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Brandy

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Everything posted by Brandy

  1. Brandy
    The fact that they get to day 2-6 makes me think they aren't eating properly. That would be about the time their yolk sacs would be totally exhausted. I suspect either you are not feeding enough of the right thing, or you are feeding too much at once and causing an ammonia spike. So lets focus on exactly what and when you are feeding, how often and what amount of water you are changing, and whether you are testing for ammonia/nitrite/nitrate. I have never kept corys, I am just going thru basic trouble shooting routines. Give us a detailed explanation of what you are doing or what you have tried and probably someone here will have some great suggestions.
  2. Brandy
    Use a food wafer in a bottle trap if nothing else works. It works for shrimp and snails, people are always complaining that khulis get in there too. It's not a bug, it's a feature!
  3. Brandy
    Ironically that is exactly what I did with the non-thriving tank. It is a tiny tank, and you are looking at blades that are less than one inch long. I heard the same things.
  4. Brandy
    20. But I have seen cardinal tetras bunch up at 10-15 if they thought they had a reason.
  5. Brandy
    I can't wait to see the fish merry-go-round video! This is exactly the sort of thing I would try to do. I have managed to stock my 29g with rummy nose and am finally getting directional schooling. Adding a couple of rams definitely helped them get serious about it though. The rams only tried to chase them for 5 minutes, then they just threw their little fins up in disgust and set about investigating the caves and hunting the baby snails. But for some reason the rummys are still in a gorgeous pack days later. Instincts activated, I guess.
  6. Brandy
    Heeeyyy, this is looking good! Lots of cover and safe spots, an airstone, live plants! Good job Kenneth! This is looking like a fishy wonderland. You are definitely on the right track!
  7. Brandy
    I think this is pretty accurate. And yeah, what Irene said. Though, I have cheated on the 6-12 months a time or two with clean up crew, but been prepared to feed heavy to compensate. I am an impatient soul, but knowing which corners you can and can't cut helps. Early tanks have wild swings in more than nitrogen cycle--pH/GH/KH can all drift around too while wood becomes saturated, mulm builds in the substrate, maybe your substrate has some (intended or unintended) activity, etc. If you are starting with aged decor and substrate repurposed from another tank, if you are feeding heavy and the tank is cycled, if you have live flourishing plants, and some algae, I would say you are getting close. But if every parameter has been stable for just a month, that is not saying it wont do something crazy next month. If it is stable for a year, you can feel more confident. So I have 100+ RCS in my shrimp tank. I will throw 3 in a newer tank. If they grow and molt and seem happy, I will put in 15-20 a month later. If they seem stressed I can move them back. I would not order $50 worth of fancy shrimp and experiment like that.
  8. Brandy
    My plan is this. There is a second video with plants, with that string/thread algae, and it is the same. Just check out the before and after.... UPDATE: my amanos were COMPLETELY ineffective. Laziest shrimp ever. They just sat on the sponge filter and then stole fish food. Your milage may vary...
  9. Brandy
    I would add that in reference to algae eaters you need to have lots of visible algae before you add them. It is surprising how many people will "preemptively" buy algae eaters for a brand new tank and then NOT feed them.
  10. Brandy
    +1 for christmas.
  11. Brandy
    totally off topic, but I have always wanted to use this technique to stencil a word on a brick wall here in Seattle. If I started in fall I bet it would take.
  12. Brandy
    I have always considered it to be underwater compost. In my tanks with wood, it is largely wood that has passed thru a snail. Like compost, it contains bacteria, and micro fauna. It is dead plants, fish poop, food bits...bacteria, algae, seed shrimp, detritus worms, etc...depending on how much and how long you leave it there. If, like me, you aren't into gravel vacs, it becomes soil/fertilizer for plants. As an experiment I left a bunch under some wood in the shrimp tank. it disappeared in a short time, like a month? Great plants there now!
  13. Brandy
    They will take up nitrates as they GROW. So depending on light, you will start to see effects in a week, I think. Roots are better at this than leaves I suspect, so that is why floaters and terrestrial plants work so well. Also, those plants have unlimited CO2 from the air. The limiting factor will be light. Most of the ones I listed handle low light really well though. The bigger the plant, the more nitrates it will consume.
  14. Brandy
    A friend just offered me a rimless 5g. I have wanted to put one on a bookshelf for a while, no filter! cool! thanks for this, I am totally doing a walsted on the bookshelf now! I actually have several bookshelves come to think of it...
  15. Brandy
    No. If you have high water movement on the surface they will be unhappy. An alternative is to put the roots of a clipping of a terrestrial plant in the top of your tank--pothos, spider plant, peace lily and tradescantia all work well. You can wire a little clip over the rim to support them or stuff them in the top of a filter compartment if your tank has one. Or if your tank has a lid, in the back there you could just cut a notch in the plastic.
  16. Brandy
    So, while Bill is right about needing to treat the whole tank, a 100g would be a huge pain with ich-x. One alternative if you have the option, would be to move the affected fish to smaller hospital tanks, take all the fish out of the 100g, treat in the smaller tank, and turn the heat up to about 85 (speeds the process but not necessary) on the big one and leave it empty of fish for a week (or two if the heat is lower and you are paranoid like me). Keep feeding the tank as if the fish are there to maintain the cycle, and the parasites will try to find fish and die off. I have had success with this method, though in my case my fishless tank had shrimp and snails in it. The parasite cannot live without its host.
  17. Brandy
    The moss won't root, but it will attach. If undisturbed it sort of can look like a carpet, but if you pull on it, it will lift the top layer of substrate with it...and if you let go it will fall back down. So not a carpet but a throw rug?😁
  18. Brandy
    could they have ridden up as eggs on a plant? I move plants around and could see setting a handful of hyacinth in the upper container while cleaning the lower...
  19. Brandy
    I have a 7.5g with plants, snails, dwarf shrimp, and 5 dwarf blue-eye rainbow fish (pseudomugil). They stay in the top part of the tank a lot, but like darting in and out of the plants. I would be really comfortable adding a few more, or another small type fish--emerald neon rasboras maybe, clown killifish, etc. I have considered scarlet badis too. The trick to stable water quality is to have fish that don't eat a lot or spill a lot. The shrimp do a lot of clean up too.
  20. Brandy
    Java moss will take the low light, and shrimp will love it. you will have to trim it to keep it from filling the bowl probably, but that just gives you options.
  21. Brandy
    Sorry, I missed this, you could feed it as part of his regular diet, sure.
  22. Brandy
    As a person who very distantly works in this field--genetic engineering is an expensive and difficult endeavor, that takes skill and effort, just like composing music, writing a book, or writing computer code. You can't copyright or patent letters or notes, or programming languages (actually, you can with computer languages apparently--but you know what I mean), but you can the products you create. Like other patents this will run out, but until then it makes them the money to have made the R&D worth the while, and hopefully helps to fund more science in the future. Monsanto is NOT my favorite, but they are not the entire genetic engineering scientific community. That is like judging all retail establishments by the actions of Walmart. The glo-fish aren't my favorite, aesthetically. I have handled MANY fluorescent reporter species in a lab setting, and they are almost universally more fragile and less robust than their wild counterparts, but not any more so than a fancy line bred guppy or pug dog vs. the original wild version. Our pets are a business. Making money selling pets is not ethically wrong. I am more ethically concerned about wild caught fish than glo-fish.
  23. Brandy
    Its a danio thing. My kid has 6, same deal. They need hiding places (not that they seem to ever use caves--think more like "corners" that they can lose a pursuer around) and also you may want to get a few more asap so that they can share the chasing.
  24. Brandy
    Pretend they are betta pellets. Just a little once or twice a day. They are nice and nutritionally dense.
  25. Brandy
    Daphnia is a tiny live or frozen crustacean. A "water flea" they are sometimes called. You can grow them yourself or sometimes buy them frozen in little blocks. I have a very piggy betta that I got from the store looking about like that. I just didn't feed for a few days and kept a very close eye on him... Not that there was much more I could do at the time. Now that I know him better I suspect he was being overfed at the store. It resolved slowly over the course of about a week. I fed him VERY lightly to start, and now feed a few small meals a day. No matter how many pellets I put in the tank, he eats them ALL and still acts like he's starving.
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