gardenman

Regarding aphids specifically, I've had them on lily pads in my pond before and dipped the pads underwater and my goldfish ate the aphids without any issues. It's the world's easiest aphid control.

There are differences in wells. A deep well typically delivers pretty stable water quality while a shallower well can lead to some pretty wild fluctuations. If you've got a deep well, odds are your water from the well will remain pretty stable. If you've got a shallow well (mine was about twelve feet deep) you can expect some pretty big swings in water chemistry. If you've got a shallow well, frequent testing is advised. I might go slower on the water changes as long as the parameters allowed it as going from 8+ to 6.5 is a pretty big swing. A 25% change weekly might be a tad stressful for the fish. Smaller, more frequent changes might be safer. (5% every other day?)

If your water pressure is low a booster pump would certainly help. My old well had a 20/40 pressure switch. The pump would run whenever the water pressure got under 20 PSI and stop at 40 PSI. If you've got a well, there's a pressure switch in the system and a gauge to show the pressure. There should be markings on the switch showing its rating, but if not simply turn on a faucet and watch the gauge. If it falls to 20 PSI then rebounds to 40, you've got a 20/40 switch. If it goes down to 40 then up to 60, you've got a 40/60 switch. There are also 30/50 pressure switches. The 40/60 switches seem the most common, but even with those and many RO/DI systems wanting 60 or more PSI a booster pump could be a good investment. You'd only be getting 60 PSI for a very short period.

There's clogged and clogged. A truly clogged sponge filter will collapse in on itself and be noticeably smaller. If yours isn't doing that, it's not truly clogged and water is flowing through it. It may be dirty, but not clogged. As long as you've got water flowing through the filter, it's doing its job.

I've seen videos of discus being collected in the wild and the variety of fish they pull out with the discus is impressive and includes fish I'd never think to pair with discus. Pike cichlids seem to be caught a lot with discus. Besides the water temp and water quality issues, food might be another issue. Discus don't necessarily eat the same foods in the same sizes as some of the other fish you mention. Keeping everyone properly fed and happy could be an issue.

The floor moving when you walk on it is a bad omen. You have to remember that the weight of the tank is a long term issue. Over time, wood tends to deflect when subjected to a load placed upon it. In engineering you're talking about static and dynamic loads. In the building trades they're often referred to as dead or live loads. A filled aquarium is a static/dead load. The materials under a filled aquarium never get a chance to relax. You walking across the floor is a dynamic/live load. The floor is only stressed momentarily and can then rebound when you move away. Wood tends to rebound from temporary live loads. A static load on wood over the long term can erase that ability to rebound and cause permanent issues. (Bentwood rockers are made by subjecting wood to a static load over time and they don't unbend when the load is removed.) In general, putting a tank against an exterior wall is safer than putting one in the middle of a floor. Older homes (pre 1920's) tend to have been built stronger than much newer construction. (Though there are exceptions.) The more you can disperse the load, the better. Setting the stand on some thicker plywood or lumber can help. I wouldn't worry a lot about a 20 or 29 gallon tank but anything much larger could be an issue.

The fasting could be an issue. Fish tend to spawn when there's ready food available for the fry. Adding baby brine in decent quantities on a regular basis, no fasting, could motivate spawning. Why waste the energy to spawn if the fry will just starve? I'd forego the fasting and add baby brine to the equation and see what happens.

I think it was one of Cory's videos on Israeli fish farms where one of the breeders went into detail on how they select female guppies. In short, ask yourself what a perfect female guppy of the type you're breeding should look like, and then select for that quality. Do you want more color? A longer body? A stockier body? Longer fins? Figure out what your "perfect" female guppy should look like and select those females that come closest as your breeding stock.

Things can get fiddly. I grew up in an old house with an old shower that wasn't pressure balanced. You'd be taking a nice hot shower when someone somewhere else turned on hot water and you'd suddenly be taking a cold shower with no hot water. Not fun. With air pumps, any adjustment to one, affects everything else. It's not a problem if the air pump is way over-powered, but most people don't use way over-powered air pumps. Turning up the air on one, can have another one lose air completely. If you're watching and paying attention, you can go through and rebalance everything, but if you miss a tank now going airless, you can end up with a dead tank.

Neons can be a bit fragile. I don't see it being an ammonia issue. Realistically, five neons in ten gallons aren't putting out clouds of ammonia in a quantity that would likely cause an issue. The low-ish pH makes ammonia less toxic also. At 6.4 pH you'd need a fair amount of ammonia to be toxic. I doubt that it's a "normal" tank decoration sold for aquarium use that's causing the issue. The snails were alive and well, so had the water been horrible they'd have likely had an issue in the week they were there. You never know what's been going on in the retailer's tank. He/she could have been experiencing large daily losses also. Oxygen deprivation is typically why fish hang out at the surface. Either an issue with their gills or insufficient oxygen in the water. Ammonia burns can cause gill issues and it's possible that was damage done before you got them. A tank with any type of water movement in any quantity should stay oxygenated enough for neons. They're small fish with limited demand for oxygen. I don't see a smoking gun here and would assume it was one of those things that happen from time to time.

Guppies can be a bit fragile, but the bristlenose pleco dying is odd. They're typically pretty tough little fish. With water parameters it's always worth remembering that what we see when we test is a snapshot of how things are at that moment. It doesn't necessarily tell you how things were when all heck broke loose. This is especially true of small tanks with less water volume. A test now may not tell you what went horribly wrong eight hours ago when the fish were first in trouble. It's possible her biofiltration was barely keeping up with the bioload and then overfeeding or an unseen dead fish overwhelmed it. When the fishkeeper went to bed the tank could have been on the verge of collapse. The fish died, as the biofiltration fought to catch up. Once the fish died the ammonia output from them briefly paused (no respiration, urine output, etc. and decomposition hadn't started yet.) The biofiltration rebounds, catches up, and when the water is tested in the morning it looks great despite there having been an ammonia spike overnight and a tank of now dead fish. The water temp is fine now, but maybe the heater stuck on for an hour overnight and cooked the fish. It then became unstuck and by morning the tank was back at its normal temp. To begin with, I would put no blame on the crushed coral in regards to its effect on the water chemistry. It's possible the crushed coral became contaminated with something toxic to fish along the way. (Common weedkillers for example.) Something happened. That's for sure. The list of possibilities can be very long and nearly impossible to pinpoint after the fact. Everything looks good now though. Common illnesses seem less likely as a cause. I would think it was an environmental issue of some sort. Wild temp swing, contamination, or the like.

I live in Pennsville. I had docs in Philly and Cherry Hill so I was up that way fairly often. The 70s and 80s were great times locally. Martin's was great. Both their Jenkintown and Cherry Hill stores were impressive. Worldwide Aquarium in Upper Darby was great also. Tisa's in Cherry Hill (on route 38) was another favorite of mine. There were two aquarium stores in Berlin also. One was in an old gas station and the other was in a shopping center. The one in the old gas station had a pair of retired breeder Sailfin Mollies that were enormous (maybe ten-plus inches) and just gorgeous. The male didn't know he was retired and was flashing and displaying for the female. I've wanted some ever since then. There was a fish store in Echelon mall for a while. They had a good selection of marine fish. Their supplier ran a dive school somewhere in the tropics and whenever he didn't have a class, he'd go out and collect fish for the store. They paid him by the box and never knew what was coming. I was there one day when they opened a box and found a baby sea turtle had been sent. They were reaching out to the Philly zoo and other sources to try and find out if it was legal for them to keep it and sell it. And how on Earth to price it. As you moved farther south in Mantua was the Mantua Tropical Fish and Pet Island run by Maryann and her husband. A fantastic store. Maryann all but made you sign adoption papers to buy fish. If a female livebearer died she'd do a caesarian to try and save the fry. She'd then raise the fry to a sellable size. In Vineland you had Chick and Barbs. They bred fancy goldfish and sold their culls as feeder fish. You could get some pretty nice goldfish as feeder fish. There were lots of other shops also. It was just a fantastic era for the hobby. Delaware had multiple stores including one on Governor Prince Boulevard that displayed their fish in a dark showroom lit mostly by the lights of the tanks. They had a huge Arowana in a display tank there. It was a very impressive store. Expensive, but impressive. Less impressive but cheap was Discount Aquarium off of route 202 in Delaware. They weren't kidding about the "discount" part. Very low prices. There were lots of smaller Mom and Pop type stores often run out of a home also. In Salem there was Evans Tropical Fish where they sold their fish from an enclosed back porch and raised them in their basement. It was a great time to be a hobbyist.

Yeah, and it's dangerous for the employees. Here's a link to a news story on what happened to the Aquarium Center. https://6abc.com/mercury-clementon-aquarium-center/1341398/ It's uncommon for someone to use mercury, but crazy people will use other things to poison fish given the chance. I'm not sure Predatory Fins ever discovered what someone used to poison their huge display tank. It's not that hard to poison a closed system and there are enough lunatics in the world to make it a problem.

Not really. There's a local pet store that has tanks, but don't really take good care of them and don't have knowledgeable staff. The nearest true LFS is about thirty miles away. Go back thirty-forty years and there were probably twenty (or more) good fish stores within thirty miles. The local fish stores have become a dying breed. The 70s and 80s were the peak of the tropical fish hobby here in the South Jersey area. Every town had one or more stores and all were staffed by folks who knew their stuff. More often than not you'd be dealing with the store owner when you went to them. Some of the bigger stores would hire staff, but they trained them up and typically hired hobbyists who already knew their stuff. Everyone wanted you to succeed. It's a tough business to succeed in these days as crazies will poison tanks and kill your stock. (As happened to Predatory Fins in their massive display tank when they were in Florida. And also to Aquarium Center at their old Clementon, NJ location when someone poured mercury into their tanks.) You need the tanks accessible to catch the fish, but there are enough crazies around to put you out of business pretty quickly.

It's hard to have too much filtration, but it's easy to have too much flow depending on the fish you're keeping. The more filters you have the more homes you have for beneficial bacteria and unless you clean them all at once, the less likelihood there is you'll accidentally clean away much of your beneficial bacteria. If you have just one filter in an otherwise bare tank, the risk of killing much of your bacterial colony when you clean the filter is pretty high. If you have three smaller filters and only clean one a week, it's nearly impossible to kill off your bacterial colonies. Even if you destroy the colonies in the filter you're cleaning, the colonies in the other filters will still be alive and ready to keep the tank functioning. More small filters beats one larger filter in my book.

It can take a while. Some males are absurdly slow in developing. I put one male and two fully grown presumably female neon swordtails into my quarantine tank to keep it cycled and give me a backup colony. After about a month one of the fully grown females became a male. Any male you buy from a retailer is likely to be an early developer as they don't keep fish around for a year or so. And it can take a year or so for a slow developing male to emerge. Having bought just three fish, you put yourself in an iffy position. Five would increase your odds of getting at least one pair. The more young fish you buy the better your odds are of getting a pair. Buy a thousand and the odds of them all being the same sex is ridiculously small. With fish where there's a size difference between males and females you really need the right person netting your fish. Some good sellers want to give you the biggest fish they have available, but by doing so they may inadvertently give you all fish of one sex. A later buyer who comes along after all of the "big" ones were sold might get all of the opposite sex. If you're planning to breed fish and have the option to talk to the catcher, try to get a mix of sizes. Ideally, you'd want half bigger and half smaller. That improves your odds. And the more fish you buy, the better your odds get.

Some supplies I'd recommend are single edged razor blades, isopropyl alcohol, painters tape, fine sandpaper, extra silicone (you don't want to run out part way through) and some strong tape to help hold the corners together. Or corner clamps if you're into woodworking. The single-edged razor blades will make short work of the old silicone. The fine sandpaper can help remove any the razor blade misses. The painters tape lets you lay down perfectly straight lines of silicone. It's not a terrible job. The fumes can get annoying, so be sure you have good airflow and keep your head out of the tank as much as possible. The fumes seem heavier than air, so they build up in the tank. As to curing time, the general rule is it's cured when you can no longer smell the silicone. I tend to wait a day or two longer just to be sure.

I've done it both ways, but now break a tank all the way down and reseal it. That eliminates a seam between the old silicone and the new and leaves you with essentially a brand new tank. It's not a lot more work and makes for a better seal.

In addition to the bare bottom, some professional discus growers keep the fry sectioned off in a large tank. That makes them use less energy to find the food while still giving them a large volume of water. It's a little weird to see ten or more young discus sectioned off to one small part of a very large tank, but it works. More food gets eaten with less energy consumed resulting in faster growth while waste still gets diluted in a larger volume of water.

Just a quick warning. While most people insist the black silicone is stronger, I've found in my limited experience that it's not. I only had one tank with black silicone but it sprang two leaks in the first five years. My clear silicone tanks go far longer. Maybe I just got a bad tank, but I ended up tearing it down and redoing it with clear and no more problems.

I've always like the idea of a combined fish store/garden center/greenhouse. Waste water from the aquarium side waters the plants on the greenhouse side. The greenhouse can also custom grow aquatic plants for the fish store. It would hold down costs on both sides and with things like garden ponds/koi there's already a certain amount of overlap. Growing non-native organics for use in aquariums is probably not cost effective, but finding native organics that could be used in aquariums makes sense. Acorns, oak leaves, pine needles, maple leaves, and assorted native seeds/leaves are areas you don't see explored much. Some/many might be as effective as the exotic stuff we import and available in massive quantities right outside our doors. I'd like to see a pure fish store explore the more exotic tank designs. Things like a high flow river/stream tank. A tank designed for archerfish with lots of room for them to shoot down their prey. Monster tanks (fiberglass? plywood? sectional?) that could be bought and easily assembled by the buyer. Different things than the normal stuff. Maybe tanks with electronics built in to monitor the status. Go beyond the norm and stretch people's imaginations on what a "fish tank" could be. If you have a store in a part of the country where basements/cellars are the norm, demonstrate how a hole could be cut into the basement floor and excavated to create a monster fish pond in one's basement. Limited structure needed as the earth would support the sides (assuming the house isn't built on sand.) There are lots of things that could be done to break the mold of a "normal" fish store.

Harvesting the worms without harvesting the mud is a challenge. If the water chemistry is similar, moving a few fish you want to fatten up to the worm tank could solve the harvesting issue for you. Take the fish to the worms instead of taking the worms to the fish. As to risk, eh, there's always some risk in anything that's not absolutely sterile. Is it a manageable risk? That's up to you to decide. You could plop a fish in the tank with the worms for a bit and see what happens. If it just gets fat and happy, odds are the risk is minimal. If it develops parasites or other health issues, then the risk might be too high.

I'm 64 and yeah, we've been there and done that. I tend to think of the 1970's as the golden age of the tropical fish hobby. There were fish stores in most small towns owned by fish keepers who knew what they were doing. Many raised the fish they were selling. They had lots of knowledge and were happy to pass it on. The marine hobby was starting to boom with Nektonics being the big name on the marine side. It was a great time to be a hobbyist. There were more than twenty good fish stores within an hour or so of me and I visited all of them. New items were hitting the market constantly. It was a very good era for the hobby. Multiple magazines were published with Tropical Fish Hobbyist being the biggie. It was arguably the golden age of the tropical fish hobby. There are good things now. Online ordering is great. The selection of fish you can order and have delivered is impressive. Modern lighting is better. There are reputable sources online for information. But given a choice, I'd go back to the older days without hesitation.

I'm jumping in here late, but the kid with the guppies he/she brought in from home that did well likely also moved some beneficial bacteria on/in the fish and in the water he/she transported them in. Those extra bacteria may have been enough to help things along. Bacteria being fed chemical ammonia might not be as efficient as bacteria used to eating the more organic ammonia produced by live stock when confronted with organic ammonia. Ammonia is ammonia, but maybe not to the bacteria. Their guts full of food that you thought would trigger a spike, might have been also loaded with beneficial bacteria that the food deprived mail order fish were lacking.

If you're a pretty competent woodworker then a plywood tank might be a very good option for you. There are countless "how to" videos on plywood tanks on YouTube. Aquarium Domain is currently doing a series of videos on his current 300+ gallon build and has made several tanks of over a thousand gallons using mostly wood as the building material. It's pretty easy stuff and much less expensive than acrylic or glass aquariums.