Hobbit

Such a sweet looking kitty. I’m so sorry you lost her. ❤️

Good to hear from you! Glad you’re still enjoying your fishy friends.

Oh my goodness! 😰 That’s so scary. I’m really glad there’s no permanent damage, that the procedure went well, and that our dear @Odd Duck was here to talk with you. Forum friends are 100% real. I hope we get to meet in person one day. ❤️ My mom had a heart attack when I was 20 and we were all on vacation (my siblings were 18, 16, and 11). It happened when we were on a shuttle bus back to our hotel, and the bus driver ended up turning the bus around (full of people and everything) and driving us to the hospital. She radio’ed ahead and they were ready for us. Honestly probably saved her life. The worst part was sitting in the waiting room after she’d been taken back. She had to be transferred to a bigger hospital that night, and the doctor’s wife and 14 year old daughter drove us behind the ambulance, a full hour drive one way. They were so kind. The daughter distracted my little sister really well. Everything ended up fine in the end, thankfully, but I’ll never forget the kindness of all those strangers. ❤️

Ah! I had to refresh my screen and then it showed up. That doesn’t look like the algae I would get, but that doesn’t mean it’s not from excess food. I tried to find a picture of the kind I get, but I don’t think I have one unfortunately. Mine kind of looks like the glass is frosted and is greenish, and if you look closely at it you can see that it’s a few millimeters thick.

Oh whoops! 😄 What did I miss?

I think it’s any picture you try to post that’s in portrait mode. (Taller than it is wide.) It may be an iPhone specific problem. If you crop the pictures a little, it seems to change something about their raw data, and the forum won’t flip them no matter what shape it is.

Ohhhhhhh boy! I’m a former high school bio teacher and you’ve just totally nerm sniped me. 🤩 If you want to talk details of lesson/curriculum development I am up for basically unlimited discussion about that! Will most of your students have had at least one high school bio class already? Or will you be getting some kids pre-bio? My ideas for curriculum are more geared toward what ties into other high school bio subjects, or what will be useful to them in the rest of their life: pH, ions, atoms vs molecules, covalent vs ionic bonds, ionic bonds break in water because of the polarity: basic chemistry if the kids need it. The importance of surface area! More surface area of bubbles leads to more dissolved gas. More surface area in a sponge or gravel leads to more places for bacteria to grow. More surface area on a plant means more places to absorb nutrients/gasses and get rid of wastes. More surface area in the gills means the same thing! Dissolved gasses. More gas is in solution at a low temperature, less at a high temperature. Versus dissolved solids, which are the opposite. The physics behind why that is. Osmosis and diffusion. Especially the mechanics of how a fish exchanges wastes/gasses across the gills. Why freshwater fish can’t live in salt water and vice versa. Data collection and interpretation!!! Make them all keep lab notebooks. Have them graph their pH, ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, etc as they’re cycling their tanks. Experimental design. Maybe half the class can add fish food during their cycle and half can add ammonia drops. Different fertilizers and how they affect plant growth, different size sponges and how they affect the cycle… never ending possibilities here. The variety of reproductive systems!!! Students leave biology thinking everything reproduces like humans do. FALSE! Livebearers, egg layers, egg scatterers, mouth brooders, and so much more. Often it’s the male fish who does the most parental care. This would be a great opportunity to use those “fish facts” cards that someone else suggested, and even have the class do brief presentations. You could even include different systems in snails, because then you get to talk about hermaphroditic creatures. Protists!!! When you teach students about the different kingdoms of life, no one ever knows what protists are. But there are tons of them in aquariums, both single celled and multicellular. Microscope use. You will have a never ending supply of interesting things to look at under the microscope. Fish eggs, shrimp molts, filter gunk, algae, thin plant leaves, etc. You can briefly cover photosynthesis and respiration and how that affects the water chemistry and gas availability over the course of a day (I assume you’re using live plants). Of course, ecological principles. How the different parts of an ecosystem work together for balance. You may have to cover energy loss up the food chain if students start wondering why a mom fish can’t just eat her babies and make more and then eat them and survive forever that way. 😅 How pollution affects aquatic ecosystems. Algae blooms —> no oxygen for the fish, etc. Why there’s a dead zone where the Mississippi flows into the ocean. Having 80 minutes 5 days a week is both intimidating and amazing. If you want to talk specifics of lesson planning, I’m here for it. 😁 As for what to do with the tanks: I think pairing the kids up to set up their real tanks could work well to keep you from having too many fish to get rid of. If you have the space and funding though, you might consider making the groups optional. I’m sure some kids will have strong ideas of what they want and will want to just do it on their own. Plus, then you don’t have the excited kids fighting over who gets to take the aquarium home. I’d check with your LFS about which fish they’d be happy to take from you and sell. Probably livebearers like guppies or platys, or maybe shrimp. You can also consider auctioning off the aquariums that students don’t want to take home. If your school or PTO already has some kind of silent auction event, it could be fun to just add the aquariums to that. In terms of setting up the cycle in each tank: I’d recommend maybe not giving them seeded sponges or gravel, at least at first. Give them a few days or a week to see how the tank struggles without it, and then give them something to jump start things so they can see the change.

Oh wow! Somehow I never made the jump from your old thread to this one. Your tank looks amazing! That’s so weird about the anubias. But everything looks great, and I’m so glad the tank stand is working out for you.

I almost always keep ramshorn snails in my fry tanks. Soft algae can take over really fast from uneaten fry food and infusoria drippings, and that algae can trap really small wrigglers. I call the snails my “nanny snails.” 😊 On the other hand, if you’re raising plecos or otos, you definitely don’t want snails because you want to save all the algae for your babies. And they will eat certain kinds of eggs, so you have to be careful there if you’re trying to hatch eggs directly in the fry tanks. The other thing is that since you feed fry so heavily, you generally end up with a LOT of snails. So you have to have a plan for that, whether it’s just crushing them ☹️ euthanizing them 😴 or feeding them to some loaches. 😋 In my experience, ramshorn snails raise nitrates very little beyond what you’d already have from uneaten food and such. So over all I see them as a huge positive, especially for those really small fry.

Heaven forbid a psychologist ever shows a nerm one of those blot tests…

Does Barnaby do house visits? I need a cat that can hunt moles…

Wow! That’s some next level stuff! How many tanks do you have?

The tank is up and running and the student is home! She seems very happy with her new frogs and nerite snails. 😊 Thanks for the help, everyone!

That’s my favorite part of WonderShells! 😜 They changed it on some of their packaging which makes me sad.

Ooo thanks for the recommendation @OnlyGenusCaps! For now my plan is to rearrange the broodstock so I’m not mating no-body-black fish to spotted/tuxedo mates. Still debating if I can get away with wag + plain…

That’s so hard, but it sounds like you’re making the right decision. ❤️ I’m sorry to hear about the collapses. Hopefully you can find ways to express your artistic side that are easier on your body. I’m glad you’re making progress on your SSI case! I’m sure it will be a big help once that goes through.

Oh yikes! That’s the worst sort of surprise. ☹️

I went to college in northern Indiana and we had an army of those sidewalk plows. They looked like something out of Busytown with those gigantic brushes on the front. Unless you live in a district where they start taking away your breaks if you have more than two. ☹️ Stupid New York. They take some things WAY too seriously. Ahhhh this thread is making me miss snow a LOT 😭 There’s something so fun about trudging through a foot or more of untouched snow. Leaping through two feet is a blast! 😄

You are so kind. ❤️❤️❤️ That’s so fun that you’ll be starting your own flock! If you need any help or just want to share pictures, be sure to post in Off Topic and tag a bunch of us! Based on the comments here I think we could rival any chicken forum. 😁

I overnighted some plants and supplies and a used coop sponge filter to my student’s mom! (That talenti ice cream jar was a PERFECT fit for the small sponge filter.) I was pretty concerned that she would think me a little insane when she saw how gross it looked, but she sent me this picture with the caption, “I make kombucha so I’m used to looking at gross things.” Phew!!!

@PineSong oh no! That’s a bummer. Have you done any autopsies? I can’t confirm or deny if any of mine are developing internal tumors, but on the outside, I look for either really dark spots that seem larger+darker than the fish’s other pigmentation, or spots where they shouldn’t have spots. On the tuxedo platys, this has looked like spots on their head. Later I’ll find tumors on the caudal peduncle and sometimes the tail fin. I’m still watching the blue spotted platys to see if any of the dark spots I’m seeing turn into tumors. In this generation I’m seeing some with dark black streaks on their tails, and I’m not sure yet if that will turn into anything problematic. Side note: a yellow tux platy sounds really pretty.

Bummer that the sparkling gouramis aren’t a good fit, but I think it’s great you’re trying to find them a better home. Looking forward to seeing how the plants grow in in your new 20 long!

Thanks @laritheloud. I was not prepared to lose them both so soon. ❤️ I’m still hoping to get mates for their kids and raise up some of their grand fishies.

@H.K.Luterman I have more data now (meaning more baby platys) and it looks like I am getting tumors on the wag+spotted hybrids. 😞 One of the males in my broodstock is a first generation offspring who’s spotted—not wag—but may still have been a hybrid. It could be his + my blue wag mom’s offspring who are getting the tumors. The other guess is that I wasn’t getting many offspring from my blue wag mom before the most recent two batches, but I’m not sure how likely that is. My current blue baby population is all from the blue wag mom and F1 spotted males. Many of them are showing signs of potentially developing tumors, but only time will tell for sure.

Last week I found an egg in the middle of the lawn. Literally. Usually they all lay in the coop but someone was caught way off guard 😆 They’ll also let me know when someone else is in the nest box and they NEED TO GO. Some birds will only lay if there’s an egg (fake or real) in the nest box already, so if they’ll just waddle around the yard squawking until I go move an egg to an open box. I have three fake eggs now so it usually isn’t an issue—unless some of the top birds decide to sit in the nest box for no reason (looking at you, Fluffy 😒). She goes broody every summer, too. In fish land… the stand is up! 🤩 And the hubby expressed his hopes that the 20g tanks on this shelf would be pretty. He says he was really blown away at how nice the 55 breeder looks and it would be so nice if the other tanks looked that good too! So of course I’ll be happy to oblige 😇