gardenman

On my fifty gallon tank I have a sponge filter, a knockoff Ziss-type filter, and a Penn Plax Cascade 1500 canister filter. I like all three options for different reasons. The knockoff Ziss filter is easiest to clean. Just unscrew the base, pull out the sponge (while the filter is still running) give it a good rinse and then back in it goes and back on goes the base. No muss, no fuss and I'm done in a minute or two. Sponge filters take a bit more work to clean, but they're not horrible. The canister filter is a lot more work to clean, but it's not horrible, It takes me maybe twenty minutes to clean it completely. If I had to go with just one type of filter, it would probably be the Ziss knockoff. The K1 type media has an impressive amount of bacterial growth on it and it's arguably the easiest of the three to maintain. It's also the noisiest though and if that's an issue for you, you might want to go with another option.

Synodontis cats should do well in those conditions also. They live among African cichlids in the wild and those are high pH and high hardness water conditions. Cory cats are South American and they tend to be in softer, more acidic water.

Pretty much every marine reef aquarium has a sump and they almost all use wavemakers, so there shouldn't be a major issue. Now, having said that, if you have a drilled tank and the feed to the sump is fairly high up in the tank and the wavemaker will make big enough waves so the feed hole to the sump is occasionally out of the water, that could be an issue. The term wavemaker is used pretty generically these days, but a true "wavemaker" is a series of pumps (at least two) on either side of the aquarium that pulse on and off and create a back and forth current, much like waves along a coastline. They're wired together and typically have a controller of some sort. You can find true wavemakers that create six inch or larger waves which could affect flow to a sump if not properly accounted for. If you're just using one pump to increase circulation, it shouldn't be an issue.

He opened the store and has been showing some unboxings and whatnot. He's not as active (by a long shot) as he was, but running a store will do that to you. He's been having issues getting quality fish also. I believe he mentioned in one episode that most of the cory catfish he was getting were very small and dying. He's probably being kept too busy to shoot and edit too many videos right now.

In my limited experience with the 6500K daylight LED bulbs in an old incandescent hood, they worked great, but were much shorter-lived than expected. I was replacing them every three months or so. Whether it was the horizontal orientation, or the lack of ventilation, they didn't come close to getting the 50,000 hours one would typically expect from an LED. After a year or two I ended the experiment and just bought a cheap LED fixture instead. It ended up being cheaper than replacing the bulbs.

To me, there's ich and then there's ICH. If a single fish has a single white spot in a crowded tank, I'm not overly worried about it. I'll buy an apparently healthy fish from that tank and treat it. If every fish in the tank has ICH and a lot of it, then no. I'll walk away. Ich is treatable and often just a sign of stress. And fish go through a lot of stress in the retail sales process. A minor ich issue involving just a few fish wouldn't scare me off if the fish I was interested in appeared to be healthy. In a perfect world you'd want every fish sold to be perfectly fit, disease free, well nourished, and stress-free. In the real world, you'd be hard pressed to find one fish in even the best pet shop that was in that condition. I'm not a huge fan of the tank to tank filtering systems many shops use, but the reality is most shops and staff will cross contaminate tanks anyway, so you might as well have them all connected. It probably won't make that big of a difference. Many tank-to-tank systems use UV sterilizers where individual tanks don't, so you could argue that a tank-to-tank system is safer overall. (Assuming the UV bulb is working, the water flow is correct and the bulb is reasonably fresh.) Net dips aren't always used between tanks. Even when they are used, the dip solution gets diluted every time a wet net is dipped back into it. A fresh net dip solution might be 99% effective. By the end of the day after hundreds of fish have been caught, it might be mostly water and completely ineffective. With each use a wet net goes in, drops off water and dilutes the net dip solution while carrying some of the net dip solution back to the tanks. Even if the net dip is perfect, if the clerk gets their hand wet moving between tanks and doesn't disinfect it, they can spread whatever issue one tank has to any other tank they dip their hand into. I don't mind some dead fish or minor disease issues in pet shops. It's pretty much the norm. It's almost impossible to totally prevent issues from arising.

One of the big issues for many newbies is a desire to keep the tank immaculate. They think a cleaner tank is better and will scrub the filter and even boil sponges and the like to sterilize them so the fish live in a cleaner, more sterile tank. As a general rule for aquarium keepers, dirtier is better than cleaner. We've been conditioned to believe bacteria are bad when for aquariums they're essential and vital. The reality is our fish tanks should be more focused on keeping bacteria alive and well and the fish are just how we feed the bacteria. If we take good care of the bacteria, the fish will be fine. If you plop fish into a sterile environment, they'll be dead in short order. When dealing with newbies, there are two key points. One, chlorine in tap water is deadly. Two, dirtier is better than cleaner. It's very rare for a tank to be in trouble because it's too dirty, but very common for a tank to have issues with being too clean.

It's not a bad job on my Cascade canisters, I'd just never thought it would be necessary. The hoses have a valve on them that you shut and then unscrew the hoses from the canister. I then just carried them to my sink and plopped them down there and reopened the valve. I then started to push in the brush and within a few inches of the brush entering, black slimy gunk started to emerge from the other end of the hose. Yikes! The hoses were nearly completely blocked with gunk. Once I had them all brushed out I then held them up under the faucet to flush them and then reinstalled them on the filters. I knew the flow rate had been lower than normal and while the impellers looked fine, I'd just assumed they were worn or the motors were having issues of some sort. I was getting ready to order new impellers when I opted instead to try the long hose brush first. I'm glad I did. It turns out the impellers are fine and it was just gunk in the hoses that was causing the slowdown. Lesson learned. The gunk in the hoses was probably good gunk/bacteria as the water quality was great, but it was slowing things down too much.

If you keep a healthy, established, planted tank with at least some livebearers in it, you're doing a pretty good job of creating a "natural diet" environment for your fish. My tanks are teeming with life. I keep my breeder boxes hooked up on the tanks even when they're empty and the water in them just teems with life. A close look at the water in them (which slowly circulates to and from the tank) shows all kinds of small stuff moving, jerking, swimming, or crawling around in them. All that life came from the tank. You don't see it as much in the tank as the filters tend to filter it out and the fish tend to eat it, but it's there. The livebearers produce fry, most of which end up in another fish's belly. Egg-scatterers like tetras and the like provide extra nutrition by scattering their eggs that the other fish enjoy consuming. Algae is a natural food source. If you add a few shrimp to the tank the shrimplets become something of a delicacy for the bigger fish. My fish still get prepared food (flake/pellets/Repashy/freeze-dried) twice a day but truth be told, it might just make up half of what they eat in the course of a day. The rest of the stuff in their bellies is stuff they found in the tank. My fish are constantly on the prowl for food and pecking away at something. They don't just recline in a lounge chair and wait for me to open the top and drop in some food. They don't have to. There's always something to eat there in the tank with them.

Imagine what they'd look like after four years. That's where mine were. Both filters are just over four years old. I'd never bought the insanely long brushes as I'd just assumed the water coming and going wouldn't clog the hoses. They will get cleaned much more frequently from now on.

My canister filters had been slowing down for a while and I couldn't figure out why. There's a grate on the inlet so nothing big can enter and any water leaving will have gone through the filter so it should be clean. The impellers looked fine. The hoses are black so there should be no algae inside. I found it very unlikely that there could be an issue in the intake or exhaust hoses. I was wrong. After the last cleaning I decided to order a hose brush (under $7) and just see if there was anything in the hoses. Yikes! I got the hose brush today and the intake and exhaust hoses on both filters were horrible. Globs of stuff came out of each. (Bacteria perhaps?) Once the black, slimy stuff was flushed out and the filters restarted, they were back to their old flow rates. It's amazing the amount of gunk that was in the hoses and restricting the water flow. If you have a canister filter that's slowing down, clean out the hoses. You may just find that's the problem.

I've only ever had one issue with an eBay purchase and that was the fault of Fed-Ex, not eBay or the seller. Some snails I'd ordered earlier this year with two day express shipping, ended up taking nine days to get here and were dead upon arrival. I'd kept the seller informed the whole time and the money was refunded by the seller. There are people out there who will try to cheat though. It happens in retail a lot also. Someone will buy a new laptop computer, carefully remove it from the box. Put their old laptop back into the box and return it to the store and want their money back. If the clerks aren't careful and just look inside to be sure there's a laptop there, the store can be out hundreds or thousands of dollars. They'll do the same with HDTVs, and other devices. If caught they'll swear that was what was in the box when they bought it and that's why they're returning it. It's not an uncommon game among the less ethical people out there. It costs stores a lot though.

When it comes to corys, more males can be better. The females are tough and more males typically means more sperm floating around which should lead to more fertile eggs. I've had one female mating with three males at the same time with no trouble. No torn fins, no injuries, just a small kind of bubble of spawning catfish. It's typically advised to have two males for every female, so more males is better than not enough males.

With corys the size generally tells you which sex they are. Males are thinner and generally smaller. Females are bulkier. (Though don't call them that unless you want to get tail slapped. Perhaps calling them more Rubenesque would be less offensive to the female corys.) In my experience, it's not a subtle difference in mature fish. If you can't tell a difference, you've likely got corys that are all the same sex. It's typically not a subtle difference in size and bulk. A top down look may help you distinguish males from females better also. Once you know what to look for, it becomes pretty clear which are males and which are females.

My plecos fight over a way too small one-inch diameter piece of PVC. I use end caps on the PVC and my guys/gals prefer the smaller diameter over the larger diameter ones. Too large of a cave makes it too easy for the female pleco to escape. Part of the mating game is the male traps the female in the cave until she lays her eggs. If the female can easily swim out, the game ends. I've got the plant watering spikes in my tanks also, but they really prefer the smaller PVC. The YouTube channel Freshwater Exotics recently showed the holes in a riverbank during the dry season that plecos breed in. They were pretty much perfectly round and not very large. When the rainy season comes and the water level rises, the plecos move into the holes and breed.

I've currently got a Sterilite tub under my 6500 K daylight T-8 light fixture that I use for some seedlings and it does a great job of growing aquatic plants. I have an LED "grow light" that's more the purple color that was great for my outdoor seedlings that I tried a few aquatic plants under and they did nothing under that light. It was mostly floaters I placed in a shallow dish and they just wasted away. Was the light too intense? Maybe. Or maybe they just didn't like it. I don't know. I tried red root floaters, salvinia, and frogbit, and all of them died. They all thrive under the 6500 K T-8 bulbs though.

For some perspective, I'm a 62 year old, one-eyed, arthritic, hemophiliac with a replaced left knee, a nonunion fracture in my left femur that's held together with a plate and eight screws, hemophilic arthropathy in both ankles, osteoporosis, and more, so I have some experience with disabilities. I've been on and off crutches since I was two. I've been keeping fish forever. Accessibility in the aquarium hobby is pretty good overall. Smaller tanks can be used when dealing with water change issues. In a five gallon nano-tank, a one gallon jug is a 20% water change. If you can't even manage a one gallon jug, you can just use a drinking glass several times a day to change out the water. For people in wheelchairs, most of the commercial tank stands are impractical, but a custom stand can be made fairly easily that would allow a wheelchair to slide in under a tank. You'd want to use lower tanks like a 20 long or a 40 breeder and the tank would need to be lower than is typical, but it would be very doable. Old school metal tank stands used 1" angle iron for the stand and a custom made stand for a tank using such materials could be made to perfectly suit a wheelchair user. Things like a HOB or heater could be moved to the front or side of the tank for better accessibility to a wheelchair user. I think there's an over-reliance on water testing. If your fish are doing well, that's more important than some arbitrary number from a test kit. (Which may or may not be accurate.) Many/most fish stores will perform water tests for you and there are commercial water testing sites. (Expensive, but if you've got nothing else they can give you very accurate results.) Things like canister filters and sponge filters can go weeks between cleanings. In the past three years I've had a fifteen day hospital stay, two six day hospital stays, and a seven day hospital stay, and my fish have been fine when I've gotten back home to them despite nothing being done for that time. (The pond/bladder snails became food for the swordtails while I was gone but their population rebounded once food hit the tank and the swordtails had something else to eat.) It's a pretty good hobby if you've got a disability. Could some things be improved? Sure. But people with disabilities are pretty clever and adaptable and can make things work.

The Amazon has a rainy season and a dry season. There's not always fresh water flowing in. From the end of February through July is the rainy season. Then there's lots of fresh water flowing in. After that, not so much. Is there some? Yes. But not a substantial amount during the dry season. The water level rises quite a bit during the rainy season then recedes a lot during the dry season.

I've been thinking of making a three chamber HOB that would have a top down mechanical filter (layers of filter material that could be stacked then peeled off as they become soiled revealing fresh material under them.) A biofiltration chamber that would likely be fluidized K1 or a similar material and then a largely isolated chamber off to the side that would be filled top to bottom with gravel/sand. The only water flow to that would be smaller diameter holes in the bottom, and then a pothos, impatiens or some other water tolerant terrestrial plant planted in that chamber. The HOB would extend above the top of the tank by a good bit. Water would flow in from a pump in the tank into the mechanical filtration area. Since most of the bonded filter material readily available is 12" wide, I'd make that chamber twelve inches wide. That would make cutting the filter material to size much easier. Maybe make it three inches front to back and maybe sixteen to eighteen inches deep. I'd pretty much steal the design of the various sealed fluidized filters for the fluidized chamber and make it easy to toss an airstone into the bottom to fluidize the K1. Then the third chamber would largely just sit there and house the plant with no real water flow through it. I'm assuming as the plant consumed the nitrates new nitrates would move from the tank water to the plant water. The chamber itself would be largely anoxic and relatively harmless to the fish since it would be external. Any harmful gas built up wouldn't enter the tank. Combining an external anoxic chamber with a nitrate consuming plant would seemingly give you the best chance of seriously depleting nitrates. In theory, water would flow into the mechanical filtration area, downwards through the filter material across into the biofiltration fluidized chamber, then up and overflow out into the tank. (Which is why the filter would protrude above the tank. I'd count on gravity returning the water to the tank.) The deep (maybe 14") gravel/sand bed in the adjacent chamber would have essentially no flow through it. It would just sit there holding the pothos or whatever plant and suck up whatever nitrates found its way there. I kind of figure three inches square by about 14" deep for that chamber. To build it I'd use acrylic. Make a box first that was say three inches front to back and 18 inches side to side. (one 12" chamber and two 3" ones. (A bit less than 3" due to the thickness of the acrylic.) The box would be pretty deep, say 16"-18". Lots of room for filtration stuff. There would be a perforated grid in a half inch or so off the bottom all the way across. I might run a solid piece of airline tubing down to the bottom of the fluidized chamber with an air stone attached. Two vertical dividers creating the three chambers. Some sort of an upper grid on the fluidized chamber to keep the K1 from floating away. Then an outlet above the fluidized bed chamber for the water to flow back to the tank. It would require two pumps to work, an air pump and a water pump, but it should be a pretty efficient filter. In theory, it should solve lots of the issues people have with filters. It would be easy to clean the filter, simply peel off a soiled pad. Most of the bonded pads are about an inch or less thick. If the box is 16" deep with a half inch space on the bottom you could put as many as fourteen layers of pads in at a time and then not have to replace them until you've peeled away all fourteen. You don't even have to shut off the filter to clean it. Just roll up a dirty pad and there's a clean one under it. The then mechanically clean water goes into the biofiltration area where oxygen rich water keeps buffeting the K1 to keep it clean and functioning optimally. Then back to the tank. Meanwhile. Mr. Pothos is sitting there in a largely stagnant pool of water and sucking up nitrates while anoxic bacteria do their thing. It all makes sense to me. Would it work? Pretty much any filter works. It's just a question of how well would it work. If I get bored over the summer and have some acrylic lying around I might just build it to see. What's the worst that could happen? I kind of expect the pothos or whatever plant to send roots down through the substrate and into the void beneath the other two chambers. Not that that's necessarily bad. Water wouldn't flow through the anoxic chamber other than what transpired through the pothos. It might actually work.

Yeah, people try to pass off lesser plecos as "real" zebra plecos (the L046 variety) and uninformed buyers can get taken. I'd love to find real L046 zebra plecos at $20 each, but I'm never that lucky. They typically sell for $200-$300 when I see them and sometimes more. And those are typically young fish at that price.

That's a very good price even for wholesale. If you trust the seller, then great. But the L046 Zebra plecos are typically much, much more expensive, even at wholesale. I just don't want someone getting conned.

I'd be a little nervous about what I was getting at that price. The last time I saw zebra plecos they were selling for more like $200-$300 each. You're talking about spending $500 for fish that should sell for more like $5,000-$7,500. As a general rule when a deal is that good, it's not a real deal. You really want to be careful when someone offers you something at that reduced of a price. I'd recommend looking around at zebra pleco prices and then consider whether this seller is offering a you a real deal, or if you're being conned. My suspicion is they're trying to con you. I get nervous when a deal seems too good to be true.

I would say sooner than Saturday. Wednesday or Thursday seems more likely to me. Once you see that level of development they're pretty close to coming out. They won't do much at first but in a few days they'll start moving around more.

I would think of the stingrays as the cleanup crew. They're pretty good at sucking up any uneaten food and will scour the bottom of the tank looking for food pretty much nonstop. The sailfin or gibbiceps pleco would be a good algae eater/cleanup crew for such a tank also. They get big fast and will even continue to eat algae at a larger size. (At least the one I had did.) I might be a tick nervous about plecos and rays. Plecos tend to nibble on flat-bodied fish on occasion and there's not a more flat bodied fish than a ray. A giraffe catfish might be a good cleanup fish and could be less threatening to a ray. You probably already know this, but in case you don't, black arowanas end up looking an awful lot like a "normal" silver arowana as they mature. They start out looking totally different when young, but as they mature they look more and more like a "normal" silver arowana. Most people only see them as young fish and imagine them keeping that coloration, but they don't. They're very impressive as a baby fish, but when an adult they're very similar to a normal silver arowana. The bigger they get, the harder it is to tell the two apart.

Is one better than the other? Probably not. I'd go with two separate ones personally, simply because they'd be easier to manage. I could clean one at a time that way and disturb the biofiltration the least. Either way works though.