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Brandy

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Everything posted by Brandy

  1. Brandy
    Well, if you think about it, roots are for feeding the plant. They are catching detritus and "stuff" and holding there for the plant to eat, like sifting the water for compost. It is not pretty but it is actually a good thing. However, I think you are right that the lack of water movement contributes to visible build-up.
  2. Brandy
    oooh, or like the youtube emoji/icons, so you are a shrimp, then a puffer...years=level=new pin. EDIT: Or, you could have a new design for the merch each year--2020=shrimp 2021=puffer 2022=pleco, etc...eventually you would have a collection and then newbies would be like "WHAT?!, When did they make a Murphy shirt?! How long has that guy been around?" This happens to me now with sailing race shirts...the old shirts bring people over to ask which boat I was on that year and whether I rembember the insane start pile-up, etc.
  3. Brandy
    If you are REALLY interested in doing this right I would say best options are: buy from an ethical hobbyist--aquabid, other online sellers that you have researched buy from a LFS that treats bettas well--support locals! buy direct from thailand and use a transhipper--ebay. do research on the seller reputations.
  4. Brandy
    I also think this would destroy the forum. The only way this comunity works is if the old salts help the newbies, and making an exclusive clique is the opposite of the point of this forum, as I see it.
  5. Brandy
    This, 1000x this--how cool would recognizing each other in real life be?! Several price points, like buttons, hats, tshirts, hoodies, but you only get the sales link if you are a member. "Official Nerm Wear"!! Lol.
  6. Brandy
    So, while I am generally a fan of all the ACO products, I will urge incredible caution withany liquid carbon. DO NOT OVERDOSE. It is hazardous to animal life in your tank at high doses. And to you--don't let the toddler play with it. In my experience, I have had the most reliable results spot treating areas that are impossible to manually clean--in otherwords I remove and scrub off algae on rocks or hardscape, prune off leaves on fast growing plants, etc. Then I lower the water in the tank, and using a pipette or syringe I squirt a small amount of liquid carbon directly on the leaves of slow growing plants like anubias or bucelphandra while they are above the water line, taking care not to exceed the dose for the tank. Then I refill. All that said, this is a temporary method, and a better one is to figure out what is causing the algae to begin with and fix that. For staghorn I have found that High light + Low nitrate makes it grow. For BBA I have found High light + High ammonia--20 decaying snails in the puffer tank for instance. Both situations resolved with floating plants, and stag horn needed added easy green, and the bba required less dead snails!
  7. Brandy
    I have a love/hate relationship witth duckweed...I want it in some tanks but it gets everywhere, and is sometimes fairly impossible to eradicate without resorting to a near scorched earth policy. I envied Cory his goldfish solution, but my tanks are too small. A few months ago I bought 3 mystery snails. I had heard they were not as great at eating algae, and I have tons of other kinds of snails, so I thought why bother paying for them? But then I saw @Kirsten's magenta snails, and I needed them. They were small when I got them, but they grew really fast. I was worried my tank didn't have enough algae, as it has nerites, pest snails, and otocinclus. But boy, did they grow... And then I realized suddenly my duckweed kept disappearing...weird. I thought it couldn't be...I put a cup full of duckweed in from another tank in order to get this pic. The snails made a beeline to the surface as soon as the duckweed hit the water. Who knew?!
  8. Brandy
    I actually replaced a canister with sponges. Things I noted, the canister was removing a LOT more mulm than I gave it credit for. I added some maylasian trumpet snails after much deliberation, and made a point to vacuum the tank more often for a bit, and that seems to have resolved the issue. The tank is much more low maintinance, really.
  9. Brandy
    He has 4 pellets in his mouth and can't close it. 🐷
  10. Brandy
    He does look like he has a mild case of rot or possibly fin nipping or injury--they can do this out of boredom or stress or just from rubbing on things. He needs clean water, the tank to cycle, some peace and quiet, and quality food in TINY amounts. Feed him only what he will eat in 30 seconds to a minute at first, and try not to feed him so much that it falls before he gets to it--he wont eat it later, they are picky. Just focus mostly on clean water, his fins may never get back to their full glory, but they will be healthy and that is the best you can do.
  11. Brandy
    Last thing, because you said you are new--if you are using chlorinated city water you will want to use a water conditioner like Prime to remove chlorine every time you change or add water.
  12. Brandy
    Ultimately he will be happier with some soft things (live plants, smooth stones or driftwood) to hide in and around, and floating plants (like frog bit, water lettuce) would be very welcome. No I would not rinse the pebbles--just swoosh them in his old tank water to knock off the big chunks. You want the slimey coating that is on them to be moved with him to the new tank. haha, I see @Colu beat me to the decor suggestions, good advice!
  13. Brandy
    Also if you still have the glass pebbles from the vase, don't rinse them and toss them in to carry bacteria also.
  14. Brandy
    Ok, the vase plant likely has beneficial bacteria on it and will help seed the new colonies your tank will need. the filter needs to be turned down to minimum flow--those fins are not made for racing water AT ALL. Keep the tank light turned off, he doesn't need it to see and has not had one, so let him get used to things gradually. The short answer here is that the tank you are providing is better than where he was living, as long as the water flow is not over whelming. He will be better off moved, than not. skipping a few feedings over the weekend, and having a few quiet days to settle in will be beneficial.
  15. Brandy
    Also if my substrate is shallow I just drop a rock on top of them--my corys will dig an inch or more to get at the capsule which they want to eat.
  16. Brandy
    Not typically, however...you should be doing 25-35% water changes daily as in the instructions for this reason, among others. In all likelihood the ichX is killing somehthing in your tank (parasites as intended, or other harmless microorganisms with similar biology) which are then creating an ammonia spike.
  17. Brandy
    To be honest I like when GSA covers my hardscape and rocks, and it is not harmful to your fish or snails. But I am not such a fan of it on my glass and plants. You can scrape it off glass easily and I have found nerite snails helpful for cleaning it off plants.
  18. Brandy
    I cannot even conceive of a tank that balanced. It's my lighting, I think. I can't help it, the whole reason I wanted tanks was some indoor sunshine for my darker corners. I mostly have cheap lights, but I ultimately am constantly filling them with floaters to fight back the algae and that defeats the purpose!😆
  19. Brandy
    Just out of curiosity, what is your waer change schedule on this, @Daniel?
  20. Brandy
    Thanks! My husband, brother, sister in law, and son's girlfriend's mother all remembered to wish me happy mother's day...you know who did not? My adult kids, lol.
  21. Brandy
    He has 4 pellets in his mouth and he can't close it. But he won't eat them one at a time.
  22. Brandy
    extra ideas: I logged into ebay, went to the "live fish" section, and searched the keyword "thailand" Here all all the species that came up: Some of these may have been imported from thailand originally, and then are being resold in the US, but presumably all of them are in some way coming from thailand originally.
  23. Brandy
    I have seen many Thai breeders on ebay as well. We see lots of fancy guppies and bettas--all the "new" stuff seems to come from Thailand. The cost of shipping live fish internationationally is high on this end, and use of a transhipper (of which there are a few in each region of the US) is standard. It is worth looking over ebay in the US to see how pricing breaks down. The Thai seller may get $10 USD for a betta, but the fish is going to cost me closer to $50+. This means the shipping costs more than the fish, and so the best strategy is for people to ship larger quantities, either to resell or divide an order among many. I very much envy your location! Chaing Mai is a beautiful area.
  24. Brandy
    Yes way off topic. Suffice to say we are all complicated humans with our own irrational sets of fears. I can understand that, and I am even subject to that. But in a functioning scientific community, you should be called out on your bias regularly and vociferously. It is not just our job, most of us see it as a moral obligation. This past year, that has not been my experience, and like the poor nerm working in the big box fish store trying to explain again that you should not put a goldfish in a 2 gallon bowl, I have watched many of my colleagues break, exhausted, and I have had a very hard time maintaining my own faith in the system and our value/place in it. But I am just one person in a very siloed part of an already siloed community. My experience is purely anecdotal.
  25. Brandy
    Weeelll as a person who is heavily into genetics and immunology I get really wound up about it when I see some fairly common misinformation. Personally, this past year has been incredibly hard on me as a scientist, when I feel both politicians AND scientists have been ignoring science and data in favor of emotionally charged anecdotal evidence in the media. It makes you wonder if anyone actually cares what is TRUE anymore, and that is (again, speaking from a personal perspective) incredibly destabilizing to someone who has spent their life in pursuit of an empirical ground truth. I try not to personally attack anyone, despite sometimes feeling that my world view is the one under attack. In this case, splitting this topic off into it's own thread was an excellent idea--the science nerds get to do their thing... To this I only have one answer...Please click thru to see a fabulous counter example...
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