Novabound

It's close, and very pretty, but not quite what I was looking for. Simply asking the owners of these vids was actually not something I had thought of. Thank you

I've started to get back into twitch streaming and I'm focused on playing games but I was going to brand my twitch streams as aquarium keeping and cooking related. Branding in the sense that I can talk about cooking and fish keeping all day with random people online. As I'm putting things together to tie my themes together, I'm having a hard time finding media to use as "scenes." For anyone unfamiliar with a scene in streaming, you can set what an viewer of your stream sees and it can be literally anything. It can be an image on your desktop, it can be your desktop, you can set it as a web browser link, anything. I've currently been leaning on my own rudimentary Photoshop skills to make very basic still backgrounds, or finding .gif files if I wanted some short animation type thing. What I'm looking for exactly is either a gif of an aquarium that is heavily planted and gently swaying from a powerhead current, or an underwater shot of a river with tons of vegetation. The problems I run into while searching for them are things like The loop of the .gif is too short The quality is low The resolution is low. It's perfect...but it's saltwater/oceanic :< I tried making one of my own aquarium but the only recording device I have is my smart phone, and it doesn't look great since I don't have a way to hold the camera steady. I'm also open to suggestions on how to get a good video of my own aquarium using a smartphone.

I borrowed a rock from the hardscape. It kinda worked out. It was almost buoyant lol

I carved a small pumpkin for the shrimp and otos and currently trying to figure out how to get it to sink. I thought you all might like my amature carving.

Im currently going through a similar thing. I have a 75 gallon that only has shrimp, but we dont have central air and the tank is in the finished basement that has no way of cooling the space. What's worse is we have our gaming set ups down there so between 2 cats, a dog, 2 people, 4 monitors, 2 computers, and rgb lights everywhere, and aquarium equipment, it's not uncommon for the room to hit 90+ degrees. I noticed a shrimp death and saw the water temp was a whopping 87 degrees. Things i did to help were cool it off: -Add a floor fan to circulate air better -Remove the aquarium lids. This encouraged more evaporation but cools off the tank more. I have to top it off more often and it makes our dehumidifier fill up faster, but it's brand new and does a great job. -And the biggest contributor that was a hard decision to make; i swapped the hours of light time to be opposite of when i use the basement. I work from home from 730 to 4pm and usually game from 6 to 10pm~12am. So i have the lights turn on at 1030pm and slowly reach 100% brightness at 4am, then slowly dim to off by 11am just before the peak of the day. Plus my plants aren't missing out any photosynthesis. It sucks that i can only enjoy it on my lunch/breaks and for a few minutes before bed, but it's helped keep the water in the 74-78 range. And i havent had any more shrimp deaths. Once winter rolls around i can set it back to normal hours where i can enjoy it more often.

Just a warning, depending on the rock, boiling/baking them can cause them to explode. I usually just rinse and dry any rocks i find. If in were genuinely worried about rocks, i would put the rock in a bucket or tub with water and let it sit for a week or two and then test water parameters.

https://www.twitch.tv/shrimps247 Here's a shrimp stream. I think it's just strictly streaming shrimp and i dont see anyone really chatting all that often. I like to have it on during work.

From what I understand they strictly do fly fishing and catch and release as these hatcheries are meant to inject more trout into the surrounding lakes and streams as they're popular for sport fishing. I don't have tanks big enough to house adult ones haha. Theyre super pretty though so i definitely would if i could. The pics were all done on my phone which is a Samsung Galaxy S8.

I recently moved to Pennsylvania after living my entire life in Florida (32 years). It wasn't until i started fish keeping that i realized what a haven Florida was for the hobby. I've been feeling a little regretful that i didnt take advantage of my time there to really take in the wildlife and vegetation, so I've been trying to find ways to incorporate more nature in my life here in PA. As it turns out, i live a 9-15 minute drive away from SEVERAL hiking trails AND fish hatcheries. I was able to visit a trail and a Trout hatchery yesterday and i grabbed a few nice pictures that I think some may appreciate here more than my generic social medias.

I accidentally bred them once and it was a good amount of time before i could even tell they existed. I fed them fry food heavily every day to help the grow and i think it was like 5 or 6 months before i could start distinguishing between male and female. But they were sooooo tiny lol.

Haven't been here in a while since not much is happening in my world since I'm working on moving, but i had a surprise last night that turned into a bigger surprise this morning. This is the 3rd attempt at growing a flower for this plant and probably the fastest ive seen it go from the base of the plant to pressing against the lid, so i left it open over night.

My wife thinks my online spending habits have gotten crazy since quarantine but i don't buy things unless i or my pets need them.

I've backed off from constant maintenance, fertilize once a week, ensure there's decent root tabs, and increased my fish feedings from one modest serving to two generous feedings per day (skipping sundays for fasting). The lotus i let it go ham and cover the vast majority of the tank until i figured that my tank was a little too dark and then i trimmed a bunch of leaves. I left about 5 huge leaves to stay at the top and 2 weeks later i noticed the bud. And it's growing tall FAST.(Trimmings seen here )

Just wanted to share some plants that I'm super proud that are doing well. I got 3 plants getting ready to flower and successfully attached moss to twigs to make a tree. Super stoked about the lotus flower bud. For the tree I'm gonna include a before and after pic.

Doing a long over due water change as the tannins have reached a level I'm not a huge fan of. I've been trying a hands off approach recently and the tiger lotuses have been abusing it lol. So time has come to restore light to the bottom of this tank. I wish i took a better before picture, but check out what i did get. These pads are like, 10 inches from tip to tip. Im pretty sure the jungle val is taller than i am if i had cut it at the root at 5' 11". Excuse the mess we're currently reorganizing for a move <_<

I have a hospital tank where i keep lose plant trimming to grow out. My theory is the dense vegetation also helps reduce stress in fish while quarantined. I was trimming plants in my guppy tank and i went to throw a plant in there, and i noticed a tiny blue dot moving. I dropped to the floor and looked closer and saw a cloud of blue dots. There's fry in there. I haven't had a fish in there for like, 2 months. The last fish i had in there were forktail rainbow fish and i left them in there a little longer than intended (5 weeks) before moving them to my main tank. Zero clue how the fry have been surviving or how long ago they hatched. Thankfully i have fry food on hand and started feeding immediately. I'm still blown away that i somehow bred fish.

This is what i was planning on my next substrate. Sand looked nice, but being inert and constantly replacing root tabs is annoying

I bought a pack of red root floaters and salvinia to help soak up nitrates in a 7 gallon. After somentime the salvinia is doing well but the red root floaters are browning, sinking and disappearing. I've read care guides that say they dont like surface agitation but they're pretty hardy. But i can't get them to survive in my tanks. The only agitation is from a sponge filter. I dose fertz regulary and lightly over feed the tank. Anyone have any ideas? Water stats 0-0-20ish. 8.0 ph. 8 hours of high light per day. Dose 0.7 ml of iron once a week. Soft water hardened with wonder shell.

That pic looks super blurry, hopefully this one is better

We're approaching the 2 month mark and it's gone through a few changes. It's definitely more mature with a fine layer of mulm on the substrate. I swapped out the emerald rasboras with pseudomugul luminatus, got some floating plants to make them feel safe, and added some bushier plants. The tree moss started to die pretty hard, but like aquarium coop suggests, i waited out the die back.Then came back incredibly lush

So i am moving across country from Florida to Pennsylvania in the next 4-6 months, and I'm kinda excited. Mostly because i feel like it's a free excuse for a reset in aquarium keeping but i get to start over with over a year's worth of knowledge to build from the ground up correctly. I am kinda sad because of our current predicament, I'm not going to be able to keep all our fish that have stayed with us for so long. We have 7.5, 10, 10, and a 75 gallon tank teeming with life, not to mention 2 cats and a dog. The plan is to take the inhabitants of the 7.5 and 10 gallons with us in a tub in the car and all my fave plants from all the tanks in a 5 gallon bucket, but the 75 gallon inhabitants will probably have to go back to the lfs 😧 So i do have a question. In a perfect world, we're moving to Bethlehem, PA, but we're also looking at other cities that are about an hour away in any direction of Bethlehem, Allentown, Quakertown. Is anyone from that region known what the water conditions are like up there? Or the more fun question, what are cool/good fish stores in those cities? I value the opinions of any locals to that region on this forum higher than randos on google reviews.

So i had been quietly testing to get my nitrates up putting increasingly copious amounts of ez green (up to 72 pumps) every day to try and get my nitrates up. It would always stay at 0. I gave up, and just went to 8 pumps a day and toned down the lights to fluctuate between 50% power for 6 hours and 10% for 4 hours to lessen nitrate consumption and just hoped the fine algae would stop covering my leaves of plants. Today i noticed my seachem filter nob pop up, which if you don't have one, is a thing they have where if the water filter flow starts to slow down it causes a little peg to be pushed up on top as a signal that you may want to service it. Like the lights on my dashboard, i usually ignore it. But it's been about 4 or so months since i wrung out the sponges so decided to service it today and do a large water change. I was wrung out the prefilter sponge into a bucket, wrung out the coarse sponge in the filter basket, shook off all the bio media in the dirty tank water, and squeezed my fine filter sponge. I stared at the fine filter sponge and realized it wasn't just a fine filter sponge, because my LFS only had coarse sponges and NITRATE ABSORBING sponges. I never got it for its ability to absorb nitrates, i just wanted a finer sponge as part of having a diverse set of non-chemical filtration assuming that "nitrate absorbing" was just a buzz word to get people to buy it. I just assumed it was gonna suck at its job of absorbing nitrates and just be a fine filter sponge. I feel like if my life in aquairum keeping were a book, it would be called "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Over corrections"

Admittedly I've slacked on water changes to about once a month. I haven't felt much pressure since the nitrates are pretty much 0 for me all the time. I only did them to help get rid of visible fish poop and because of online reading pressuring me to "always keep up on water changes!" I think the play now is to crack open the big bottle of easy green, measure out what i have been dosing, then increasing the amount and seeing what it takes to get to 20ppm. And then like Cory suggested, time how long it takes to get to 0 and then tone down the lights to try and keep it at 20. I've learned so much from everyone. Thank you!

I actually just bought the big bottle an order ago. I go through the small ones so quick.

Yeah it's pretty heavily planted. I actually recently increased my lighting about 2 weeks ago (i think? Time has lost all meaning in quarantine) and ferts but have noticed algae slowly growing on the newer plants so dialed back the intensity of the lights from 100% to 70% while continuing to dose 16 pumps. Still not seeing an increase in nitrates. As im typing, I'm starting to wonder if this is an excuse i can use to add more fish to increase the bioload O_O