Hobbit

I’ve done a terrible job of keeping up with this thread, but if anyone else wants to post here, they should feel free!

@Sal when I first put my chickens outside, I had to put them in the coop for several nights before they would go in themselves. It didn’t take too long, but it’s VERY important to put them up right at dusk. Mine would go to sleep in a pile against the fence. One night I forgot to put them up until about an hour after dark, and I came outside to discover something had grabbed Goldie trough the fence and nearly scalped her. That was my first foray into being a chicken nurse! Thankfully chickens are quite tough, and Goldie’s doing fine to this day, though she still has a bald spot on her head. I’m really sorry about your little chick passing. I lost a chick at a similar age once. She just stopped eating and drinking. I’m glad you got some snuggles with her at the end. ❤️

I think one honey gourami would be just fine! I do think it might be shy though without other fish swimming around the middle of the tank. It will depend on the honey’s personality. The two I have right now are SO shy, but the two I had before weren’t very shy at all. Regardless, it will almost certainly be less shy than a sparkling gourami. A honey won’t bother your pygmy cories at all. They’re very peaceful, unless they’re guarding eggs (which you won’t have to worry about if you only have one).

Yes, my little Dad Fish honey had a brown scale! He wasn’t born with it—it just developed one day. When he passed away, I went ahead and got out the microscope and the tweezers and pulled the scale off to see what was going on. Honestly, it just looked like a bunch of dirt had gotten stuck under it! The color didn’t seem native to the scale, and there weren’t any parasites or indication of damage. It never bothered him, so I came to think of it like a little freckle. ❤️ Wow, your honeys sound like they’re having a good time! 😄 They look very healthy!

I’m very late to the party, but I’ll just add my experience: I kept my honeys in a tank that got increasingly hard water due to the gravel leaching. Unfortunately they only lived about two years, which is much shorter than I was hoping. I attributed their shorter lifespan to the harder water, but I have no way of knowing that’s for sure what it was. I do think the hard water makes it more difficult for them to make and maintain bubble nests, just like it makes it harder for us to get suds out of soap. It’s just a guess, but if you want your honeys to breed, you may want to try to soften their water. 🙂 In your last video, that nosing into the water lettuce looks to me like he might be building something in there! So maybe your honey’s going to find a way to breed no matter what!

Oh no! I’m so sorry to hear you might have to stop breeding this line. For my first set of fish that developed melanomas, I did euthanize them with clove oil. I just didn’t feel right bringing them to the fish store to sell. However, the next time I went to sell fish, I asked the owner about it and he said he’d be happy to take them and give them away for free to people who have turtle tanks. I preferred that to euthanizing them, so any others that developed a tumor have gone to the fish store with everyone else. I did decide to stop breeding the line that was growing tumors, though. Is it just this one fish growing a tumor, or have any others shown suspicious black streaking on their tails? There’s always the possibility it’s just the one fish, in which case you could try to get a different female to replace her.

It’s been a while since I was on the forum, so I just wanted to put a note here saying I’m still here! I had a stressful month because my brother had some major surgery. Thankfully it went well and he got to go home from the hospital this week. With the weather getting nicer, I’ve also been spending more time out and about, which means less time for the forum. I’m hoping to be around more going forward, though, because I’ve missed my fishy friends! 💖

@Sal they are SO cute!!!

Ah, I see! That’s a cute mouth. 😊 Not sure if the office realizes how big Chinese algae eaters can grow. 😬

Awesome! Thanks everyone! I have platys and this one’s body shape looks slightly different, so it threw me off. Still, it’s not like every platy is the same! I’m sure it will be more obvious as it grows.

Hey everyone! My therapist’s office has a fish tank and I’m curious about these two fish. I thought this was a Molly, but it’s hardly grown in four weeks so I’m second guessing myself. Then there’s this little fella! He’s super happy and zipping around all the time!

I’m glad you approve of the dog crate method. It’s the only thing that’s worked for me in the past. @laritheloud they look like they’re turning out gorgeous!!

I’m too late to the party to add much, but I’ll just say that my husband is an academic researcher professor dude in computer science and his research involves AI. Be forewarned that you can have an AI give you articles, recipes, poems, songs, stories that did not exist… and it’s not just text. It can give you Landscapes, cats, people, and all sorts of images that do not exist in real life. They’re hilarious when they make mistakes, and super creepy when they get it right.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it anywhere else. I don’t actually know if it’s a real problem or just something I’m making up in my worried mind. 😅 Some of their hearts just look different than others, and to my eye one kind looks normal while the other kind looks swollen and like it stops beating every once in a while. But maybe that’s normal for plecos—who knows? Not me! I’ve stopped at Ricks! Actually got my original honeys there. It seemed like a great place.

My hubby is a very modern type so I don’t use the term “training”… I prefer “desensitization.” 😆

Thanks for the advice, everyone. In terms of keeping at least 70% of the tank covered with plant mass, can I substitute floating plants for planted ones with the same effect? Part of the issue is I only have slow growers in my problem tank because the fast growers keep dying. 😛

I got them at Aquarium World which is in Boothwyn, PA. It’s also where I just dropped off six of them! 😁 If you’re planning to breed them though, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend mine—I bred them on accident and I think there’s a heart defect in some of the offspring. (I didn’t sell any with a defect but they might still be carriers.) @Fish Folk lives on the other side of Maryland and may have some recommendations for stores to check out. Not sure what part of the state you’re in.

The little platy in quarantine is now totally healed and back in with its mates! Hard to see but this is the best picture I got: I moved the platys around as I usually do after selling, putting the medium fish in the big fish tank and the small fish in the medium tank, etc. Well, the new residents of the big tank all developed stringy poops, so they got seaweed for dinner! I’m hoping that will help sort things out.

Yay! That’s awesome! Hmm I already never gravel vac my tank… @Seattle_Aquarist and @gjcarew do either of you have any insight about algae outbreaks in low tech tanks? If so, I can tag you in a different post with details.

Wow! That’s super interesting!

For sure! The large orange female platy always seems sad when I take out another large fish—even the male that was harassing her. She sulked for several days! 😢 Other fish don’t seem to notice though. I do think they’re much more flexible as juveniles—I wonder if it’s natural at their stage of fishy life to be moving and exploring new things. Kind of like people I guess! Fish have been delivered!

You can start to get an indication from the non-down feathers that are already growing in. It’s a fun surprise for sure!

Around 50 1”+ platys, separated by color: (pre-bagging count from my main grow out tank:) Six 1.25” super red bristlenose pleco babies, six 1” white medaka, and 3 adult platys (2 female, one male). I’m retiring all my broodstock with black on the body. I don’t’ want to worry about the genetics in order to stop producing babies with tumors. Plus the hubby isn’t a fan of the spotted ones anyway. That means the Queen Mother and just one female with spots (who I believe is a hybrid between spots/no spots) have been moved in with the orange platys! I’ll retire the last spotted female when I get some more blue females big enough to breed. The poor Queen Mother was very scared and depressed last night, but I was happy to see she came right to the glass this morning for breakfast. That leaves the other side of my 55 breeder empty… for a surprise project that has yet to be revealed! 😎😃

Thanks! The light strip is meant for sewing machines. You can cut it to any length you want. As for the hubby being less annoyed… not sure it helps that much 😅

Well… I only have two pleco babies left in the fry box. 😝 Unfortunately, I’m fairly sure that these pleco parents produce a large number of fry with heart defects. It’s really easy to see their hearts when they stick themselves to the glass, and while some of them beat in a regular quick pattern, other hearts look swollen and seem to stop beating frequently. ☹️ I suspect those fry don’t make it long, and get absorbed into the ecosystem of the tank. If I was breeding these plecos on purpose I’d be sure to trade in one of the parents to see if increasing the genetic diversity would be helpful. But I’m not actually trying to breed them—they’re just doing this on their own! In other news, I’ve achieved a new milestone in my nermy development: It appears that I’ve grown green water! (Totally on accident of course 😄) This morning it looks more brown than green, so I’m concerned that it’s not going to stick around. But for now it’s a nice extra source of food for my fry. There’s one medaka fry in this jar who seems very happy. My medaka fry-raising plan continues to get dialed in. The system doesn’t quite work yet but hopefully we’re getting there. Right now, I collect eggs from the parent tank every week or so and put them in one of these jars: I mostly physically pick the eggs off the plants and spawning mops, but sometimes I’ll just grab a whole chunk of hornwort and stick it in there. I feed them infusoria two or three times a day—which isn’t really enough, I think. Plus I think I need to use less yeast in the infusoria jars… still working on that. But either way, after two weeks, the fry get transferred to a larger container. That used to mean the green water jug, but I was losing almost all the fry I put in there. So I got out an old 1g bowl my mom had saved from when we were kids, and I’m hoping the fry do better in something larger yet shallower. I seeded it with mulm from the sponge filter in my 55g display tank, so they’ve had a lot to eat for the last 48 hours! In terms of the two platys that were sick in my last post: I lost the smaller one almost immediately. I wasn’t surprised—it didn’t look like it had developed properly. The fish with severe fin rot is doing great, though! This was a few days ago and it’s looking even better now: Aquarium salt really works! 😃 Today I’ll be preparing fish and plants to take to my LFS tomorrow, so I may be back with more pictures soon.