gardenman

I started out with just seven and they've multiplied many, many times since then. They're pretty neat fish though.

Mine love the shrimp pellets and also freeze-dried tubifex worms (they get six cubes a day and at four or so in the afternoon they start lining up where I place them waiting for them), they get a good handful of French-style green beans each morning also. I think overfeeding them helps the spawning process.

You might want to take a very close look at the two "female" swordtails who are harassing the female. They could be hidden males trying to spawn with her. Check for a gonopodium on them. When I have an aggressive female swordtail, it typically turns out to be a male who hasn't shown a tail yet. And I've got a lot of swordtails as the photo below will show. And that's just one of four tanks of them.

Depending on where you live, you might want to wait for the temps to moderate a bit before ordering. Midsummer and midwinter can be tough times to ship anything living. Also check out where your source is and their weather. I tend to order most of my live stuff (plants, fish, cultures, etc.) in the spring or fall when temps are more moderate and less likely to freeze or roast what I'm ordering.

I always kept live brine shrimp in the fridge and they'd last about a week or so for me. The same with live bloodworms. Now that was about thirty years or so ago when I had sources for them. These days they're just not available locally. The live bloodworms I'd take out and rinse with fresh water every few days. I had marine tanks then also so changing the water every few days for the brine shrimp was also easy.

There have been a few attempts at chain aquarium stores here in the Delaware Valley, but all have failed. Predatory Fins (currently in Florida but moving north soon) is trying to start up a chain operation now and we'll have to see how it goes for them. I'm not wildly optimistic about their chances of success. Most of the attempts here to start chains were in the seventies and eighties. Martin's Aquarium then in Jenkintown, PA opened a chain store in Cherry Hill, NJ but ended up losing both stores. There was a larger chain (eight to ten stores I believe) of small aquarium stores whose name escapes me. They had a store in the Airport Circle that was run by a young Hippie-type couple who later opened an independent store in Washington Township after that chain went under. Chain stores work in principle by giving the stores more buying power. If you're ordering for ten stores you can buy more and pay less for each item which then lets you undercut your competition. But for that to work you need everything sent to one central location and then redistributed from there. The warehousing and transportation costs then have to be passed on and that's where you run into trouble. If you could create a large breeding facility and raise your own stock, and use that facility as a hub, you could probably run satellite stores off of that main store supplying adjacent areas, but you'd want each satellite store maybe thirty miles or so apart so they weren't cannibalizing one another. That big facility would have to be in a cost-contained location also. It's not something you could just pick up and move easily if costs increased. A series of those breeding hubs and satellite stores spread across the country could work, but the startup costs are insane. To build a national or international chain, transportation costs start to spiral out of control. Loading up a van and driving thirty miles isn't terribly expensive. Moving something from Seattle to Florida is a whole different story. And you're competing against online retailers now. It's a nice idea, but I'm just not sure how practical a chain concept is for aquarium stores these days unless you're breeding and raising the fish yourself.

If your tap water has ammonia, or nitrites out of the tap, by storing it with some crushed coral in a container the good bacteria can set up housekeeping in the container and make the water safer for your fish. It's kind of a win-win. My well water has an absurdly high ammonia content from the tap, but a few days in the bottle and the ammonia is gone.

Fish collecting isn't always all sunshine and rainbows. If you've ever tried to catch an oto in a tank you can imagine how hard it is to catch them in the wild. The use of poisons and anesthetics is pretty commonplace (also with marine fish where cyanide is often used to catch reef fish.) The poisons/anesthetics will disable the fish and they float to the surface for easy capture, then into freshwater to try and revive them. Some people use electric shock to stun fish to make them easy to capture. It's called electrofishing. For small, fast-moving, bottom hugging fish like otos, conventional seine nets are pretty much useless to catch them in the wild. When you look at the price of an oto (typically under $5 here) and realize that they were wild caught, flown halfway around the world, went through an importer, wholesaler, local distributor and finally the pet shop and still retailed for under $5, they had to be caught in large numbers and fairly easily. The only real way to do that is by using poisons and anesthetics to bring a lot to the surface for easy collection at one time.

I like crushed coral. It slowly dissolves and adds minerals to the water. It bumps up the pH also. It's a handy tool to help stabilize an aquarium. If you're worried about water changes, store some water in containers (I use old kitty litter bottles that each hold 2-3 gallons) with some crushed coral in the bottom. You can reuse the coral by not pouring it into the tank.

Angelfish are often absurdly productive, so the first question should be, "Do you want the fry?" They aren't always highly sought after by pet shops and they tend to require significant culling due to genetic defects. I've heard of a few pet shops that charge the breeder to take their angelfish fry, so you don't always make money off of them. It's not hard to flood the local market with angelfish fry. If there are multiple people breeding angelfish in your area, the supply likely exceeds the demand.

Guppies are going to give you large spawns, but most get eaten by, you guessed it, guppies. Momma guppy will even snack on her own kids given the chance. You want the adult guppies separated from the babies if you want to raise a lot of fry. There are lots of ways to achieve that. Fish Boy on YouTube uses an external breeder box for his pregnant females to maximize yield. Some people move the pregnant females to a nearby tank and put them in a colander or similar device where the babies will fall through and the mother can't eat them. A lot of plants will help and keeping the adults well fed will help, but separation is your safest bet to maximize the number of fry.

There's a company called Smooth-On that has a YouTube channel showing how to use their various molding products to make many things, among them being aquarium safe artificial coral. They claim their products are "fish safe" and you could use their products to make pretty much anything you wanted for an aquarium. If you're not overly fixated on appearance, plastic pipe is often used and can come in all kinds of sizes. You can even buy 48" diameter PVC culvert pipe if you've got an exceptionally large fish. Most keepers of really big fish end up using PVC pipe as it's safe, relatively cheap, reusable, cleanable, and readily available. You can get 8", 10", and 12" PVC pipe fairly easily.

It's not as bad as it sounds. The DOA gourami wasn't your fault. The fish that jumped out wasn't due to water quality, some fish just jump a lot. Most of the time Cory cats bought online are small and small cories are pretty fragile. German Blue Rams like pretty warm water and if they got chilled along the way, that could explain its loss. I wouldn't stress out too much. You've had the fish for two weeks so things seem to be going about as I'd expect them to. Work on sealing the top more to prevent more jumpers. Forget losing the gourami as that had nothing to do with you. And the cory and GBR likely just got overly stressed on the way to you. I think you're doing fine and can take a deep breath and relax. If things were going disastrously bad (an ammonia spike for example) it would be affecting a lot more fish and after two weeks, you'd clearly know it was a problem.

If you just want to seal the bottom of the tank so water can't get under it and linger there, a rope of plumber's putty around the bottom of the tank would do the job. Plumber's putty is used to seal faucets to prevent water sneaking under them and stays soft and flexible seemingly forever. I don't think it would hurt a furniture's finish at all. It would provide you a watertight seal so any water spilled would stay on the surface and not get under the tank. If you wanted to move the tank later, you'd just scrape off the plumber's putty. Anything absorbent you put under the tank will help to suck water under the tank.

In my experience, anything that attaches to a fish tank with suction cups has a limited lifespan. Suction cups tend to break down and fail over time. Gravity holds the ones that sit on the bottom in place and gravity never fails. The drop-in sponge filters are pretty much fool proof. There are very limited parts to them so there's less that can go wrong. The cheap ones sold on places like Amazon tend to use a finer foam and have a very closely toleranced bottom fitting piece that clogs easily, but a few quick snips with a nail cutter fixes that clogging issue. Use whatever works for you and you like best is my best advice. Matten filters are kind of the gold standard of sponge filters, but the drop in and suction cup ones work also. External sponges in a HOB or canister also work.

My males hang out partway out of the cave showing off their fanning technique to try and interest a passing female. Any female not interested just swims on by. If the male finds a willing partner the female will hang around his cave and eventually go in to inspect things. The male will then more or less pin her in there until she lays the eggs, then out she goes and he takes over fanning the eggs and guarding the cave. With just one female you don't have to worry about rival females sneaking in and pushing out the first female's eggs and replacing them with her own. That's fairly common in my tanks. Three or four times a second female will have swept in and pushed out the first batch of eggs and replaced them with hers.

My best guess would be the Asian Stone Catfish had spawned.

Even rogue fish can turn up in an outside pond. Fish eggs are sticky and birds getting a drink in a stream can find fish eggs glued to their feet that then fall off when they visit your pond for a drink. Many pond keepers have a "What the heck?" moment when they find a fish that shouldn't be there in their pond.

Bacteria are hard to kill, but temperature and other factors can affect their activity level. The evolutionary process is at work in your aquarium and your bacteria evolve over time to thrive in your environment. If you change too much, too soon, you can get in trouble.

Add my voice to the give it time group. Tanks tend to cloud up and clear up on their own given enough time.

I suspect a lot is airborne. I live many miles from saltwater, but when I started a marine tank, I had marine algae growing in it within days. Where did it come from? I didn't put it there and yet, there it was.

Can't help you with the discus genetics, but the "blue arowana" posted on the store's tank got me intrigued. I'd never heard of a blue arowana before. Silver, yes. Black, yes. I've kept both. Blue? A bit of Googling shows there is such a fish and you should keep them in groups of six to ten or more in a 600 gallon tank. At $500 each? Yikes! I'm beginning to understand why I'd never heard of them before.

You can email it to yourself. If you click on the three dot thing at the top right you'll get a "Share" option. Among the share options are email. You can then email the thread to yourself so you have it available when needed.

Just a note on bettas, most retailers just have them in jars on shelves with no heater, so they can survive in cooler conditions.

My ramshorn snails are the best algae eaters I've had, and they could take the cooler water. They do tend to reproduce rather freely however.