gardenman

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.

I just have one tank going currently with seven CPDs, ten cherry shrimp, and five mystery snails. With CPDs being small fish, they get frozen baby brine a couple of times a day, then some micro-pellets or finely crushed flake food in between. I just cut off a chunk of the small frozen baby brine cubes, thaw it out in some warm water for a few minutes, and dump it in. Overfeeding isn't really an issue with ten shrimp and five rapidly growing mystery snails. CPDs are browsers so you want to feed them small amounts fairly often. I try to do four to five feedings a day with at least two of those frozen baby brine shrimp. The frozen baby brine I'm using at the San Francisco Bay mini ones in the 36 pack. I use about a quarter of a cube per feeding and that's enough to feed the seven CPDs with plenty left over. One cube lasts two days that way and the fish seem happy and healthy with that schedule.

The tank being uncycled probably isn't an issue with eggs. They're not likely to be producing large amounts of ammonia. The number of eggs could be an issue. One to ten eggs and there's probably not going to be an immediate problem. A thousand eggs could be an issue. Fry are small so the tank will probably do a fish-in cycle with the bacterial colony growing with the fry. Assuming there's a limited number of fry. Once again, the number matters.

I wouldn't worry about the pleco attacking and eating bettas. While omnivore plecos will consume dead fish or worms, they don't truly hunt prey. At least in my experience. Your bigger issue is going to be putting a larger pleco (they get seven inches long) in a heavily planted tank and keeping the plants planted. By and large, plecos have the subtlety of a bull in a china shop where plants are concerned. You're apt to end up with most of your plants being constantly uprooted. If you only go with plants that can be glued to rocks, or keep them in sturdy pots you could be okay, but putting plants in a finer, sandy type substrate with a larger pleco probably won't end well for the plants.

Aqua Natural Diamond Black substrate is very nice, but a tad pricey. It comes in two bags. A larger dry bag and then a smaller inoculated wet bag with bacteria starter in it. It's typically $25-$30 for enough for a ten gallon tank. Pricey, but pretty and the inoculated gravel helps speed up cycling. (It worked for me anyway.)

You could have an issue with the life of the filter if you put the CO2 diffuser on the filter inlet. When you combine CO2 and water you form carbonic acid. It's not an especially strong acid, but prolonged exposure in the relatively small volume of a canister filter can lead to issues with filter components, notably the impeller. There are lots of anecdotal reports of these issues. Filter components wear out over time anyway, but there are reports that carbonic acid will accelerate the wear.

Just to follow up on my earlier post. What I've heard with Fed-Ex is that if a hub gets overworked, and can't process all of the incoming packages, they'll just park the excess trucks out of the way and hold them there until they have a slow day to process them. The theory is that this keeps the majority of packages moving in a timely fashion and only disrupts a relative handful. If a facility can handle ten truckloads of packages, but twelve show up, the last two trucks to show up get parked until there's a day when they have spare capacity, say a day when only nine trucks show up. That's why my snails spent four days on the ground in Colorado and then another three days on the ground in Memphis. They arrived after both hubs had reached their capacity for the day, so the trucks got parked until they had a slower period. You would tend to think that if your package was delayed it would move to the head of the line the next day, but that's not how Fed-Ex does it. The delayed package gets set off to the side until there's a day with lower demand, and only then does it get moved. This is designed to alienate the fewest customers, but it really alienates those customers when a two-day package takes eleven days to reach its destination as it did in my case.

I've been in the hobby for fifty-plus years, and I've never heard of anyone having an issue with a captive puffer. Lots of people have gotten poked by a lionfish and lived to tell the tale. Lots more have been jabbed by the occasional cory catfish or clown loach. I wouldn't recommend getting overly affectionate with a puffer, as in kissing it or spending hours holding one, but in "normal" tank use, I don't think there's an issue. I definitely wouldn't recommend eating one, but as a tank inhabitant, it should be fine.

The linear piston air pump would fail before you could achieve a high enough pressure to rupture PVC. Now, having said that, PVC pipe isn't rated or designed for compressed air/gases. It's rated for water and other fluids. Insurance issues could arise should something go wrong if you're using it in a non-approved manner. Not as much of an issue for a homeowner with a small fish room but for a school.... The odds of anything going wrong in an aquarium air system are absurdly low, but there are still some risks. PVC gets brittle when too cold and can shatter at lower than rated pressures if overly cold. It can also soften when too warm, so placement needs to be considered. If you're keeping the loop in "normal" room temperature, and away from a heat source, you should be quite safe. Here in NJ, you would likely need to use a licensed state-certified school contractor to install the system. At great cost. They don't let just anyone do anything in a classroom. There would need to be a contractor hired, experts consulted, designs submitted, school board approval, etc. before you could do it.

Fed-Ex here is horrible. I ordered some live snails on e-Bay from a reputable seller. I paid for second day air. They spent four days on the ground in Colorado "due to bad weather." (Temps were in the low seventies with no rain/wind all four days.) They then spent three more days on the ground in Memphis, then four more days from Memphis to here. They were dead by the time they finally arrived. Fed-Ex flat out lied multiple times. First about the weather. Then later they insisted they'd attempted to deliver but no one was home. That was also a lie as they had the package leave their Philadelphia airport facility and arrive in Delaware twenty minutes later. They just went straight from Philly to Delaware and didn't even try to deliver it. And that's not uncommon here. UPS, USPS, and Amazon are great! Fed-Ex is a mess.

I haven't had a problem planting it. By and large it's an easy plant for me. Just don't bury the crown and it should be okay. At least for me. Plants are fickle though and maybe it doesn't like your water or substrate.

If your nitrites and nitrates are spiking immediately after a large 80% water change, I'd test your tap water. I suspect that's the source of your problems. If your tap water is good, you shouldn't see a spike immediately after an 80% change.

There were cancer issues with the half-black swordtails way back in the sixties/seventies/eighties that kept me from ever keeping those. Those swordtails were red on the front half and solid black from the mid-dorsal fin back. I haven't seen those fish in a while, so they may no longer be actively bred and commercially available due to the health concerns. They were beautiful fish, but not very strong. Most recently I was raising Neon Swordtails, and they were extremely prolific and hardy. The high-fin and long-fin varieties of swordtails are very beautiful, but you typically need to keep a "normal" male to breed with the females due to the elongated and no longer functional gonopodium of the high-fin/long-fin males. Goliad Farms was experimenting with surgically modifying the gonopodiums (hacking off the "excess" with a razor blade) of the long-fin variety to see if they would then reproduce, but I never saw the result of that experiment. I'm guessing it didn't end well. The poor guys went from "Hello ladies, look at what I've got!" to being nicknamed "Shorty" though no fault of their own. The photo posted above of the gold and black swordtail shows the overly long gonopodium that's the problem with the high-fin/long-fin varieties. The solid red male's gonopodium seems to be less of an issue based on that photo, but we don't see enough to know for sure. A quick search for "Red Lyretail Swordtail Experiment Goliad Farms" should bring up that article if you're interested.

I always found swordtails to be absurdly easy to breed, with one caveat. The high-fin varieties tend to have issues where the males' gonopodium is no longer effective due to the length. Standard, short-fin swordtails should breed readily for you. Just be aware that they're pretty aggressive predators also, so fry survival can be more of an issue than with less predatory livebearers.

A higher PPI filter could clog faster, but also provides more surface area for bacteria to grow. By and large, clogging isn't an issue with Matten filters. Matten filters are largely self-cleaning as nearly all of the waste that enters them is organic and organic stuff decomposes. Most Matten filters have a relatively slow flow rate so as one section clogs, water flows more through the less clogged areas. And while the water flows around the clogged section, the organic material that's clogging the flow is breaking down and decomposing, clearing the clog. There are stories out there (mostly from Europe where Matten filters have been used longer) of Matten filters going uncleaned for ten years or more and still working fine. Clogging is more of an issue if you have a high flow rate through your Matten filter. You don't need a high flow rate through a Matten filter for it to be effective. I've seen heavily stocked tanks where the flow through the Matten filter is counted in drops per minute rather than gallons per hour.

Just a heads up on lighting a tank from the bottom. You may see some behavioral changes in your fish. I had a nightlight under a goldfish tank and the goldfish tried to swim upside down thinking the light was up, as all light in nature is. The sun, moon, and stars in nature are all up, and my goofy goldfish assumed the light coming up from the bottom of their tank was up and they tried to orient themselves to the light. If you notice your fish swimming weirdly at night in a tank with bottom lighting, don't worry too much. The fish are probably fine, just confused as to which way is up. Their swim bladder says one thing and their eyes another.