gardenman

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.

For algae on glass, I find the plastic razor blades and holders sold at Amazon work great. For around $4 you can get multiple holders and sixty or more of the disposable blades. They're all plastic so no metal to rust or corrode. They won't scratch your tank unlike metal razor blades. And they do a great job. Cheap, easy, effective, what more could you ask for? And each blade has two edges, so if one wears down, you just rotate it around and you've got a fresh edge. Just do a search for "plastic razor blades" on Amazon and you'll find lots to choose from. For those with multiple tanks, you can get a scraper for each tank so no worries about cross contamination.

Swordtails are notorious fry predators, so it's possible your female has given birth then she and anyone else in the tank ate the fry before you knew they'd had the fry. The fry survival rate for swordtails tends to be quite low if the fry aren't caught in a breeding trap.

I don't see the Mr. Coffee one any more, but Amazon has a very similar Black and Decker one, model CBG110S for around $17.

Mine used to love the small frozen shrimp (60-70 per pound) sold for human consumption. I'd drop one in and they'd graze on it most of the day.

As everyone else has said, more air means more flow, but do you really want more flow? Sponge filters are great biofilters, but biofiltration can take place at relatively low flow rates. If you want crystal clear water without a hint of mulm or detritus, then you want a high flow rate to suck in absolutely everything. And your filter, of whatever type, will clog fairly quickly and need frequent cleaning. In my younger days when I wanted immaculate tanks, I'd use a Vortex diatom filter on my tanks regularly. These days I'm more of an organic gardener when it comes to aquarium keeping. The mulm and detritus we see in our tanks is essentially free compost/manure for the plants, so I leave it be. I have sponge filters operating at a slower rate and debris, fish food, whatever is in the water, just floats past them and settles on the gravel where it's available for the plants to consume and use as they please. It's how nature works, so how wrong could it be? I use a dark gravel so the mulm and whatnot don't show up as much and I don't have a lot of bottom-dwelling fish constantly stirring things up. I have mystery snails as a cleanup crew and they do very little riling of the debris. My plants are thriving and so are my fish. My water tests great, and everyone's happy. Is the tank "clean?" Not by a longshot, but it's healthy and the plants and fish are happy, and my filters need very little maintenance.

In general, everything eats fish eggs, including humans in the form of caviar. There are some shrimp that reportedly don't eat fish eggs, but I'm not sure how much I'd trust them even then. Mystery snails are more or less vacuum cleaners in a tank. They don't seem to pick and choose what to eat, they just move along with their mouth opening and sucking in anything they can suck in. If you watch a mystery snail in a tank, they just are constantly mouthing anything they come across. I'm not sure they'd specifically target fish eggs, but if they stumbled upon them and they fit in their mouths, they'd eat them. Mystery snails won't eat driftwood or healthy plants though. Bear in mind, driftwood will decompose over time and get smaller on its own.

If you have a canister filter or HOB going on the tank, you can just swish your hand through the water just above the debris to get it moving and your filter should remove it while the debris is suspended in the water. The old Vortex Diatom filters were great for this. Keeping a larger, high-volume HOB around for temporary use in this manner isn't the worst idea. Get the debris you want removed up in the water column and let the filter deal with it. Ideally, the filter strainer would be fine enough to prevent losing shrimp while open enough to let the fine debris through. You'll want an oversized filter with a high flow rate for this if you go that route. You want it filtering the tank water very quickly while the debris is still suspended. You can also come back every now and then and stir things up again.

There is no magic number. Bio load matters more than tank size. A one-hundred-gallon tank with a single neon tetra in it that only gets fed the bare minimum every other day and has a single floating plant probably doesn't need any extra biofiltration. A one-hundred-gallon tank overstocked with ten full-grown Oscars that get fed multiple times a day might need a hundred-gallon sump filled with K1 and barely be able to keep up. An old, established K1 filter will handle a larger bio load than a newly set up K1 filter. A heavily planted tank that's been established for years can use a much smaller K1 bio-filter as there are massive bacteria colonies all through the tank. And K1 filters are moving bed filters. In order to move, the K1 media need space. If you cram a gallon of K1 media into a space just large enough to hold it, but with no room for it to move, it won't be as effective as it would in a larger space. Too large a space and the K1 may not move as energetically and clean itself. When in doubt about how much bio-filtration to use, I always err on the side of more. I've got three small sponge filters running on my heavily planted ten-gallon tank that has seven CPDs in it. It's ridiculously overkill, but more bio-filtration is better than not enough. And when I set up a new tank, I can just move an established filter to that new tank to help seed it. A lot of people want to make fishkeeping into a science with an exact formula to follow. There are just way too many variables for that to ever be possible. Everyone's water is different. Every tank's bio load is different. Every tank's colony of bacteria is different. Every tank is unique. You need more focus on general guidelines than precision when it comes to fishkeeping. Build as big a K1 partition as you can and hope for the best. It's hard to have too much biofiltration, so err on the side of more is better. If you only have a little space, try it and see what happens. Maybe you'll get lucky, and it'll be enough space. What works for you though may fail miserably for someone else doing exactly the same thing due to differences in their water, bio load, and bacterial colonies. Fishkeeping is a hobby where there are very few exact answers to any question. What works for one person may fail miserably for someone else.

CPDs tend to spawn a lot, like daily, with each female laying twelve to twenty-five eggs per day. They're also voracious egg eaters and fry eaters which is why the world isn't overrun with CPDs. If I was betting, I'd say they were CPDs.

Swim bladder issues with fancy goldfish becomes an extremely common issue as they grow and mature. In most cases, there's not a lot you can do about it. Too much fish has been bred into too small of a space and deformed the swim bladder. Warmer water may help as it keeps the goldfish's metabolism and food digestion running at a higher speed limiting the risk of food impaction. Feeding very soft food like Repashy could help. The sad reality though is that many, maybe most goldfish bought small will develop swim bladder issues as they mature. More than a few goldfish enthusiasts have abandoned keeping fancy goldfish because of this issue. I'm a hobbyist who likes to buy fish small and raise them myself, but fancy goldfish would be the one area where I'd make an exception to that rule and buy a mature, fully, or nearly fully grown fish. If a fish has reached adulthood and hasn't developed swim bladder issues, it likely doesn't have the level of deformity you find in many others. You still need to exercise some caution in food choices and whatnot, but you're safer buying an already grown fish.

Sellers want bettas with full finnage and that takes time to grow. By the time you buy a betta from most retailers, they're at their mid-life point. If you get two to three years from them, you're doing well. They're not a long-term pet. There are fish that live nearly as long as people, koi being one. A koi named Hanako was reported to be 226 years old when it died in 1977. Lungfish often live into their eighties and nineties. Pacus tend to be long-lived also.

Under the rubber drum looking parts in those round plastic cylinders are two little flapper-type valves, two in each cylinder. They serve as check valves for the air and can fail or get dirty, limiting the airflow. If one is bad and you have access to wider rubber bands and a X-Acto knife, you can carve out replacements from the rubber bands using the old ones as a pattern.

A CO2 drop checker gives you a broad guideline of your CO2 status, not enough, about right, too much, but I'm assuming you already know about those and are looking for something more precise.

You might want to reach out to Freshwater Exotics. They have collecting trips you can go on with them to Brazil, and they also import lots of fish from South America. Give them an idea of what you're looking for and they may find something from one of their sources.