gardenman

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.

French-style green beans are better than whole. I found baby bristlenose have a hard time getting through the green bean skin but will devour the interior of beans.

There's an Amazon vendor, Green Water Farm, that sells killifish egg kits for around $31 after shipping. They say you get sixty eggs. They have quite a few different varieties available also. It would be a relatively low-cost way to experiment with raising them from eggs.

I use frozen baby brine for my CPDs. I get the 36-pack mini-cubes from San Francisco Bay and cut each cube into quarters, defrost one quarter at a time, and it still floods my ten-gallon tank with baby brine. More than enough for my CPDs to chow down on. On a somewhat related note, it would be interesting to know how the fish pick which baby brine shrimp to eat. They'll swim past a bunch to pick one out of the pack. Why that one? I'm sure they have a reason, but I have no clue what it is. They all look the same to me. It's fun to watch them. They'll identify one a few inches or more away, zoom to it, gulp it down, and swim right past lots of others. "That's the one for me!" It's fun to watch, but confusing as to why they choose one over another. They don't just hoover up any in the way, they get very specific and hunter-like in picking out the "best" shrimp, even competing and racing one another to the chosen shrimp.

In my experience, they'll breed just fine in a ten-gallon tank. Getting them to stop breeding is often the hard part. Younger male bristlenose plecos sometimes need a while to get the feel for what they're to do. I had one young guy who would do the fanning and luring the female into the cave, then swim off to the other side of the tank when she went in. She'd emerge a bit later and look around like, "Where are you?" Once she left and went back about her business he'd go back and do the luring in dance again. He knew how to attract the girls but then didn't know what to do once he got one. Over time, he figured it out. Generally speaking, with bristlenose plecos you don't have to do a lot to motivate them to breed. I might go with just one female though. I've had jealous females sneak in and push out the eggs of a rival.

MD Fish Tanks (a British YouTuber) swears by the API line of products. He uses their Root Tabs and Leaf Zone and has beautiful plants with a variety of substrates. Bear in mind he's also sponsored by them, so that could influence his opinion, but his tanks do look gorgeous, and we've seen some of them on YouTube for months now, so harder to fake things that way.

Reshaping the tip with heat is clever. I just use blue painter's tape, apply the silicone generously, then smooth it with a finger and peel off the tape. I expose a wider piece of glass for taller tanks that hold more water just for some extra insurance. For my old thirty-high, I left about 3/8 of an inch of the glass exposed. For a more normal ten or twenty-gallon tank I'll only leave about 1/4 of an inch of glass exposed.

A sponge filter is safest with small fish and shrimp. Restricting or redistributing the flow out is a good option for the existing filter. If you take something like a tinfoil pie pan and punch a lot of smallish holes in it and put it under the outflow of the filter, it can diffuse the current a bit and make things a bit gentler. Putting a sock of some sort over the outflow can also slow the outflow, but you have to be careful you don't overflow the filter. If the filter has an impeller with multiple blades you can sometimes get away with removing a blade or two to slow the flow. This will unbalance the impeller though which can cause other issues in the long term. If it has a lot of blades, removing one on opposite sides will limit any imbalance.