gardenman

Bulk Reef Supply is good, but they often focus on reef tanks which can be a bit more insane (and expensive) than a fish only tank. If you're going fish only, or fish only with live rock, it's not much different than a freshwater tank. A different substrate (typically crushed coral, coral sand, etc.) and marine salt, but the rest is pretty much the same as freshwater. I like Aquarium Domain on YouTube and he does both fresh and saltwater fish, but he's not so much a how-to kind of program other than building big tanks like his Predator Bay tank that he just finished building. A lot will depend on what you're thinking of keeping. A video search of that category (fish only, fish with live rock, reef, etc.) will likely pull up lots of interesting stuff for you. Mark's Aquatics on YouTube does a bit more how-to stuff (both freshwater and marine) on some of his older videos. If you're doing fish only or fish with live rock, you can pretty much just use "normal" freshwater gear. If you go with live corals in a reef setting then you've got to be pickier about water parameters, feeding, and lighting.

Freeze-dried tubifex worms are loved by my swordtails. Be careful with freeze-dried bloodworms. Lots of people get allergic reactions to them. (Myself included.)

It's a very happy and healthy plant right now. I say right now as val has an annoying habit of just melting away for no apparent reason, but for now, it's happy, growing a half inch a day and developing very nice red leaves. The red coloration was a pleasant surprise. I like it. I'm not sure why it's doing it, I'm not sure it'll keep doing it, but for now, it's neat.

There is a red variant called v. 'gigantea marmor' or v. 'gigantea rubra'. Since mine had just had green leaves until recently I'd assumed it was just a "normal" jungle val, but now it's looking more and more like one of the variants. I don't know if it waited until it was established to show the color, or if the leaves that have reached the surface are getting more light and feeding the parent plant more, but it's kind of neat. I like it. If you Google "Red jungle val" you can learn more.

I've had this jungle val for about six months now and for the first three months it largely just sat there and did nothing. About three months ago it started growing and it now grows about a half inch per day in my thirty high. The longest leaves have reached the top (24"), grown across the tank (another 24") and are starting back across to where they started from (maybe six to ten inches so far). It hadn't put out a runner until a couple of weeks ago but now the new leaves and the runner are putting out red leaves. I've included a photo of the base of the plant below, but the red doesn't come through well on camera. The red is much more vibrant in person. I'm pretty impressed with it. I'll have to see if the red fades as the leaves grow, but so far, it's pretty intense.

I would lean more towards a few days at 80 degrees. The typical time is 3-5 days and at 80 degrees, you're more in the three day window. Once hatched they'll typically just cluster together in a mass of fish until the yolk sacs are absorbed (3-4 days) then they'll spread out and leave the cave.

As to curing time, wait until there's no smell (silicone smells like vinegar) and then wait a day or so longer and you should be good.

Use French-style green beans for the little guys. The outer skin is a bit tough for them on the full or cut beans.

I throw out a big bowlful of a combination of frogbit, duckweed, dwarf water lettuce, and salvinia each Saturday. I've got some in each of my rain barrels, my outdoor pond, and covering each of my four indoor fishtanks. I could pretty much supply everyone in the state with the stuff. It's very, very prolific.

Floating plants are very effective at dimming light and absorb nitrates. Toss in some duckweed, water lettuce, etc. and your tank will get dimmer. You probably already know this, but fire eels can get huge. Three feet or more in length isn't terribly uncommon. As they grow and mature they tend to get friendlier and braver. If there are aggressive feeders in the tank with him that could be why he's currently a bit shy. Give him time.

I've done it both ways. My thirty high I just resealed a few years ago and I only redid the seams and so far, so good. I used a single edged razor blade to remove the silicone on the inside of the seams, but didn't totally dismantle that tank. My old fifty gallon tank I tore down completely and redit from scratch many years ago (maybe twenty now?) because the old silicone was failing everywhere. That tank is now about 45+ years old. If I was doing a 160 gallon tank and I had the help handy, I'd probably dismantle it and redo the whole tank. But it's not going to be an easy job. Glass is heavy and fragile. You'll need lots of tape to hold everything together while the silicone cures. It's not a one person job. It might be a three person job, two to handle the glass and one to apply the silicone and then the tape the joints. Just resealing the seams internally is a pretty easy one person job. If you opt to just reseal the seam you might want to allow a full half inch of overlap on the glass and use a thick bead in the corner. (Use painters tape to get sharp, clean edges.) Something like a tongue depresser cut with a flat edge instead of the rounded edge or a paint stirring stick and used to smooth out the silicone between the taped edges could give you a nice thick triangle of silicone that should be strong enough to hold everything together once properly cured. (Thicker silicone will take longer to cure though, so bear that in mind.) Whatever technique you use, remember to take your head out of the tank on a regular basis. The fumes pool in the tank and can be pretty unpleasant. Good luck!

Both are African cichlids and you're likely to get "typical" African cichlid aggression from them but if you're going to put them together in a community African cichlid tank then you can pretty easily quarantine them together, especially if you're planning on medicating them pre-emptively. It's easier to medicate one tank than two. You'll want lots of hiding places, sightline disrupters, and safe places for a shyer fish to hide out from an aggressor, but you should be able to quarantine them together. There may even be less aggression with them all together than in smaller groups. Dropping twelve fish into a 29 gallon all at once may stress your biofiltraiton a bit (depending on the size of the fish) so you'll want to keep an eye on your water parameters during the quarantine. Having a tank divider handy might be wise if one group gets overly aggressive to the other. You could then separate them but keep them in the same tank.

I haven't done it, but they seem to breed like most tetras with a few minor differences. Females tend to jump while laying their eggs, so you'll want to be sure they have jumping space. A close-fitting cover is a bad idea if you're breeding them. Something like a 30 high tank half-filled might be ideal. Feeding them induces spawning. Feed them well with high protein foods and they'll spawn. Females are a bit chunkier when viewed from the top down when they're ready to lay eggs. They're egg-scatterers so a planted tank is good, but they prefer subdued light, which is not so good for plants. They're prone to breeding at dusk or overnight also. Like most fish they'll eat the eggs if they can get to them after laying them, so removing the parents after spawning is a good idea. They'll lay 300+ eggs at a time per pair so you can find yourself with a whole lot of fry. The hatching time varies with temperature but a couple of days seems the norm. If you see the female jumping and being chased by the male/males, you'll know she's laying eggs. When the jumping stops the egg laying ends and the egg eating begins, so that's a good time to get the parents out. They seem like a fairly easy, typical tetra to breed. If you've had them for a while, odds are they've already been breeding and you've just never noticed. Tetras are kind of breeding machines if you're meeting them even halfway. They just lay very small eggs that are hard to see and the eggs and fry tend to get eaten.

Some koi hobbyists who want really big koi (and who have really, really good filtration), make self-feeders where there's a bar, ring, or ball the koi hit when they want food and it triggers a small motor that dispenses food for the koi. It takes the koi about an hour to figure out the system and then they're eating machines. They go through a lot, and I mean a lot, of food each day, but as long as your filtration can handle the bioload you get huge koi. Probably not practical to do for a short vacation where the goldfish would be fine with nothing, but there are crazy hobbyists out there who make all kinds of stuff to autofeed fish.

You'll like it there. It gets crazy busy on weekends, but it's a neat place. It's also huge.

If I'm traveling two hours, it's more to That Pet Place in Lancaster. It's an easier drive and they have a vast selection. There's also lots of other stuff to do in the area. That Pet Place now sells fish mail order at good prices, so it's probably cheaper given gas prices and tolls, to just order what I want and have it delivered.

The food boxes were actually a pretty neat way to transport fish as the fish were somewhat insulated and simply staring at blank white walls. Assuming they didn't get tilted too much or knocked over it was pretty good for the fish. I haven't seen it done for decades, but it was the "normal" way I bought many of my fish in my youth. Plastic bags took over before too long, but those boxes were the way to go for a while.

If I was intentionally raising maggots on good food, yeah. I'd feed them to my fish. I'd be nervous about them from the bottom of a trash can though. It's possible there was something there that they've come in contact with (weed killer for example) that doesn't kill the maggots but could be harmful to the fish.

When I get fish from an online vendor, I follow their acclimation instructions whether I agree with them or not and document everything. That way if there is an issue, I can show it wasn't my fault. If there are no specidfic instructions then it's plop and drop.

Yeah, the South Jersey, Delaware, Southeastern PA region was great for fish hobbyists in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and into the nineties. I was very lucky growing up here. There are still a few good places around. Just Fish over in Delaware is reportedly a nice local fish store, but they don't open until noon and I tend to be done shopping and on my way back home by noon, so I've never hit them. I may have to make a special trip sometime. That Pet Place in Lancaster, PA is fantastic, but about a two hour (or so) drive. Aquarium Center is the best "local" place now, though it's still about an hour away. We used to have a small store locally owned by a guy named Woody that was quite nice. There's a small petshop locally now but their fish tend to look horrible. I'll buy frozen food there, but that's about it. Their fish never look good and their staff is a bit clueless much of the time.

Hi back neighbor! Another Salem Countian here. The South Jersey region was great for tropical fish hobbyists for most of my life. Sadly, most of the good places are now nothing but memories. I wasn't sure if the Aquarium Center was still open or not until a few days ago. I would check out their website whenever I was heading that way to see what they had in stock and they hadn't updated the website since mid-April so I thought they might have closed. (They had been doing weekly updates on new arrivals until then.) Just a few days ago I stumbled upon them on Facebook and saw they were posting regularly there, so I was happy to see they were still open. I may have to make a trip up there in the coming weeks now that I know they're still open. (They should put a note on their website that they're now updating their stock list on Facebook instead of the website. I'm probably not the only person who thinks they might have closed.) There was a fish store over on Governor's Prince Boulevard in Delaware that was amazing back in the day. They were pricey, but had a gorgeous fishroom largely lit by nothing but the light from the tanks and every tank was like a show tank. They even had indoor ponds in the middle of the room. It was the prettiest fish store I'd ever seen. Most fish stores are kind of blah, but that was a fish showroom and very impressive. The tanks were all built-in and they had a huge display tank on the far wall with a big Arowana and assorted other large fish in it. It was like buying fish in a fancy public aquarium. Sadly, even that building is gone now.

I was born in 1958 and was keeping fish myself from the mid-sixties on. My grandfather had been a fishkeeper and gave me my first tank when I was around six or so. I've been keeping fish ever since then. My grandfather died when I was eleven and I inherited his fish tanks and stuff then. Our old WT Grant store had a rack of metalframe fish tanks in their pet department and that was my primary fish buying site in my early years. There was also an older couple in a nearby town (Evan's Tropical Fish) who operated a fish store out of their back room. They bred their own fish in their basement and were very helpful. They'd often throw in an extra fish or two for free. Most of the fish back then were cheap, so even with a minimal allowance I could afford most of what I wanted. I think neons were like ten for a dollar on occasion, so stocking a tank wasn't a huge issue. I hit pretty much every fish store in the Delaware Valley in my younger days and there was an endless variety of good stores. Mantua Tropical Fish and Pet Island was a favorite of mine. Maryann was the owner (along with her husband) and they carried everything including lots of live food. I bought tanks and supplies at Discount Aquarium off of route 202 in Delaware. Every now and then I'd make a run to Worldwide Aquarium in Upper Darby a wholesale/retail operation where you could save a fortune on stuff and buy it from the same people the local retailers were buying stuff from. I'd occasionally make a run to Martin's Aquarium in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Martins expanded to a second store in Cherry Hill in the 80's, but both stores closed a few years later. They were the best fish store around. Anytime I was around Cherry Hill I'd also hit up Tisa's pet shop on route 38. There were a couple of aquarium stores in Berlin NJ that I'd hit up when in the area. In Vineland there was Chick and Barbs. Every mall had a Doctor's Pet Shop with a good fish selection. Echelon Mall had a huge aquarium store in it for a while. They actually got a baby sea turtle in a shipment once while I was there and the owner was worried if he could legally keep a sea turtle or not. He had a marine fish supplier who ran a diving school in the South Pacific and when the diver didn't have students he'd collect marine fish for the store and ship them to him. The store paid something like $300 per box and never knew what they'd be getting. It was just whatever the guy could catch. The sea turtle had the store owner very concerned though. It was a great time and place to grow up as a fishkeeper. You had endless variety, good shop owners, competitive pricing, and lots of people willing to share their experiences with you. It's become something of a fish desert these days with very few stores other than the occasional Petsmart/Petco. There's still one old school type store in the Aquarium Center in Clementon, NJ, but most of the good local places are gone now.

It could have been a WT Grant thing as that's where I got most of my fish back then, but the fish and hamsters were put in those boxes for transport. They'd use a hole punch to make air holes for the hamsters and it was always a race to get one home before it chewed it's way out of the box. Their pet department used to have a stack of the boxes alongisde of the tanks for the fish and hamsters.

Back when I first starting buying fish 50+ years ago, fish were put into the white boxes with the metal handles that are used for Chinese food these days. (Photo below.) There was no way to float them to temperature acclimate. The fish were caught, plopped into the box with some tank water, the top of the box was folded closed, the price was written on the box and off you went holding the box by the handle to check out your new fish. When you got them home you'd just open the box and pour the fish and water into your tank. When plastic bags became more common for fish the first talk of the need to temperature acclimate them came along. Before that everything was plop and drop.

When linear piston air pumps are used for septic systems they're often outside in plastic boxes with screens to let fresh air in. I would assume a plastic box sitting outside in full sun with an operating pump inside would get well over 100 degrees on a regular basis.