gardenman

I agree. That's more a "slate look" tile than a real slate tile. A real slate tile is slate from top to bottom, front to back and side to side. What you've got looks to be more of a glazed porcelain or ceramic tile. If you go to Home Depot and search for slate tiles you can find some natural slate tiles that are around $3.49 per sq ft. Just make sure they're natural slate tiles and not "slate" looking tiles. Real slate tiles will be all slate from every side, angle and position.

They also have very large fry and far fewer at a time. Instead of an umbilical cord they have a trophotaenia that nourishes the fry internally from the mother. A very large fry count for a goodied is 10 to 15 compared to upwards of a hundred fry for some other livebearers. You really couldn't do a c-section on a goodied unless the fry were very, very advanced. On the more typical livebearers you can do it much earlier. Not many people keep the goodieds though. They aren't a very common fish among aquarists.

It's a good way to save on your investment. I was a teenager when Maryanne was doing it (I'm 62 now) so that was around fifty years ago when she was doing it. It's not something you hear of a lot, but it does get done. It's easier with bigger livebearers, but it's doable with any.

My understanding is that livebearing fish are different from mammals in that they just retain the eggs internally but there's no placenta or umbilical cord or anything the parent fish does to support the eggs other than holding them internally. The eggs develop and hatch just as they would if they'd been scattered. An old pet shop owner (Maryanne from Mantua Tropical Fish and Pet Island) would do c-sections (of a sort) on any pregnant livebearers that had died to remove the fry/eggs and raise them. With fish that lay their eggs externally and we can see them, we expect them to hatch over a period of a few days. The same thing happens with eggs carried internally. They hatch and then pop out when ready.

The aquaculture folks tend to say that optimal biofiltration takes place above 68 degrees Fahrenheit and below 90 degrees. Fish metabolism also slows down in cooler water. If you want optimal growth then you've got to feed goldfish a lot and feeding goldfish a lot produces lots of waste so you'd want optimal biofiltration. You'd also want the goldfish's metabolism to make optimal use of that food, so you'd want them warm enough to ensure that. I would think a temp of 76-78 would be pretty darn ideal. It's a good range for both biofiltration and their metabolism.

To recap, you bought six plecos, quarantined them together for three months with no issues. No aggression (torn fins, etc.) or obvious illness. You divided them up three into each of two tanks. Two died almost immediately after being put into one of the tanks but the third is doing fine. You then moved an established pleco (owned for nine months) into that same tank and it died within 24 hours. I've never seen an "I'm going to kill you!" level of aggression from my Super Reds. It's possible your survivor is that aggressive, but to kill another pleco is tough. The last Super Red I saw in a store had been in a tank with Oscars that had tried to eat it multiple times. It had badly torn fins but was alive and essentially well. A bit annoyed, but well. They'd tried to kill it but couldn't. The skeletal one is largely impossible to diagnose, but if the more intact dead ones didn't have torn fins and look like they'd been in a war, I would assume it wasn't aggression. It could just be a weird coincidence, but plecos are pretty tough little buggers. The bloated stomach makes me think something bacterial might be the cause. Maybe your healthy fish is a carrier and thus immune, but why didn't it affect the others in quarantine? It could also be a water quality issue of some sort that doesn't show up on the testing. It might be a good idea to throw a few sacrificial fish into the tank with the pleco to see what happens. A pair of platies, swordtails, or other cheaper, more expendable fish to see if they have any issues.

Live food, which is often viewed as a spawning trigger would have natural hormones in with it also. I suspect hormones in fishkeeping will eventually evolve into a hot topic.

Hormones are an interesting thing. Micks Fish UK on YouTube just toured a pleco breeder and that guy said something about keeping guppies in his breeder tanks as he found their hormones helped the plecos to spawn. His theory is something along the line of the plecos thinking "if other fish are spawning it must be safe for me to spawn." Now whether they're actually thinking that or their body is registering the hormones emitted by other fish that are spawning and acting accordingly is hard to know, but it's something to consider. Adding a pair of endlers, or other livebearer to your slow to spawn guppies might just get the hormones flowing. In the human world, young women in close contact may or may not (the science isn't clear yet) synchronize their menstrual cycles. If you work in a workspace with multiple young women you'll tend to find there are baby booms where everyone seems to get pregnant at or around the same time. Did they all consciously reach that decision independently or was there some hormonal shift that brought it about? (Or were they all snowed in with nothing else to do nine months earlier.) My Super Red plecos are in with my neon swordtails who breed nonstop. Does that motivate the plecos to spawn? I don't know, but it's an interesting idea. Keeping some prolific livebearers who are spewing out hormones with each spawn might just encourage reluctant breeders to be less reluctant. (You might have to limit water changes to let the hormones build to a decent level though.) Stress hormones like cortisol have been shown to have a negative impact on fish health, maybe some testosterone or estrogen in the water could motivate fish to spawn. It's an interesting idea to play around with. Toss a few mollies, swordtails, guppies, platys, etc. in with anything you're trying to spawn and see what happens. Fish sex and birth is likely pretty messy with some sperm oozing out during conception and other fluids emerging with births. Odds are all of those fluids are packed full of hormones of one type or another and your other fish are swimming in that sea of hormones. If the fish you're trying to spawn are too aggressive to keep livebearers with, then create a livebearer heavy tank and instead of giving the fish you're trying to breed fresh water in a water change, rotate in some of the supposedly hormone heavy water from the livebearer tank. A bit of Googling on the subject shows that fish farms inject hormones to induce spawning and a guy on YouTube that I haven't watched before (JH Aquatics) has a video dated 02/07/2020) of how he uses water from tanks with fry and adolescent fish to get his tetras to spawn. He assumes their hormone rich water does the trick. It's an interesting idea to play with.

I get nervous moving Val. It tends to melt on me if I do anything it doesn't like. I've lost a whole tank full of it before. These days I pretty much just let it do what it wants to do. My thirty high had a full back curtain of jungle val that was probably six inches deep front to back and just looked gorgeous. I kept having to trim it back in length as it would cover the whole top of the tank. A LFS had a really nice Madagascar Lace plant for $7 that I couldn't resist. I added it to the tank and in a week all of the jungle val was gone. Everything tested fine, but the val didn't like the new plant for some reason and just melted away. I've got some new jungle val back in the 30 high and it's not exactly where I want it, but it's growing and doing well, so I'm not moving it or bothering it. It took it almost three months before it started to grow and I'm not taking any chances with it.

You should be fine. Most commercial orchid mixes (at least the one's I've used) have been thoroughly dried and cooked in an oven to sterilize them before being bagged. That cooking process would drive off any VOCs or other issues you'd likely have issues with.

I wouldn't worry about age too much for a molly either. A pet store in Berlin, NJ many years ago (maybe 40 years now?) had a pair of retired breeder sailfin mollies that were among the most gorgeous fish I've ever seen. The female was around 8" long and the male was pretty close to that with a huge sailfin and both fish were just gorgeous. The male didn't know he was a retired breeder as he was flashing and displaying to the female like crazy. I talked with the store owner who said he saw them at his wholesaler and couldn't resist them. He'd bought them cheap but put a high price tag on them as he didn't want to sell them. (The price was something like $69.99 for the pair.) The story he'd been told was that the Florida breeder was getting out of the business and sent off his breeders along with his last batch of young fish to the wholesaler. The breeders were sent to the wholesaler for free and were a once in a lifetime type of fish to find for sale so he grabbed them. They'd been pond-raised their whole life. The store owner wanted to keep them for himself but his wife insisted they had to be put on sale, so he lied to her about how much he'd paid for them and put a really high price on them so no one would buy them and he could keep them. Even though they were huge and retired, the male was still more than actively trying to breed, so age shouldn't be a huge issue.

I like the Odyssea a lot. It's got a few quirks, the bracket isn't as adjustable as I'd like, and it'll occassionally spit out the cup when the flow rate slows. But for under $20 it does the job.

I use an Odyssea Clean 100 Surface Skimmer where I enlarged the openings on the skimmer basket to suck up duckweed. A piece of quilt batting serves as a filter material and it cleans up the excess in short order. I then spend time picking out the snails and returning them to the tank, but the surface skimmer does a nice job of sucking in duckweed.

From an aquarist's perspective, keeping CO2 in the water is harder than getting rid of it. It off gasses pretty readily. I would assume that just storing it for a few hours before using it would let most of the excess CO2 off gas and the water would be good to go. Some aeration would speed the process up even more. Storing water for later use with some plants in the holding container could speed things up even more. As water issues go, too much CO2 is one of the easier ones to deal with.

I use a modified Odyssea Clean 100 Surface Skimmer to inhale the duckweed when it gets too prevalent. I just enlarged a few of the openings on the skimmer cup and the duckweed flows in. It's the best way I've found to remove the excess duckweed.

A loach in the wild wouldn't really have a choice. Their water is what it is. A rainy season can drop a year's worth of rain in a few days/weeks and vastly alter the water chemistry in streams, and even large rivers. The fish survive such upheavals (generally anyway) and may use it as a trigger to spawn. A heavy monsoon rainfall in Delhi recently dropped 1,100 mms of rain (that's about 43 inches.) That much rain in a stream is going to alter the stream water chemistry rather dramatically. There are monsoon seasons and some fish are seasonal spawners, so there's a decent chance that a monsoon rainfall is the trigger some need to spawn. If you're trying to spawn loaches in a 40 breeder, and knowing that a guy who spawns clown loaches does so by dropping their pH from 7.5-6.2, I might have a few large containers (100 gallons?) filled with 6.2 pH water (or even slightly more acidic like the 5.6 pH of rain water) that's slightly cooler than the tank water and then rig up a pump to pump that water into the tank at a moderate rate while letting the older tank water overflow out of the tank. There would be a transition period as the water exchanged, but you'd end up with slightly cooler, more acidic water that could trigger the spawning if the water quality alone was the trigger. Spawning could also be daylength based, lunar cycle based, or be triggered by something else, but that would be a good starting point. It might just work. You never know.

He's likely replicating the rainy season with the pH shift. Loaches tend to live in mountain streams and mountains are made of rock and rock tends to give you harder, high pH water. Rain water tends to have a pH of around 5.6. If there's a rainy season then the sudden lowering of the pH (and hardness?) as the rain water dilutes the "normal" mountain stream water could very well be the trigger. There could also be a day length sequence involved. Likely a cooler water temp also. Fish have a trigger to spawn. Figuring out the trigger can be tough though. If you're brave enough to try replicating a rainy season and potentially risk losing the fish, then creating a rainy season in your tank using acidified distilled/RODI water at a slightly cooler temp might just trigger spawning.

On a somewhat related heating tanks note. In my fevered imagination of some day opening a large fish store, I think I would build essentially houses within the store (four walls and a flat roof, all insulated) with the tanks acting largely like windows in each "house". Each house-like structure would be heated/cooled internally to whatever the ideal temp was for the fish in those tanks. There would be a service area down the middle sealed by an insulated door at both ends. (you'd need an escape at each end to prevent someone getting trapped in should there be a fire or other issue.) All of the messy stuff would stay hidden. Tanks could be heated/cooled to whatever temp you set their "house" to without having to heat/cool the whole store. Running a gazillion tank heaters is a nightmare. Trying to figure out one temp for the whole store is challenging. Coolers on individual tanks are expensive. A system like that could let you keep warm loving fish in one "house," cool loving fish in another all while hiding the messy stuff. Discus and Rams like 86 degree water. Heating a whole store to 86 degrees gets pricey. Heating a self-contained discus "house" within the store to 86 degrees, is not so pricey. The startup costs would be more, but you have to build/buy racks anyway, so the cost wouldn't be horrible and it could greatly reduce your operating costs down the road while providing an ideal environment for the fish. Built right, the roof of the "houses" could hold surplus stock as sort of an in-store warehouse. Condensation on the front of the tanks could be an issue with the cool water tanks, but a few well placed fans might solve that. I might make each house 8' wide and 8' high (stock lumber size to minimize cutting.) That would give you room for 2' deep tanks on each side with a 3'+ aisle between them. The air supply, water change, filtration, etc could all be hidden away inside the "house." Insulate above and below the tanks and the ceiling. Maybe use something like the split units to heat and cool each individual "house." Slap some waferboard or something cheap but structural on top of the ceiling joists and then use that space up to the store ceiling for storage/warehousing. Such a system should keep humidity in the store down. It lets you keep the store itself at a consistent temp while each group of tanks is kept at their optimal temp. I've never seen that done, but it makes the most sense to me if you're opening a large fish store. Shoppers see just the tank fronts and the fish but not all of the messy stuff while you're keeping your fish at their ideal temperature.

In general, fish want to spawn. When they don't spawn it's typically because we're not giving them something they need. Figuring out what that something is, or multiple somethings are, is the challenge. Ample food is a given. A certain type of food could be the trigger. Atmospheric changes. Lunar cycles. Changes in water flow rates. Changes in water chemistry. Day lengths. Temperature changes. Maybe they need a school of a certain size. Maybe they have a symbiotic relationship with something that's required for them to spawn. Maybe another fish spawning triggers them to spawn so their fry have fish eggs/fry to gulp down. Maybe they need to migrate miles upstream or downstream. Maybe they need a specific substrate. It could be a combination of multiple factors. There's a reason they won't spawn, but figuring out what it is can drive you a bit crazy.

Cory did a video on clown loach breeding back on may 26, 2019 titled "SERIOUSLY-This guys breeds clown loaches" that may have helpful information for you. I'm one of the 128 thousand people who watched it.

There's an interesting article titled "pH crash" on the goldfish-emergency.com site that might apply to your issue. It talks about the relationship between KH, pH, and O2 levels. I'm not sure how valid it all is, but it's interesting.

Twice a day for me and pretty heavy feedings too. In the morning everyone gets flake food, green beans, and shrimp pellets. In the afternoon more flake food, tubifex worms, and more green beans. (I feed neon swordtails and super red bristlenose plecos mostly. There are a few cory cats, and an elusive oto also.) If I have frozen bloodworms or brine shrimp they'll get added to the afternoon feeding but I haven't had them for a while. I'm experimenting with frozen shrimp (the human kind, precooked, shelled, deveined) as a grazing food. I just bought a bag today and dropped one in my 50 gallon tank. I think the plecos will graze on it off and on through the day, but it's hard to say as the swordtails swarmed it and have been picking it apart. If a fish dies and I don't find it the plecos will devour it, so I think they'll do the same with the shrimp. Assuming they can push their way through the swordtails to get to it. I like keeping fish well fed.

I've never had high pH water but I would guess the natural processes would bring it down to the stable pH range. To get to a naturally buffered 7.0 or lower water, you're looking more at adding organics, like driftwood, peat, tannins, etc. You'll still want a highish KH tokeep things stable at the lower pH though.

I find my ramshorn snails like to eat the roots of my floaters. I have frogbit indoors in each fish tank and it stays small. I have some under a plant light in a tub and also outside in more tubs and it gets enormous with very long roots. When I move the outside ones inside, the roots disappear pretty quickly and the plants get smaller and smaller. I often find a ramshorn snail on the bottom of the frogbit so I'm assuming they're what eats the roots. (Though it could be my bristlenose plecos also.)

It's easy to forget sometimes how competitive plants are. If one plant is doing well and the rest aren't, it's likely due to that one plant sucking up everything and outcompeting the rest for whatever they need.