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Hobbit

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Everything posted by Hobbit

  1. Hobbit
    What a beautiful little fish! Congratulations!
  2. Hobbit
    Mine will guard or steal food, but that’s the extent of their “aggression.” 😉
  3. Hobbit
    Lack of oxygen was going to be my first thought, too. To be safe, you could get a small air pump and an air stone. (I highly recommend Aquarium Co-op’s nano air pumps: they’re super quiet!) Is there any chance you can get a video of the fish? You’d need to upload it to a video site such as YouTube and then post the link here. Definitely stop feeding them until you figure out your water parameters. They’ll be fine for several days without food. Do you already have a test kit? If not, you can usually bring a sample of your water to a local fish store and they’ll test it for you. Can you tell us more about your setup? Did you use dechlorinator, any starter bacteria, etc.
  4. Hobbit
    @BlackCrappieLover any updates on what you decided to do with the fish? Did you keep any? I agree that they don’t look like honeys, but sometimes the hobby throws us a curveball and it ends up being fun!
  5. Hobbit
    Looks like I don’t have enough recent pictures of my hens! But here’s Fluffy, our friendliest chicken, who recently hopped up onto my back when I bent down for something. She’s not allowed to do that anymore after she pecked me in the eye in 2018, but she doesn’t think any rules apply to her at all, ever. And yes, she did poop on me. Here’s a picture from a few months ago. We hadn’t been getting eggs for a while, and I decided to go hunting under the coop. This summer I decided to help out the local butterfly population and raised some black swallowtail caterpillars. Their mom laid eggs on our dill plant (which we plant specifically for caterpillars). We raised and released five butterflies! And then of course, an obligatory picture of the queen of the house, Rosemary. Here she is ready for bed. Not sure where I was supposed to sleep. 😄
  6. Hobbit
    It will *probably* be fine, but it’s scary, isn’t it! While leak testing, I like to wipe off the whole outside of the tank (after I fill it and let it sit) so it’s bone dry, then take tissues or paper towels and run them over the seams to see if I can find any water. If the tissue comes back damp, I would blot the water away and see if it comes back in a minute or two. It’s possible the first leak you saw was just water that had pooled in the rim after the rain. But better safe than sorry!!
  7. Hobbit
    You’re getting lots of great advice! I’ll second that he needs more buffer in that tank to control pH swings. Mix a little bit of baking soda (1/4 teaspoon) into a pitcher of tank water and add it slowly over the course of the day, then retest and see if the pH and buffer are any higher. As for a source of ammonia/nitrates, do you know if the wood in there is seasoned driftwood? Could it be rotting and adding to the problem?
  8. Hobbit
    Can you pinpoint the smell to a particular part of the bedroom? Since there’s no carpet, I’m wondering if anything else porous might have absorbed the smell (curtains, bedding, etc).
  9. Hobbit
    There was a similar element for me, too. I was so tired and took lots of naps… turns out there was mold growing on my mattress. You couldn’t see it until you got all the way under the fabric slipcovers, but it was there, and finding it was one of the most horrifying experiences I’ve ever had. That combined with mold throughout our ductwork and HVAC, it was a terrible environment. I’m glad I’m feeling better, too! I’ve missed you all. 😊
  10. Hobbit
    This seems like a good thread to add to after a long time away from the forum. 🙂 For me, the hobby’s effectively been on pause for several months. Some of you know I was chronically ill for six years. During that time, I could do very little, and fish were a bit of an escape for me. Then about a year ago we discovered that mold was the main culprit in making me sick. We started a huge remediation project and fish took a backseat. Feeling better did two things. It gave me the energy to pick up a second job, as well as the energy to re-evaluate a lot of things in my life. I found I had new dreams and ended up leaving my online job to pursue… something new. Still figuring that out. 😄 Now I have no jobs and lots of introspection time. And I’m just now getting back to thinking about fish. Water changes have been severely lacking; thankfully all the tanks either have pothos or floating plants (or both) to help keep the nitrates down. It’s likely we’ll be moving in the next year, so I’m trying to downsize. The fish seem happy, though I’m sure they’d be less bored if I was more involved with them. My two largest tanks also have huge algae problems. Oh well. The two highlights for me recently were: 1. I gave my therapists’ office eight male platys that I bred myself, and they’ve been a huge hit! They’re the perfect dither fish. Their male opaline gourami has come out of hiding and the white skirt tetras now swim around at the front of the tank. 2. I made the loaches new caves out of oyster shells. Loachy the one-eyed loach loves this one where he thinks he’s totally hidden. 😂
  11. Hobbit
    Late to this party but you’re right, I’m a pretty big fan. 😁 @jwcarlson I think it’s very realistic to say the books have aged. Our conventions for storytelling (and fantasy specifically) have changed a lot over the last ~60 years! No one can deny the books set the foundation for the fantasy genre as we know it, but if you don’t have the nostalgia factor motivating you, they can be a bit of a slog to read I personally have a huge nostalgia factor for the books. I discovered them in middle school, just before the movies came out. So not only did I read the story at an age where I had a huge imagination and a decent amount of free time, I got to totally fangirl with my friends over Orlando Bloom as Legolas. Plus seeing those movies when the cgi technology was still so new… ahhh 😍😍😍 it was so impressive! I’ve seen the original animation (at least the first of the trilogy) and it doesn’t do a whole lot for me I’m afraid… but I do sing “The Greatest Adventure” song to tease my husband sometimes. It’s a real ear worm! 😁
  12. Hobbit
    Yaaaay! Excellent paper! Congratulations, and I hope you get lots of citations.
  13. Hobbit
    Aww, poor fish. Yep, unfortunately it’s genetic and there’s nothing you can do. ❤️
  14. Hobbit
    Got this cute picture of Loachess and Loachy ( @Streetwise’s loach) hanging out this morning. 🥰
  15. Hobbit
    Aww yay fry!! That goodeid mama sure looks healthy. Hopefully she’ll make you many more!
  16. Hobbit
    Thanks for the update. Sorry you had to step away from the hobby, but I get it. Life happens. ❤️
  17. Hobbit
    @Anjum I currently have two male honeys in my 55g tank and they are pals! They choose to hang out near each other most of the time. Sometimes one tries to entice the other into mating. 😄 I didn’t add them at the same time either—one was maybe a year old when I added the other as a youngster. If you have the option to take a second gourami home as a trial, I’d take it and see what happens. But I’m always going to be in the “more honeys” camp. 😁
  18. Hobbit
  19. Hobbit
    I just caught up on your honey gourami breeding attempt! And 🤣 what drama! They are such fun, smart little fish. Your female looks like she’s fat and happy. Great condition! The females were always the bosses in my tanks too. Maybe they’d react better if you took the other males out of the gourami tank instead of removing the mating pair. That’s just a guess, though. If you aren’t actually looking for babies, why not just let her enjoy all the attention? 😆
  20. Hobbit
    Progress! Yaaaay! The new HOB filter is up on the 55 platy tank, and the sponge filter I seeded from the 55 community tank is up and running in the 10g. I also happened to be near a big box fish store the other day, so I went in for some bottled bacteria. I came out with a product I’d never seen before. I can’t say for sure if they worked, since I was trying other things at the same time, but it sure was fun to plop these clear balls into the tanks. They totally disappear at first, but after a day or two, as they started shrinking, they get a bit cloudy and you can see them again. I’ll keep an open mind and say I think they helped! It’s such a relief to have the tanks cycled again. My husband is happy too because he doesn’t have to help me schlep buckets outside for a while. 😊
  21. Hobbit
    Well, one tank’s cycle corrected itself while I was traveling. Thankfully my 16-year-old neighbor didn’t have to deal with any fatalities! This was two days ago: I did a 50% water change on both the remaining problem tanks after taking the above test, and I’ll do another today. The nitrite looks better but still bad. I also have a new filter arriving for the 55g, and I’m seeding a sponge for the 10g in my faithful community tank. Never a dull moment in fishkeeping!!
  22. Hobbit
    @Ori_ana so glad we could help! Sorry your panda platys are growing tumors.
  23. Hobbit
    Is that a bell pepper they’re munching on? I wonder if it helps them develop brighter colors…
  24. Hobbit
    I’m not sure, but my best guess is that it crashed after I treated the tanks with meds. I’ve done Paracleanse and Expel-P recently because of some stunted platy fry and weird-looking poops. The only other thing that changed is I added heaters a few days ago in preparation for us turning our house temp down while we’re gone. In one tank the temp jumped a good 6 degrees at first. So perhaps the rate of decay of the mulm just outcompeted the bacteria for a bit.
  25. Hobbit
    Well, nothing like testing your water before you leave for vacation to discover that your cycles crashed in two tanks. 🤦🏼‍♀️ This is a reminder to everyone to test your water regularly. I tend to have to learn things the hard way, unfortunately. I did a large water change on the affected tanks. I also cut up the sponge from the powerhead in the 55g community tank and distributed it among the tanks that seemed worst. The community tank’s been going for so long that its sponge is full of great bacteria. To make best use of the sponge, I cobbled together some sponge filter-like things out of the old fry slurpers and some tubing. Unfortunately the sponge was too small for any of my spare co-op sponge filters. These platys are just so darn tough. I didn’t realize anything was wrong because they were behaving totally normal! Looking back I see other clues, but man, these fish can withstand anything. I do feel bad for them though. 😕 I did have a bit of fun and rescaped the holding tank for the platys that might develop tumors. The wood will get rotated once it fully sinks, but for now the heater’s holding it in place so it looks wonky. I hope everyone has a merry Fishmas. And go test your water if you haven’t in a while!
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