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Brandy

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Everything posted by Brandy

  1. Brandy
    I can only help in broad strokes here...my guesses: 1 rotala spp. 2 ludwigia spp (palustris or "red" Maybe?) 3 definitely looks like Alternanthera 4 probably ludwigia, but maybe bacopa? 5 staurogyne repens?
  2. Brandy
    oh boy, this is true...I have a giant piece of driftwood and my tank has been up for only a few months. I can see mulm in the moss, in the substrate, in the water column if I disturb the moss...I am actually sometimes annoyed by it. But my otos and snails seem really happy so... My otos looove cucumber, and will occasionally take a hikari algae wafer. The khuli loaches and snails clean up the rest. I also leave the lights on a bit long, but now I have a bit of a staghorn algae issue, not sure that is working as well as I hoped. I have cleaned the front glass ONCE in the months since getting the otos. You can't see algae anywhere except for the dang staghorn...
  3. Brandy
    It depends on where they are from and how healthy they are. If they were shipped I sometimes don't wait, because they are already so stressed I assume they could be sick already. If I find them locally from a hobbyist or trusted fish store and they look healthy I will give them overnight to settle in.
  4. Brandy
    I had a similar experience...it was stressful. I have decided to stick to bare root anubias from now on, since I don't seem to have good luck with potted. I think it may stress the plants and make them more susceptible. I waited a few weeks before replacing with bare root, and so far there has not been a recurrence. Fingers crossed.
  5. Brandy
    Fry can go back in with the adults when they are too big to go in the adult mouths, generally. However if you put him in there and the adults chase unrelentingly it will be better for him to grow up more.
  6. Brandy
    yeah, I think you can try any of those with him. Of course some bettas are ornery, but all those are small fast fish. If you get a school they should just outrun him and he will get tired of chasing them.
  7. Brandy
    I was told that snails would eat eggs. I have some fish that spawn constantly with snails and I have never seen a single fry.
  8. Brandy
    I have never used bay, but I have used alder cones, and indian almond leaves, and oak leaves. I think you have to be a bit careful to not put in things that have phenols (like conifers) and I put in the things when they are dry and brown, not fresh. Typically with botanicals I leave them in there until they are gone--meaning the shrimp have skeletonized the leaf. They like to eat it as it rots. If it looks ok to you, leave it as long as you like. I take them out when they look too chewed to be pretty and then I put in another. Taking them out is for my aesthetic sensibilities, the shrimp would munch on them longer.
  9. Brandy

    PH

    Brandy replied to RandyH's topic in General Discussion

    I think if they were going to go into shock they would right away. I also think this is a good reminder of why some people do not advocate chasing a particular pH. If you are going to try to keep a pH different than your source water, you will need to either do small changes, or really work to bring the source water to an equivalent pH before changing. If you are going to try to return it to 6.4 do that slowly. In my personal experience, shrimp have been tougher than I expected, but my water is soft and acidic at the tap so I am usually working from a different starting point than you are. I have amanos and dwarf cherry shrimp. I suspect they will be ok, but long term stability will be best. How are they behaving now?
  10. Brandy
    Just scrub with regular hot water. However, for future reference, if you think about it, any traces of bleach get neutralized by dechlorinator. And be sure they are really quartz and not calcite or something. Options to test for them being inert are to put them in water for a week and test ph before and after, or to put some strong acid on them to see if they bubble. I like the week long version myself, as natural rocks have more than one component sometimes.
  11. Brandy
    Agreed, I think I had a chart once, and sadly it is not that straightforward. Genetics rarely are!
  12. Brandy
    I like the embers over the espies. Napoleon has a lot of dark, I would pick something bright/lighter for contrast, and I think the embers are brighter. Glowlight tetras are also bright, or green kubotai rasboras. There are some really pretty yellow tetras at the Co-Op, I forget their name...Silvertips! I think that is it. Thanks google.
  13. Brandy
    just keep swimming is very good advice, but hard to do sometimes. I am right there with you, every day seems crazier than the last.
  14. Brandy
    yep...will the babies be green? 😆
  15. Brandy
    Thanks, a great feature. This one feature is sort of the heart of this whole forum, isn't it?
  16. Brandy
    I think the best fish would be tiny ambush predators like maybe a scarlet badis. Bettas, shrimp, and puffers work...and MAYBE the tiniest of schoolers. Or maybe an endler or two? It looks like you already have the tank...so you know that it has a tiny footprint. I would worry about anything that would USE a whole 10g, you know? The portrait shape is convenient for a desk, but fish most often move laterally. I haven't kept gobies, but you could try them and then pull them back to their current home if it doesn't work out? And report back! 🙂
  17. Brandy
    It sounds like you were FAR from depleted, it was more that you had too many nutrients and had to keep light low to manage algae. I have not had trouble with clarity in a dirted tank with a thick sand cap, not have I had trouble with algae, but I stepped my lighting up slowly, waiting for the plants to catch up. I am not trying to convince you to go with dirt--I only have it in one tank, but I do really love it. I do not love eco complete, my vals, lilies, lotuses, and crypts like it though--not so much fragile roots, and it is annoying to plant it to me. ADA amazonia is highway robbery, but works ok for a monte carlo carpet, and is a little easier to plant in. If you are looking to have a more precisely controlled nutrient load then going with an inert substrate makes sense, I think you have the best solution right in front of you--use the sand you like, and mix in a larger particle sand or small gravel in the bottom layer where your dirt currently is. You don't say what size tank this is, but economical options include regular aquarium gravel from a big box store, or play sand from building supply stores. I think once you go inert, you are really just looking for a particular look with at least some variation of particle size, best accomplished by mixing.
  18. Brandy
    Also, BTW, I have aponogeton madagascar in a dirted tank with a sand cap and it LOVES it. So you should eventually have a happy happy plant.
  19. Brandy
    I don't know if it will actually LEAVE without being removed, the stuff is tough. But it should definitely stop growing, and then you can remove it bit by bit if necessary.
  20. Brandy
    For the most part for green water I think patience is the key--but if it bugs you to insanity levels UV sterilizers are fast and cheap. BBA I have been manually removing (look at me, I am a flag fish!) but my one big lesson from setting up many new tanks over the past few months is that each one goes through a settling in stage and over reacting to that stage is just going to cause more problems than it really solves. If you successfully kill the green water, something else will take its place, possibly something more annoying, like thread algae... Right now, you just need more plants growing. While you are waiting for the roots of your substrate plants to get started I would add as many floating plants as possible. If something needs to take up nutrients, make it something you choose.
  21. Brandy
    TBH, I do like the back compartment filters for their clean look. I was hoping this would help someone in the next question about this tank, since I know there is a video on it. But if I ever break down the tank, I might consider removing the back compartment. It has been a great foray into dirted tanks for me, with a betta and some inverts, and I debated needing a filter on this size at all. Watching how it recovers from its pumpless days will be interesting. So far just some green water...Replacement should arrive today!
  22. Brandy
    Small head's up. I had this tank for 2 months and then the pump just quit. In your hotrodding adventures, be sure to leave yourself a way to retrieve that pump. I am so glad I did NOT just dump the biorings into the compartment as I first thought I would. Because the bag didn't want to fit, I ended up threading them on fishing line, and I am SO glad I did.
  23. Brandy
    it is amazing how that stuff migrates isn't it?! I made an un-planted white sand "beach" in one corner of one tank. I watched the eco-complete trickle down slope into it, which I expected, and then watched the sand magically become shifted all over the tank, where it settles under the substrate against the glass in little drifts... Snails. I have watched them leave little snowy sand deposits as they move around the tank. I did not expect that at all. 😆
  24. Brandy
    I think burying the roots and maybe adding a rock or two on top of them might be easiest. If a fish is moving it that will help. If it is uprooting because the leaves are really long and the current is catching them, then it is easy, cut them right off, lilies grow so fast that you will have plenty of new leaves in a week or two and in the mean time the roots will have a chance to get a grip.
  25. Brandy
    I do think that you could put the fish directly in the tank and then treat the whole tank. If the betta tank is small, that is not cost prohibitive, and won't hurt the betta. If the quarantine med trio seems expensive, count the amount of money you will spend replacing all your fish, both the ones you have and the ones you will be getting. Not so expensive after doing that once or twice, even with a small tank. The med trio is anti parasite, anti fungal, anti bacterial. To my knowledge, the only way to get that broad spectrum effect cheaper would be to go with aquarium salt, and salt will kill any plants and is not well tolerated by many species of fish and invertebrates, takes longer and is less effective for some things. Not using some meds and quarantining is a bit like driving a car without being able to "afford to" change the oil. You can do it for a while, but it will cost you far more than a few quarts of oil in the end. Back in my childhood we never medicated or quarantined. It wasn't a thing. We killed a lot of fish, too. It was very mysterious...Fish just died a lot. I don't mean to sound discouraging. It is a way you could do things, just roll the dice. But it can be really upsetting when it doesn't work out, and I hate to see that.
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