Brandy

I love the hanging "planters" at the top and have similar for my tanks. I want to do more of that and appreciate the additional plant inspirations. The "spiral val"? I have seen that at a garden center. I think it was named something different, but I have been wanting to add some reed/grass-like things to the tops of my tanks in back. @Streetwise was just talking about marginal plants that can be grown emmersed, and I am in the same camp, loving the plants as much as the fish. If I could, my apartment would look like an indoor jungle--most people already think it is over the top, but I mean a REAL jungle, lol. Light is the limiting factor. I need to invest in attractive grow lights next...

I am not a discus expert, my family had some as a kid but I have never had them myself. But I would pick a school of rummynose or cardinal tetras, and a few khuli loaches and otocinclus....aaaand I have just listed my current tank stocking list but I don't have discus. My tank is at 83 degrees. About to put in some rams. Fingers crossed. Admittedly, my list is pretty basic. I am going for balanced and non-aggressive.

I don't know what your water situation is, but if there is a way to get unpowered water, you can do water changes daily, feed very little or nothing, and use some prime, if you are not evacuated. The tank will make it. Treat it like a giant fish in cycle, and disconnect the filter so it doesn't putrify and then blast that into the tank unexpectedly. An airstone would be nice if you can run it. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, I have had to low tech survive a lot of power outages. If you don't have unpowered water access, stockpile as much as you can asap.

Water lettuce is my easiest. Red root floaters are the most beautiful. I have grown water lettuce small, so that it looks like giant blue-green duck weed, and big so that it makes a "lettuce". I can personally attest that the "dwarf" version is just immature. You can easily make them behave as either form. Red root floaters tho want really low surface agitation in my experience. And none of them like lids. They are all prolific, and require regular thinning. Because of that, they can be a headache. Scoop and discard often.

If I remember correctly, I think Cory once said in an off-hand live stream comment, that a lot of prefilter sponges go over the end of the filter intake, but have a continuous hole all the way thru, which might allow the shrimp in at the bottom. A quick fix, if that is the case, would be a stocking toe or similar fine mesh rubber banded over the whole intake end, over which you could then put the sponge that you have.

Well, it clearly knew how, it just doesn't feel well now for reasons unspecified. I think tetras are happier in larger groups, but the first sign I have seen that they are not is aggression, the second is hiding. It kinda depends on what else is in the tank too. If anything harasses them in any way, more will be better for them. That said, we do the best we can, and if you end up with three and you can't keep buying more, three in a stable well cared for tank is better than 3 bouncing back to a fish store in my opinion, unless they are actually in danger of being eaten. Maybe someone with more experience with glow fish tetras can chime in. I have only ever kept rummy nose, cardinal, and neon tetras. GloFish are based off black skirt tetras I think, and so you could read about them for more insight.

Not eating is pretty serious. In my experience I haven't brought tetras back from that. Sometimes that is the only symptom I get. I would insist on seeing them fed before buying more. I would quarantine this fish until it eats or passes away. I don't know enough to suggest more treatments, but the quarantine trio mostly handles external parasites. Not eating might have to do with internal? Or with tetras I feel like it is just a universal "I'm sick" symptom.

Thanks. I always have guppy fry and all the tanks to care for them, but with all the "surprise" fry I've been hearing about lately, I was thinking about the "what if" questions. I'm set up to take care of them, but they might have to share digs with the guppies! At least for a bit...

Wow. 😳 I have some Rams in my QT and 2 have paired up and are acting broody. It's been 2 days. I'm hoping to get the unpaired guys out of there before much longer... But I was hoping they wouldn't spawn in quarantine. Now I'm going to be holding my breath.

I felt the same. I got them as cleaners. They quickly became more important than what I wanted cleaned. So much fun to watch!

So this may be a ridiculous question. But if you had fry of 2 very different species, say guppies and small cichilds, or corydoras, And they had newborn fry at the same time would they be easier to raise together in one grow out? Assume that the fry gets transferred to a new grow out in a month, about the time you can reliably sex the guppies. Are the growth rates too different? Has anyone done this? I know there are ACO videos of community breeding, like shrimp and guppies and plecos....That is kind of where my mind was.

I haven't had any problems with RCS. If anything, I am a bit over run, or I would be if I wasn't trying to get enough to colonize several tanks. I sweated bullets until the first drop of shrimplets. Now I am not as worried. I have juveniles approaching adulthood, and it is almost time to distribute the shrimpy madness! 🙂 I guess I do have a little (very little--a few tablespoons in a 12g) of crushed coral in the filter media too.

curious, what water pump are you using? I would like to find a small cheap quiet submersible that can lift at least a few feet above water level. I have a much smaller drip irrigation plan...in the far distant future.

@Cory or moderators, can we pin this thread? in the intro section maybe?

I have had good luck with neos too, and have been trialing them a few at a time in all my tanks. Temps range from 74-83 degF, pH 6.6-7.8, most have low GH/KH, but I do sometimes feed calcium enriched food to the little ones to help with growth/molts. They have SURVIVED in all conditions so far--too early to know if they will breed. Tales of their fragility seem a bit overrated. The only losses I have had were in the original shipped batch, and they all happened early--either water parameters were different (not according to the seller and my tests) or there was too much shipping trauma.

Beautiful buce! Welcome, and hi from Seattle!

@Errk25, if you do get girls, I have some advice on how to recover the line, feel free to send me a message if you would like. It is going to be a bit of a rough thing without access to gene sequencing, but it might be possible.

Ok, 2 things here. There is the possibility that you have a sex-linked embryonic lethal recessive trait--this means that if you have 2 copies of the lethal gene you never get born. This only happens with FEMALES because a male is always XY, but a female is XX. So in this case if the X chromosome can carry a lethal gene, you would see fewer and fewer females over generations until the line dies out (what I think is happening with @Errk25's situation). If the Y carried a lethal gene, the offspring of that male would ALWAYS be female. That is incredibly rare, because of long winded boring reasons most of you don't want to know. However if this is just one single drop, there is a high PROBABILITY of a 50/50 split of sexes in any litter, but a probability is a normally distributed curve--a "bell" curve. There is still the possibility of getting mostly one or the other sex, and if you look at enough drops, or litters, you will see this eventually. It is always surprising, but not magic. It is the flip a coin game, you flip enough and you will get occasional runs of all heads. So, there is that. But in the case posted here originally, I think the depredation of the brighter colored males is exactly what you are seeing. This is why I put my guppy fry in species only grow out tanks--especially because they are mutts. If I didn't I would end up with plain wild type fish in just a few generations, because I would be selecting for the most capable of survival, and nature already did that once.

Also here is a thread on this topic that might be helpful.

So. I know in canada you don't have access to the coop trio from the aquarium coop, but the salt and almond leaves are probably all you need. If the fins look healthy, with no fuzzy growths, and aren't getting worse, he is bright happy and eating, you might want to just minimize his excitement from moving tank to tank, keep your water parameters stable, and wait. Fins take a looong time to grow back.

Fun quarantine tip that I just stumbled on an hour ago... I keep my QT bare bottom, for a variety of reasons, primarily to make ich easier to fight. I still wanted plants for water quality and fish cover and I always have floaters I can throw in, so that took care of that, but I had no solid decor to break up sight lines... I have 4 small cichlids in my tank right now, and two of them have decided they are going to pair off immediately. They are stressing everyone out. What to do? 3 Coffee cups. The stress level in the tanks has dropped to negligible. I hate to admit it, but I need some plastic plants, I guess. Ugly but effective:

Well I only have little tanks but I hate the piles of snail leavings under the cholla wood, so I have a siphon hose and a turkey baster. A squirt with the baster stirs the poop UP without touching substrate and siphon takes the rest. I think you could safely do similar near plants, just spot clean and then do your HOB water change trick? I have seen someone rubberband the baster to the siphon hose to make it a one hand deal, but I haven't bothered yet. Arguably however, you might want to just put something larger over the area (stones? carpeting plant?) to hide the unsightly poop and let it fertilize those swords...

So, I have been thinking about how many kids were introduced to fish keeping by the proverbial carnival goldfish, or a parent who gave them a goldfish. These days kids probably get bettas. But while I mostly don't plan on keeping goldfish again, and I don't think anything really can substitute for a real koi in a large pond, I have noticed there are a lot of goldfish/koi colored fish available now, many of which are more suitable for a smaller tank. Koi guppies... Koi Bettas... Mollies... What else captures the nostalgia without cruelty? If you had a table top pond or something like @Bill Smith's Subaru Nano-ponds, What would be goldfish or koi-like that would FIT?

@Lynze I can find big ones but they cost as much as aquariums! 5g iced tea jars are over $60. Crazy pants.

Mine is a 7.5g...kinda oddball size.