Brandy

probably not a concern if they have a rim. If they are rimless, they want a perfectly smooth surface. what weight is the shelf rated for? I recently put a 5g on a cheap particle board cabinet. In about a month the top had deflected under the weight enough that the drawer under the tank would no longer open, and I had to move the tank.

I would encourage you to just keep the shrimps and maybe wait out the ugly duckling phase. I have found shrimp to be incredibly resilient, and mine thrive on benign neglect. If you opt to add a basic small fish or two, that will clean up the rest of the free food, and the whole set up can be remarkably low maintenance. I think you have a normal situation for a new tank. You can back off on the CO2 maybe, depending on your plants...But yeah, best thing to do is be patient. It will sort itself out.

I am not even sure they can eat that...I know they can eat brine shrimp hatchlings, but those are smaller than copepods. I have read this on the internet, but I honestly have trouble believing it, my hydra are smaller than shrimp hatchlings? Maybe there are more varieties that are bigger.

You don't have pests, you have a smorgasboard!! Likely the various pests came in on the plants. I would add one or 2 male guppies or endlers. They will clean up everything but the snails in under a week. Adult shrimp will not be bothered by them, but juveniles will need cover.

I have never dealt with the disease, but the salt you want is generally marine or aquarium/pond salt. Table salt often contains additives to keep it from clumping when it gets humid, and I don't know how they would affect fish--probably not at all, but I don't know. If you actually have table salt with no additives, it is ok to use that.

real talk? 3 males to 2 females, you can expect them to be constantly pregnant. They will probably have a drop about once a month? It depends a bit on how much food they are getting I think, more food = more frequent and larger drops. If you add a lot of fine leaved plant cover and rock piles with small gaps, some fry will start to survive without intervention. If you save them all you will be shortly overrun.

I have almost every category of filter but a HOB (though I have had them and UG in my past). My canister is doing it's thing, but I am not a fan. I have my largest tank in my kitchen, and needed a way to keep as much hardware hidden as possible, and push the tank as close to the wall as possible. a canister fit the situation, and lives on a shelf under the tank. But it takes more maintenance than I like, and even after freshly serviced does not do as good of a job clearing the mulm out of the water as I had hoped--in fact it almost seems to just stir it up. I am about to fill the entire thing with floss and polishing pads, lol (j/k). I have wondered what would happen if I ran no filtration on this tank and only an air stone--not kidding. I may give it a shot. My favorite filter to this day is the matten filter in my guppy fry auto sorter, and my second favorite is the type that comes built in to the back of a tank

Arguably, I am definitely at maximum capacity--I would not add a single thing. But it is my favorite tank.

Endlers? a 29g will hold lots, but start with a few and they will make more. As a comparison, in my heavily planted 29g I have: shrimp (around 10) innumerable snails 3 otocinclus 3 khuli loaches 3 german blue rams 1 angelfish a school of about 19 rummynose tetras My nitrates are always lower than I want them, and would drop to zero without fertilizer, but I do have to service my filter more often than I would like due to the snails chowing down on the driftwood in the tank and making a lot of mulm. Aggression is held to a minimum, because there are so many plants you can barely see more than the rummies and a third of the other fish at any one time. Anyone feeling picked on is hidden in 3 fish lengths, and it is mostly just the female rams sparring when they feel broody. The angel breaks it up now and then by chasing them away from each other.

So hang on, you added a light, your nitrates are at 0ppm, and now you will reduce fertilizer? This seems like the wrong direction to me. Nitrates should be held at over 10ppm in a planted tank. If you have excess lights and not enough fertilizer you can cause algae blooms too, algae is like weeds and out competes the plants if conditions are suboptimal. Have you tried dipping out some water in a white cup? What color does it appear to be? green = algae, white-cloudy is usually bacteria bloom (consistent with your nitrite/nitrate readings), chunky stuff settling means filtration/detritus issues, which can go with driftwood. edited to add: Ah, I read more carefully and see you came to the same conclusion. Sorry!

I have seen those symptoms, though less obvious pink on the gills, more just gasping, followed by death. I used Paraclense, which is Praziquantel and metronidazole. I think flukes can be silent a while and then multiply during stress--but really I am guessing about that. I don't have personal experience with Levamisole, but I found this site suggesting dosing and it seems like levamisole would be faster than salt. Diseases Summary WWW.FISHBASE.SE

I would. You want to hit somewhere between 10-20ppm for happiest plant growth. I have not found red cherry shrimp or amanos to be sensitive to that range.

I think in a 55 you could have a sizable school of both rummy and cardinal tetras. If you get rummys, I would get a few otocinclus, who will keep your tank plants and glass clean and actually jump into the rummy school now and then. It is funny to watch them sneak in, like an imposter rummy. If it weren't for the angels, I might go with some long fin golden danios tho--they are busy! But they want cooler water I think, and they don't really school, like a guppy they are just everywhere.

I actually have the pennywort, and it is doing something similar. I vote boost light and nitrates to at least 10ppm. Your shrimp should be easily fine at that level. It looks to me like a fast grower that is just hungry. I have not yet tried root tabs, but I may try that also. Mine is putting on a lot of new growth, but the older leaves look a little yellowed and unhappy. If it is not getting enough light the spaces between the leaves will increase as you go toward the tip. The moss may be converting from being grown emersed. I would wait, and again maybe increase light. Your shrimp will take care of the brown bits for you.

Mine LOOOVE the center of a cucumber, raw. They will not eat the skin, so if you don't want to have to retrieve it later, peel first. I usually drop in the ends if I am making a salad, and fish the skin out a day or two later. I assume this is not the most nutritious, but more like oto candy bars.

I have added 9 amanos and 4 red cherry shrimp to my 29g. I haven't seen them in months. I just saw 3 of the amanos and all 4 RCS yesterday, I was shocked that they were still in there. 🙂

Also, I was thinking. The slimy white stuff is likely also related to the high pH hard water. Mineral deposits and normal bacteria.

Mixing the water is exactly how to get the correct pH going forward. I would start testing with a half and half ratio, and then move from there to get a ratio that works for you. The fact that your water is so hard means it is highly buffered. "Buffering" means it is resistant to changing it's pH, which is why the chemical adjustments are not working. Distilled water doesn't have any buffering capability, so as you replace the hard water the pH will move more quickly. Assume once you start to see a shift on your test kit that you may want to start to make smaller and smaller changes, and switch to doing water changes with mixed water. A gradual change will be easier on the fish. Aim for it to take a week or two.

It is hard to tell from the photo what the white stuff is--I almost think I see a hydra (harmless) on top of the filter. Your water, however, is super hard and high pH. That is probably contributing to the betta fin rot. Easy fix would be to do some gradual partial water changes with distilled water. I would aim at replacing 1g every other day with distilled water and keep testing. Once you get below a pH of 8 (preferably lower), I would try to hold it there, and see if the fin rot improves. Betta pH range is 6.5-7.5, and they prefer softer water. They can adapt up a little, but your water is off your test range.

To my knowledge Seattle doesn't use chloramines? However, the way 2020 is going, I wouldn't even be surprised if they up and did something crazy without mentioning it. I was more suspicious of having hand sanitizer on me or something. I usually use prime in the bucket with the new water and only add the amount to treat what I am changing before adding it to the tank. This morning I added the amount to treat the whole tank, so if there was extra chlorine/chloramine then it was covered. Given how FAST they responded I am inclined to think that is what happened.

I have that same tank, and one day I heard a bunch of loud splashing. A nerite had climbed onto the filter outflow and was munching away, completely unconcerned as the water was diverted by his shell straight up, hitting the lid and raining back down. 😆

Confession: I have been a little busy and a little lazy. As a result I have gotten behind on tank maintenance. I have kept up with water changes and feeding an that is about it. So last night, I decided to really clean up my largest (29g) tank. the glass was getting fuzzy, the canister filter floss was a schlocky mess, there was algae on the hardscape, and vallisneria was popping up in places it didn't belong, duckweed...you get the picture. So I set to work, servicing the filter, scraping glass, pruning plants, changing water. I refilled the tank, and because of the algae on the hardscape, I added a dose of flourish excel, which I have been using intermittently, while I try to sort out the algae issues. I noticed the fish seemed a little stressed, but I put it down to my activity in the tank, gave them a snack which they all eagerly ate, and went to bed. This morning, I walked out to every single fish motionless and gasping. Shrimp I haven't seen in months were all out at the highest point on the vegetation, in the open, also largely motionless. Even the snails seemed to be in the upper third of the tank. I checked temperature and filter flow, and turned up the air stone. Nothing seemed amiss, and I cannot recall anything weird or new that I did during the water change. But clearly something was wrong, and even if my slightly aggressive cleaning had crashed the cycle (highly doubtful with the plants and wood crammed into the tank) it was too soon and too universal to be seeing these effects. I immediately did a 30% water change, adding extra water conditioner in case of a chlorine shift in my source water. Literally in minutes, before I had even finished replacing the full amount of water, all fish started acting and breathing normally. I have no idea what was in the water. I don't know if there was something in the source water, or if I set a tool in some spilled household cleaner at some point, or if I had something on my hands. I may never know. But disaster averted. I feel lucky today.

I think it IS mostly water parameters and aggression issues. The OTHER thing I have read is that some (mostly African?) cichlids can cross breed, and there is concern over hybridizing because of loss of pure genetic lines. That is a controversial issue...clearly we selectively breed animals of all kinds, creating hybrids, and even genetically modify animals. I think this is a purist thing with a common sense solution that is much like breeding a dog or whatever--don't accidentally crossbreed your fish and create a mutt and then try to pass it off as a purebred. It isn't as if there is a registry for fish that is closely policed, so I suspect that lends to the passionate arguments.

Is the school in each tank a mix of the 2 batches, or was the healthy school kept separate from the unhealthy one from the beginning? I think mine had some kind of gill fluke type parasite--they would seem to breathe heavily, stop eating, and self isolate right before they died. I treated with Paraclense for the full course, and then I lost one more the same way months later--retreated with paraclense and no more losses since. Cory had a video showing that his 2 batches from the same source shipped just a few weeks apart had dramatically different survival rates. The theory is that they are often wild caught and that impacts their survival rate, but even if not, they possibly come from different breeders.

I think cotyledons look pretty similar on most seeds at that stage. That is part of what makes me so suspicious.