gardenman

I have an oto in my twenty high that I see once every three months or so. He's very good at keeping a low profile. About once every three months he just appears on the glass as if to say, "I'm still here. See ya." And then he's out of sight for another three months or so.

Finding a line of powder blues that breed true is the big issue with the powder blues. They tend not to do so. You're apt to get many, many fry that are anything but powder blue. In a recent video Cory showed off his powder blue fry and in the vat were quite a mishmash of various types. My neon swordtails are absurdly true to form. They never throw off a sport or deviation. At least not any that survive long enough to be noticed. My tanks are all on "survival of the fittest fry" mode these days so just a fraction of the fry survive, but those that do are all the same coloration. That photo I posted was just a small corner of the tank and in that little photo were sixteen (or so) swordtails, three super reds, at least four red ramshorn snails, and one of my young albino cory cats. That thirty high holds about sixty swordtails, twenty-plus super reds, six small albino cory cats, and God only knows how many ramshorn snails. Absurdly overcrowded, but the fish and plants are happy, the water quality stays good, and I haven't lost a fish in there in weeks. It works for me, so I just let it be. I certainly wouldn't recommend starting a tank with that bioload but this tank has been established for years now and has a generic larger sponge filter and a Cascade 1500 canister filter on it. It works, so I don't argue with it.

Mine are Neon Swords. Here's a photo of them in my thirty high taken minutes ago, along with a couple of the super reds lurking in the background. I bought six of the neon swords online through a no longer in business aquarium retailer and they arrived in August with a freezer pack that had the water in the shipping container at 50 degrees when they arrived. All of the adult fish in that order died (except for one really tough little oto.) Before dying, one of the female neon swords gave birth to eleven fry. Those fry are responsible for the more than a hundred neon swords now filling my tanks. My oldest of the neon swords is now about four years old, but the older ones are dying off a bit now. They're also jumpers. I've had one jump out of my fifty each of the last two nights. I've had the lid cracked as I'm using a modified surface skimmer (the Odyssea model) to skim out as much duckweed as possible and they've decided to hop out through the opening. They're a pretty neat fish though.

At that size the Acara should be pretty safe. My bigger swordtails are over four inches long (minus the sword, just the body) so they don't have a lot of trouble gulping down an occasional baby pleco. My baby plecos are maybe 1/2" long when free swimming and pretty slim. Baby plecos can move pretty quickly when prompted, but often just sit still, so they're not hard for fish to prey on. And they're pretty bright yellow when free swimming, so they're not especially camouflaged.

My super reds tend to lay about a hundred eggs per spawn. If I leave the young in the tank with my swordtails only one or two of the fry survive to adulthood. If I raise them externally nearly all survive. The swordtails really love young pleco fry.

Sexing swordtails is a lot of guesswork. Some males mature early and are easy to sex. Some mature very, very late and are much more of a challenge. I had a large female swordtail that I moved to one of my smaller tanks and she became a he. He/she was over a year old when he/she changed. We're talking about a nearly four inch long swordtail that flipped. There are reports of female swordtails that have successfully spawned and had fry that later became males, so yeah, sexing swordtails can be a wee bit of a challenge.

Perhaps showing your gourami the scene from "Finding Nemo" where Bruce (the shark) says, "Fish are friends, not food" would help. As a general rule I find most fish just bite anything that moves to see if it's food. They also bite things that don't move to see if they're food. If what they're biting is small enough to get seriously damaged by a bite, well it becomes food. If I put my arm in a tank a fish or two will swim over and give it a peck or two to see if it's food. If there's some debris floating in the water pretty much every fish will give it a bite to see if it's food. Put a new plant in the tank and the fish will peck away at it to see if it's food. Fish seem to touch things with their mouth on a very regular basis. If what they're touching with their mouth tastes good, they'll eat it. Your gourami has found out that tetras taste good, so he's eating them. If your gourami was a puppy you could use the bitter apple spray on things he/she was trying to eat that you'd prefer not be eaten. It's kind of hard to spray tetras with bitter apple spray though. There aren't a lot of great options for you. Fish eat fish on a very regular basis.

It depends. As a general rule, rainwater is soft and acidic. The USGS says the average pH of rainwater is 5.6. If you're keeping wild caught discus, tetras, some South/Central American cichlids, some cory cats, that's pretty darn good for them and about what they're used to. If you're keeping African Cichlids or many livebearers, it's not so good. The good news is no chlorine, chloramine, or fluoride will be in the rainwater.

The eggs look good. It won't be long before you have a lot of pleco fry. It's fun to raise them up.

The good news is you don't need CO2 for java moss. The ten gallon tank three feet from me has a jungle of java moss in it. My thirty high grows it well. My fifty and twenty high, not so much. All four tanks have the same water, same fish, similar lighting, same feeding schedule, but vastly different results. Why? God only knows. Plants do what plants want to do. If your java moss wants to grow, it'll grow and you won't be able to stop it. If it doesn't, it won't. Do your best (which it seems you're doing) but don't worry too much if the plant decides not to cooperate.

Frogbit is interesting in that in my fish tanks it stays small with dime-sized leaves. It spreads, reproduces, seems healthy and happy, but seldom grows larger. I saw Simply Betta on YouTube with frogbit and her plants were huge. I thought she must have a different kind of frogbit. Then I moved some of mine to a Sterilite container under the plant lights I use for my outdoor seedlings and they're now also huge. It's not a nutrient issue as the Sterilite container holding them never gets fertilized and there are no fish in there. I'm not sure if the lack of fertilizer or the different lighting is responsible for the difference in size, but it's interesting. Mine were small when I got them on eBay so I'd just assumed they were always that size until I saw Simply Bettas. When I move a bigger frogbit from the Sterilite container to a tank, it regresses back down in size. It doesn't stay big. The ones in the Sterilite container have silver dollar sized leaves. (The coin silver dollar, not the fish.) It's like it's two totally different plants. Pretty neat.

I've never bought a moss on mesh, but I have lots of experience with java moss and if it's happy it will quickly spread, mesh or no mesh. Once it starts to grow you can just prune off pieces and attach them where you want them. I'm a big fan of cheap cotton thread to secure plants in aquariums. A lot of people swear by Super Glue and it seems to work for them, but I just use some cheap cotton thread and in a few months it'll dissolve away to nothing. By then the plants will have attached themselves to whatever you were tying them to and stay in place.

I've been watching Freshwater Exotics on YouTube where they go collecting discus in the wild. It's pretty fascinating the fish they find with discus in their nets. Lots of pike cichlids, leporinus, and assorted whatnots including peacock bass, and assorted larger cichlids. Not the fish one typically sees housed with discus, but those are their river-mates in the wild. The nets they use may let the smaller fish, like tetras and the like swim through, but when you think of a discus community tank, pike cichlids, peacock bass, and leporinus aren't the fish you would think to add.

If you have a generic sponge filter with a built-in bubbler, what happens is the nub on the bottom of the plate will eventually get blocked and your flow of bubbles will lessen. I take mine apart and shorten that bottom nub and it fixes the issue. They build them with a very fine tolerance and that nub is almost touching the bottom. Just a little debris build up or the two sections sliding closer to one another is all it takes to slow or even block the flow of air. The photos below show you one of mine that's partially disassembled. Then the top plate on the bottom section is removed. Then it's flipped over to show the nub intact. Then you see the nub in its shortened form. Then you reassemble it and you're back at full bubble flow. Fast, easy, and effective.

In my experience with my neon swordtails (over a hundred of them at this moment) the later developing males tend to be bullies. They're very passive until they start to develop the swords, but once they do, they go into big bully mode and just abuse the smaller, earlier developing males. The earlier developing males tend to get along fine with each other in my tanks, but when one of the supposedly female larger, later developing males comes along, he wants to own the tank. Now my tanks are so crowded that the later developing males have a lot of targets to pick on and no one smaller male bears their brunt, but the bigger, later developing guys are kind of intense. I had three large females and a younger male in my ten gallon quarantine tank keeping the cycle going and one of the females developed into a male and just went nuts against the younger male in the tank. He chased the other male nonstop and had him constantly on the run and there aren't a lot of places to run in a ten gallon tank. The younger male got moved out and the big guy is now happy with his lady friends.

If it's any help, as the population grows, the likelihood of the survival of new fry diminishes. Every fish in a tank is a predator to some extent and more predators means less survival chances for the prey and anything small enough to fit in a mouth is prey for a fish. You may think you have the perfect number of fish in your tank, but your fish and nature may disagree. You can try shuffling the tank decorations and plants a bit to make it harder for fry to survive. A bare tank makes it nearly impossible for fry to survive. A bare tank isn't great to look at though. You have some cories now, but your tetras are laying more eggs than the cories can eat. Adding a few more cories, or even some snails could help gulp down more eggs before they hatch. Angelfish are notoriously good at spotting and hunting fry. Adding one to the tank might be an option for you also.

Most of mine came from eBay, but Etsy also sells variety packs of them. Once you get a plant that does well in your water, getting rid of it becomes the bigger issue. I put some dwarf water lettuce in one of my outdoor stock tanks and it's covered the tank. Frogbit does very well for me in one tank. Salvinia in another. And duckweed does pretty well everywhere. Here's a photo of the dwarf water lettuce (and some salvinia) in my 110 gallon stock tank. The tank is 53"X36" and the water lettuce has only been out there for about a month. Every inch of the stock tank is covered.

Florida is an interesting place to collect fish as you can find anything there. If you can find the location of an old fish farm that's now been abandoned, you're apt to find a wide variety of stuff lingering in nearby water. They've tightened up the fish farm rules quite a bit in later years, but way back, it was pretty much unregulated and lots of stuff moved from overflowing ponds to nearby rivers and lakes. Oscars get caught by fishermen on a regular basis in Florida, along with many other nonnative cichlids. Huge plecos lurk in many ponds and streams.

New Jersey has some pretty good representation here and we had a gazillion good local and not so local fish stores in my younger days, but the Petsmarts and Petcos have killed most of them. New people entering the hobby have much less choice these days. There was a good fish store in most small to medium sized towns and multiple ones in the bigger cities. You'd learn a lot from those running the stores. They were good people who truly cared about the fish and didn't just view them as stock they had to move.

I used a Dynaflo as the mechanical filter for my first Marine tank many years ago. I used a Nektonics UG filter for the biofilter. I liked the old top-down filtration of the old HOB's as you could layer filter material and then just peel off a layer as it became soiled. You didn't even have to shut down the filter to clean it. (At least until you got to the bottom layer.) Modern HOBs are either cartridge based, or like the Aquaclears, filter from the bottom up, so you can't just peel off the soiled filter layer. The siphon tubes were a bit of a pain, but they worked.

I was using one with a pair of LED daylight bulbs (6500K) but the bulbs had a very short lifespan in the fixture (2-3 months.) I don't know whether it was the horizontal orientation or possibly heat buildup in the largely enclosed fixture, but the LED bulbs did not last very long at all.

If the seller provides details on how they want the fish acclimated, I follow their rules. That way if there is an issue later, I can say I did everything as they suggested. I also document it each step of the way with video. If there is no required way to acclimate, I tend to temperature acclimate then plop and drop.

The Supreme Super King power filters were neat. They filtered 600 GPH and were very well made. I used one for over a decade. Someone has one for sale on eBay for $400. I think I paid $60 for mine, but that was probably 40-45 years ago.

I know nothing official, but since temperature acclimation is important, I half float the breather bags, but prop them up so they're just half in the water and half in the air. It's the best of both worlds option to me.

There used to be a pet shop in Vineland NJ called Chick and Barb's that sold very interesting feeder goldfish. You'd find culled fancy goldfish as feeder fish. Either they or their supplier bred goldfish and sold the culls for feeder fish. There would often be a shortage of regular feeder goldfish, but you could always get some there. On more than a few occasions a feeder fish would make it's way to my pond or a tank as it was too pretty to use as a feeder goldfish. You never know what you'll get as a "feeder" fish.