gardenman

When I get hair algae I typically remove it with a fork. I've found over time that just winding it around a fork (like some people eat spaghetti) is the most efficient way to get rid of the stuff. Now, with it woven into your plants that's a no go for you, but if you find any that's not woven into the plants, a fork is a good option for hair algae removal. Just stab the fork into it and start spinning the fork and you'll end up with a ball of hair algae on the fork.

"The science is proven..." Eh, as a rule very little in science is truly proven when it comes to aquariums. Our aquariums have a gazillion (give or take a few) variables and what works in a lab, or one tank, may fail completely in another. I like the idea of anoxic filtration and it sounds good in concept, but you'd have to reoxygenate the water going back into the tank (which isn't too hard.) There's also the problem of methane and hydrogen sulfide being created and released by an anoxic filter. (More challenging to prevent/deal with.) It's something I've played with a tiny little bit, but never found truly worthwhile. I'm not sure a fine sponge filter that's seldom cleaned doesn't becomes an anoxic filter over time. Keeping two sponge filters in a tank and never cleaning one may be the easy way to achieve anoxic filtration. Sponge filters hold a lot of bacteria. A clogged, fine pore sponge filter would have minimal water flow through it. Kind of the perfect environment for anoxic filtration. Maybe not even connecting one to an airline and just having it sitting there would make it an anoxic filter? Spongefilters are good media for aerobic bacteria so a clogged one with minimal wate flow/aeration might just be ideal for anoxic filtration. Or so my warped mind thinks. (It's also a good excuse not to clean my sponge filters.)

I bought some "black" gravel that was actually white gravel coated with a black paint/epoxy. My goldfish, being goldfish, would mouth the gravel and then spit it out and over time they ate/abraded the black off the gravel. The black gravel is now whitish with dark speckles. If you've got fish that mouth gravel on a regular basis (goldfish, geophagus, etc.) they could be creating colored gravel suspended pigments in the water. I suspect it's more of a bacterial bloom, but I wouldn't completely rule out the gravel.

I agree completely. And not just Aquaclears. I've had to kickstart (for lack of a beter word) Aqueon filters and others also. Just nudge the impeller a bit and off it goes. It's wear related and develops over time, but pretty much any and every brand of filter will eventually need a bit of help to get the impeller restarted.

They're natural slate. In one of the photos you can see the edge view with the layers common to slate.

There is no harm other than it growing rampantly. And it can grow rampantly. In one of my tnaks it'll block out the light and get a half inch or more deep if I don't weed it our regularly. (I tend to go through tanks every Saturday and weed out the excess, but if I skip a week or two, that tank goes dark from the thick cover of duckweed.) If you don't mind weeding it out on a regular basis, and I mean a reglular basis, it's a great plant. It sucks up nitrates, helps filter the water, some fish eat it as a food and it grows like a weed.

Here's a photo of my duckweed skimmer in action. (It's in the bottom right of the photo. It's the Odyssea 100 Surface Skimmer with the modified/widened openings for duckweed.) This tank (my 30 high) was covered in duckweed yesterday. Now most of it is gone. The skimmer had to be emptied three times so far, but it does a good job.

As a rule, I don't test my tanks at all. I know, I know, bad fishkeeper! I've been keeping fish forever and my tanks have been up and running forever, and I know how my fish typically behave. As long as they're acting normal I just assume everything's good. And it usually is. Right now, in the overcrowded tank three feet to my right, there are six newish swordtail fry swimming among the roots of the dwarf water lettuce. I've got a male pleco with his tail stuck out of a cave who hasn't left the cave for a few days, so I'm assuming there are eggs or fry in there. The fish are happy and reproducing. I'm happy. The plants are happy. So, why test? When you test all the time you end up falling into the trap of "needing to do something" because a test result is off. As long as the fish are happy and doing well, that's what I worry about. And my fish are very happy and doing well. When you start "doing something" based on a test result you tend to destabilize things and make things worse rather than better. Develop a system that works for you and your fish and as long as you and the fish are happy, that's what counts. Does my water test perfectly? Probably not, but bear in mind, probably no water in their natural habitate tests perfectly either. Everything living in the water is doing well so I'm happy. If I started to chase perfect parameters I'd be more likely to screw things up than make things better.

Pleco fry are very easy to raise as they eat what the parents eat.

Letting a Cowboy fan out in public during Dallas Week in the Philly area is dangerous. The Eagle fans get a mite bit intense. (I'm wearing my Eagles Super Bowl 52 t-shirt as I type this in preparation for the game on MNF.) Back to the event, it looks like an okay event. The number of vendors is a bit smallish. Good speakers, but I'm not sure they'll say anything you can't learn from them by watching their videos on YouTube. Fish auctions can be dangerous for your finances. Sunday looks like a suboptimal day to go. If you look at their schedule pretty much everything happens on Saturday. The fishroom gets closed down early Sunday with people removing fish from 7-9AM. Everything then shuts down at 2 PM. About the only major thing on Sunday is the auction at 11 AM.

Mostly fiction. One of my novels made the semifinals in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. Another was picked up by Jason Chen for his political thriller StoryBundle in 2016. Writing is fun. I've got a novel and short story entered in this year's UK Storyteller contest. I'm proofing a novel now that I'll be publishing sometime before Christmas. The right tools make it easier to be a writer these days. I've got 77 reviews on Goodreads with an average rating of 4.36 out of five. I don't sell a lot of books, less than $2,000 since 2016, but it's fun and I like doing it.

I've self-published fifteen books so far and it's not that hard. There are some very useful tools to use. One is Grammarly. It'll catch common issues and help you to correct them. I just use the free version because I'm cheap, but it can really help you. (This website doesn't support it so I make more typos here than on other sites.) If you're using Word to write the book then Amazon has a Kindle plug-in that will help you format your book for the Kindle e-book format. It's a very handy little plug-in. Your target audience (8-12 year olds) will be smartphone and tablet oriented more than "real book" oriented so using the Kindle formatting template is smarter. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) lets you publish in e-book, paperback, or even hardcover now. If you sell your book exclusively through KDP they even let you do a five day free giveaway every 90 days for that title in e-book form and you could coordinate a giveaway with local or even national retailers to get it out there and circulating. I do a free giveaway of one of my books every Wednesday or Thursday running through Sunday/Monday.

If you putter around on YouTube, which apparently I do too much, you can find fish store tours from all over the world including multiple ones from Japan. It's pretty neat seeing what's popular elsewhere and the prices. Just Google "fish store tour videos" and you can spend a day or two catching up on fish stores around the world. There are a ton of videos out there.

Yeah, if you want a cheap, square container, the IBC totes are hard to beat. Cory used them in some of his earliest videos and earlier fish rooms. They're cheap, durable, hold a lot of water and are readily available.

For the sake of the hobby and the fish, something simple like a few drops of Fritzyme7 Turbostart added to the bag water for every fish sold would be beneficial. At least the new tank (or an older tank for that matter) would have some bacteria that way. A dose of Prime added wouldn't hurt anything either in case the new fish buyer didn't neutralize their chlorine or already had too much ammonia or nitrites/nitrate for the new fish. A larger retail establishment can buy those items in large quantities and the cost per bag could be minimal but improve the chances of the fish living and the buyer being happy. Selling healthy fish that have been quarantined would be nice also. Maybe adding a floating plant like frogbit or dwarf water lettuce to each bag would be smart also. It's absurdly prolific stuff and cheap for a retailer to grow themselves. "Would you like some frogbit or a dwarf water lettuce with your fish? It's free and can help your fish." In short, fishkeeping comes down to keeping healthy bacteria in decent water. Do you need to know the ins and outs of the entire nitrogen cycle in detail? Not really. Do you need to run a hundred tests a week to monitor things? Not really. Once people get into the hobby and want to learn more, the information is out there. But do most people need to know all of that? No. The right store doing things right, could make fishkeeping largely bulletproof for all but the most idiotic hobbyists. Add some bacterial starter to each bag of fish sold along with something like Prime to neutralize any ammonia, nitrites, or nitrates the tank already has, and most hobbyists would get off to an okay start.

Just a few times in the 20 inside. They flower fairly often outside. They've never flowered in the fifty for some reason.

Or just a hammer and metal putty knife will let you manipulate it quite easily. Put the edge of the putty knife into a seam you want to split and give it a few taps and the slate will split. Just tapping the hammer along a sharp edge you want to soften will typically chip it off and give you a more natural appearance. It's a very easy to manipulate stone unlike marble or granite. And you never know what you'll find when you split slate. It's a sedimentary stone so if a leaf, or critter was trapped in the layers, you might just find a fossil of it.

I currently have water hyacinths in my fifty and twenty gallon tanks. I had them in my pond last summer (2020) and brought them inside to overwinter them and then had enough in the spring (2021) to keep some in the tanks as they were doing well. The first photo below is of them in the 50 gallon tank and the second photo is of them in my 20. Water hyacinths grow differently in different conditions. Some get very leggy and stretched out while others grow more compactly. These are growing quite compactly.

The slate breaking like that is perfect for aquarists. You can even occasionally find a fossil in between the layers. I've bought slate pavers before and then split them down for thickness and broke them up to get irregular edges. Slate's a pretty soft and layered stone that lets you manipulate it in all kinds of fun ways.

I use an Odyssea Clean 100 Surface Skimmer to vacuum up excessive duckweed and it works fine. The mounting clamp is a bit weird, but the skimmer works fine for me. I just use a piece of quilt batting as the filter material. They can take a bit of tuning to get them working just right, but the Odyssea works for me. (I did enlarge the openings on the skimmer cup to make them wide enough for duckweed though.)

The cheapest possible fish storage containers that are square are the IBC Totes. There is likely someone near you that uses them on a regular basis and you can often buy used 275-330 gallon ones for under $100. You have to cut off the top, but they're the best bargain bin out there. They're what bulk liquid ingredients are shipped in. If you check your Facebook Marketplace you're apt to find someone locally selling them. If you have any industries in your area and you look around their yards, you might find a pile of them just sitting there. It's not unusual for businesses to just give them away. If you have any failed industrial sites you might find some old totes left behind that you could sneak in and make off with if you're the sneaky type. Once you get one, I'd cut the top off, fill it and leave it sitting outside for a bit for the sunlight and water to dilute, decontaminate, or eliminate anything hazardous left in it. Once algae is growing in it, it's probably safe to toss in a few expendable fish to see how they do and if they live, you've got a safe, sturdy, square fish container at a bargain price. Shipping liquids is a costly business and the cost of the IBC totes is often included in the purchase price of the liquid. It costs more to ship them back to be refilled than it does to just buy new ones, so businesses that use them tend to have them piling up somewhere on their property. Some places will just give them away, others want a token fee (typically $50-$100) to sell them. The more of them a place has piled up the lower their price is likely to be. If they can't find a buyer, they have to pay someone to haul them away. If you want a square container to hold fish at a low cost, an IBC tote is often your best bet.

Here's a very old video about the San Francisco Bay Brand of brine shrimp, how they're collected (or were back then) processed and shipped. If you grew up in the '60's/'70's like me, the quality of the video will be very familiar. Suffice to say it's not up to modern production standards.

If you're interested in fish collecting in the wild then the YouTube channel "Freshwater Exotics" is a good option for you. They mostly collect in Brazil while Cory collects in Peru. Freshwater Exotics even has a new trip starting on 10/04-10/16 if you're interested in seeing what happens firsthand. You can sign up and go along with them on a collecting expedition. Their videos are quite good. They visit local fishermen, fish markets, fish wholesalers and transhippers, etc. You see pretty much every part of the process from start to finish. General tropical fish books vary a lot. Gunther Sterba's "Freshwater Fishes of the World" has pretty much every native freshwater fish you'll ever find in it. If you're looking for fish-centric books, that's hard to beat. Herbert Axelrod was a prolific author on aquariums and aquarium fish. Most libraries will have a few (or more) of his books on hand.

Sad to say I mostly rely on my old books. Gunther Sterba's "Freshwater Fishes of the World" being one of many such books. I've got one of pretty much every book TFH published back in the '60's, '70's and '80's.

Those look like roots to me, so yeah, I'd say that was the bottom facing the camera.