gardenman

There's some somewhat shady stuff going on in the aquarium plant business world. I was getting ads from a NY based supplier and since I live in NJ, I sent them an order. It's a two hour drive to their listed location so the plants would have a short shipping time. The plants came from Waterscapes Aquatic Nursery in Florida instead of NY. The plants were fine, but I was expecting them to come from a more local supplier. I think some of the wholesalers are creating virtual retail storefronts that look local, but aren't. "Shop local." Yeah.

I always recommend testing your tap water also. Sometimes you can get an ammonia spike in the tap water and when you do a water change you're injecting more ammonia than the system can handle. I had that happen to me a few years back. I did a partial water change and noticed my fish (an Oscar) looking a bit stressed. I did a water test and saw some ammonia. Being a conscientious fishkeeper, I then did a larger water change to dilute the ammonia. The next day the ammonia reading was even higher, and the fish was looking even worse. What the heck? I checked all my filters again and started to do another water change when it occurred to me to test the well water. That's where the ammonia was coming from. I added some Prime to neutralize the ammonia in his tank and the biofiltration took care of the rest of the problem. We like to think the water coming from our tap is stable, but it's not always as stable as we'd like. The things you're supposed to do with an ammonia spike can just make the situation worse if your tap water has high ammonia content. What is your ph? At a low ph that ammonia level is harmless. At a higher ph, it's more of an issue. Ammonia toxicity is directly related to the ph of the water. Lower ph allows for near invincibility of fish to ammonia levels. Higher ph makes ammonia much more of an issue. While I wouldn't stress about a 0.5 ppm of ammonia at a lower ph, at a high ph, it could be an issue.

I like a finer pore sponge filter. The black gunk that comes out when you clean it is likely nearly all bacteria and likely beneficial bacteria. (Human and animal poop/waste is typically up to 80% bacteria and viruses that got pushed out in the digestive process rather than undigested food.) If you have a sponge filter that's not collecting gunk, it's not building as large a bacterial colony. People say a finer pore sponge filter will clog more, and yes, but the thing clogging it is likely beneficial bacteria and they're still in contact with the water, so they're still doing some good even if the filter is "clogged." Others will disagree, but that works for me. What's clogging a sponge filter? If it's beneficial bacteria, isn't that kind of what we want? Bigger bacterial colonies in contact with the water? I don't think most sponge filters are great mechanical filters. I've watched small fish food drift past a sponge filter and not move toward it. It's certainly not sucked into the filter. (At least at the flow rate I'm using.) So, if the filter isn't pulling debris from the water, what's clogging it? Likely bacteria. Predatory Fins just released a video of them visiting a Thailand Flowerhorn breeder/seller. The sponge filters in those tanks looked like they'd never been cleaned. You see that quite often with breeders and fish sellers. The filters work well even when "clogged." Maybe they work better when "clogged." I saw a YouTube video several years ago of a guy touring a Japanese koi farm and he was shocked to see the gunk in a filter system they used. He asked how often they clean the filter. The older man guiding him said they never cleaned it. Sometimes gunk if good gunk. I typically use multiple sponge filters in a tank and seldom clean them. When I clean one, I ignore the others for a bit. I want as much of the good bacteria as I can get and I'm pretty sure the gunk that comes out is mostly good bacteria. We're told to use that gunk to seed a new tank, so yeah. It's probably good stuff and better left in the tank.

I had a silver arowana about 40 years ago that was 22" long before he died in a jump. His tank had a very thick (3/8") glass lid that was anchored down but hitting that lid in a jump one night with a loud bang killed him. I heard the bang and went to check on him and he was floating on his side, still breathing, but not in good shape. By the next morning, he was dead. You need a lot of jumping room for an arowana with nothing they can hit that will injure them. Branches above the water or an island might not be ideal. SiIver arowana typically reach about 30" in captivity and as much as four feet or more in the wild. They're a big, powerful fish. They can jump very high, very quickly. And they do. Something like a largish swimming pool with the mesh around it that they use for trampolines is probably the best option for keeping a silver arowana. Even decor in the tank has to be kept minimal as they can impale themselves on something when they land back in the water after a jump. They're a very impressive fish but they have some unique needs that need to be addressed. Mine was the meanest fish I've ever owned. And it wasn't even close. If you put your hand in the tank he'd go after it. I ended up using egg crate to make a divider that I could slide into one side of the tank, trapping him there, very unhappily, as I worked on the other side. Even then he'd try to attack my hand as I put in or removed the egg crate. Neat fish, but they can be a handful. I had one and I have no real desire to ever have another. They are impressive though.

In general, if plants are growing taller than expected it's because they're not getting enough light and are reaching for the light. I've got dwarf hairgrass and dwarf sagittaria in my tank that are both growing like mad, spreading all over the bottom of the tank and none of them is over an inch tall. Both sets of parent plants were about three inches tall when put into the tank. I see dwarf sag in other tanks that's about six inches tall. Mine stay much shorter. In general, I wouldn't recommend a smaller sword as a plant to hide something. As others have said, they grow slowly. Watersprite, water wisteria, and plants like that make more effective shields. They grow densely and quickly when happy. Some jungle val can also be effective in hiding things if planted closely enough together.

The website of The Pond Guy, Greg Wittstock is a good starting point. Keep in mind that koi can get very, very large. The biggest I've heard of was a British koi that was four feet long and weighed over 90 pounds. You want a big pond because they can become very big fish. Fitz's Fish Ponds is another source you might want to check out. Fitz has tons of videos out on YouTube. If you're looking for an earthen pond then some of the construction YouTubers (Letsdig18 and Dirtperfect) fairly often are making new ponds. Bamabass (also a YouTuber) has built a five-acre bass pond that could be used as a model for a koi pond. (Just different food sources for koi instead of for bass.) There's a nearly endless amount of information out there for everything from a backyard pond to a multi-acre pond. British YouTuber Quailtynishikigoi has lots of informative videos out there also.

Metal razor blades can even scratch glass tanks. A great algae scraper are the plastic razor blades you can buy at Amazon. You can get a large number of blades and multiple plastic blade holders (nothing to rust) for under $5. Just head to Amazon and search for "plastic razor blades." They're what I use on my tank for algae control. Cheap, effective, nothing to rust and nearly no chance of damaging the glass. As others have said, with a bowed tank you want to go left to right (or vice versa) rather than up and down. The blade will follow the curve of the tank that way.

There are enough people breeding Black Moscow guppies these days that if you buy them from two different vendors, you're apt to get fairly different gene lines anyway, so crossing out for genetic diversity may not be as important as it could have been in the past. Many guppies these days come from Thailand guppy farms where they raise guppies by the millions. (There are lots of YouTube videos showing those farms if you're interested.) Two Black Moscow guppies from one farm could have vastly different genetics even though they have a similar appearance. If you're buying guppies from a private breeder who's used the same stock for years, genetic diversity becomes more of an issue but the majority of guppies you buy are now farm-raised and even a pair from the same vendor might have vastly different genetic makeup despite nearly identical appearance.

If duckweed becomes a problem (and it typically does become a problem) a few modifications to a cheap (under $20) surface skimmer can turn the surface skimmer into a duckweed-eating monster that will clear the tank of duckweed. Widening the openings in the surface skimmer to make them large enough for duckweed to go in will have it keeping the surface of the tank clean. If any duckweed comes back, another go-round with the surface skimmer should remove it.

I would suspect it was just her time to die since none of the other fish in the tank were affected. Death happens in a tank. Often for no apparent reason. YouTuber Aquarium Domain found a dead discus in his tank on a recent video that had died for no apparent reason. It happens.

Aquariums are complex ecosystems. Any change you make tends to alter the system, often in undesirable and unimagined ways. Over many, many years of aquarium keeping I've found that the less you mess with things, the better the outcome tends to be. In theory, removing phosphate should lessen algae growth. Less food and building blocks should mean less algae. Weird stuff happens though. I would suspect the longer days we get in springtime might be leading to your algae issue if the tank gets any natural light. Rooms stay brighter longer and that could be causing the algae issues. Around here, in mid-December the room lights need to come on around 4:30 in the afternoon. Now the rooms stay pretty bright until 7:30-ish. That's three hours of extra light each night and the mornings get brighter earlier also. While that light may not be shining directly on the tank, any extra light in a room can cause an increase in algae.

You'll want the pump placed high or add a condensation collector of some sort as when you pressurize air, you force the moisture out of the air, and it'll collect somewhere. If the air pump is the lowest thing in the system, that's where the moisture will accumulate and cause issues. If the pump is up high, any moisture will be pushed out into the tanks where it does little to no harm.

It's a fish-eat-fish world out there, so there's nothing inherently wrong with it. I have a small school of Celestial Pearl Danios (four females and three males) and they spawn every morning with the females laying twelve to twenty-five eggs each. If I collected each egg and raised the fry that would be fifty to a hundred fry per day. I just let the adult CPDs and the snails eat the eggs. An occasional fry will survive and become free swimming, but then the adults hunt it down before it gets too big. We think nothing of feeding live brine shrimp by the thousands, and they're every bit as alive as your fry. Most of the fish stores of my youth kept predators (arowanas, a snakehead, or a cayman) to consume any unwanted, leftover stock or fish that died. They couldn't afford to keep a tank running for one or two leftover fish that weren't selling, so those fish would go to feed the big guys.

The good news is it's high up, so the water pressure should be lower. How comfortable are you with working with epoxies/resins? There are "chip fixing " epoxies for use on windshields that could (maybe should?) fill the voids and stabilize the chipped area. You'll want to get the epoxy into the finest of the voids though and fill them thoroughly. There are windshield repair kits that I'd give a shot to and see if it worked. A good epoxy will be as strong or stronger than the original glass. The challenge is getting it everywhere it needs to be with no voids. Some poking and jabbing with as fine a needle or wire as you can find to get the epoxy deep into any voids would help. The water pressure at the top of a tank is a lot lower than the water pressure at the bottom of a tank. If the epoxy can stabilize the situation, you could have a very long-lasting tank.

Corys are bottom feeders so you're pretty much limited to live worms (tubifex, blackworms, etc.) If you want something from your garden, you could go to a swamp or stream nearby and grab a bucket of mud. Transfer the mud to a small pool in your backyard and you should have an easy, native culture of whatever is native to your area. Separating the food from the mud will be a challenge though. Frozen food or a good quality dry food are the easiest/safest options.