gardenman

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.

I have a suspicion that a lot of the gunk in a sponge filter that we wash out when we clean it is in fact, the good bacteria. I've watched stuff floating around in a tank with a sponge filter and I've yet to see anything get pulled into the sponge filter. If something happens to land on the filter it tends to stay there, but I've seen very small stuff (flake food for example) drift right down alongside of the sponge filter and never move towards it. Maybe it's the flow rate on my filters, but as mechanical filters, they're not especially effective. I don't know if anyone has done an analysis of what comes out when you clean a sponge filter, but my suspicion is that much of the gunk we wash away is bacterial growth. Which brings up the interesting question of "Should we clean our sponge filters?" Washing away the bacteria we need seems counterproductive. Is a filthy, dirty, sponge filter better than a freshly washed one? Do we hurt our tanks by washing our sponge filters? I don't know.

There's useful and there's useful. Bacteria in an established tank is largely omnipresent. Within seconds of the new filter hitting the tank some bacteria would be in it. Would it be enough to be meaningful in a new tank? No. I think two to three weeks of use in an established tank would make it much more efficient when moved, but even an hour is better than nothing. In just an hour it would have picked up some, maybe quite a lot of bacteria and be more useful than a sterile sponge filter right out of the box.

One of the first fish wholesaler scenes I ever saw was shot at that fishery. It was a local PBS program on businesses in Pennsylvania and they were focused on the goldfish farm in the episode I watched. (This was many, many years ago.) They had sorting tables where five gallon buckets of fish were dumped as people sat around the sorting table sliding them around to the appropriate new bucket for bagging and distribution. I was used to fish being handled gently and gingerly and these large expensive goldfish were not being handled in that manner. When they brought them in from the ponds, the fish were in no water. The buckets were just literally filled with fish. They were dumped out on this big table and then just slid around to be sorted into new buckets that were set on the floor and they plopped down into those new buckets (also empty of water but full of fish.) When a bucket of sorted fish was full it was hauled off to a bagging station where a bag would be filled with fresh water, the appropriate number of sorted fish pulled from the bucket and dumped into the bag. The bag would then be filled with oxygen and sealed and set aside. It was eye-opening to see how fish were handled on the wholesale level. I marveled at the time that any lived through that kind of handling. Goldfish are tough little critters though. I wouldn't necessarily recommend a hobbyist do what they do on the wholesale level though.

There was a pet shop in Pennsauken on route 38 (on the way to Cherry Hill) called Tisa's back in the day that had a massive show tank at the front of the store with calico fantails/orandas in it that I always loved. It was just an amazing tank. I always vowed that some day I'd have a tank like that. About ten years ago I had an empty big tank and decided to replicate it. I bought eight baby calico orandas that appeared to be in perfect health. I fed them Repashy Soilent Green, they had duckweed, not that they were overly fond of it, assorted flake foods, and frozen foods. They grew rapidly and then six of the eight developed swim bladder issues. It kind of broke my heart. A few were nearly always floating upside down while others were always lying on the bottom of the tank. Two of the eight were great however. That dream tank idea died. Lots of people have had similar experiences with fancy goldfish. They look great when small, but as they develop bad things happen. YouTuber Jennifer Lynx (Solid Gold Aquatics) has stopped keeping goldfish due to their health issues. Philly Goldies (who's a vet by the way) also had lots of health issues with her goldfish. A quick note about Tisa's pet shop. It was owned by John Tisa, who was the brother-in-law to Antoinette Tisa a New Jersey opera singer. It was a great little pet shop. I used to love shopping there. I bought many a fish there over the years. My copy of Sterba's Freshwater Fishes of the World came from there.

My personal experience with juvenile fancy goldfish is that the majority develop swim bladder issues as they mature, so buying already adult fish is a safer option. If they were to develop swim bladder issues they'd have likely already done so.

Just to follow up on my previous post. I think a reverse flow UG filter with the water coming from a canister filter and then the mechanically filtered water gently flowing up through the gravel bed makes the most sense for a DIY project. You need no uplift tube at all and can simply put the spray bar for the canister filter under the UG filter plate with just the return hose going down. A filter made and run in that manner would not disturb your betta at all. There would be less likelihood of the gravel clogging over time. Wastes should stay in suspension and be easily filtered out by the canister while the gravel bed did the heavy lifting of biofiltration. The spray bar would distribute water relatively evenly across the width of the UG bed. It would be a very nice, gentle, easy filtration system for a betta. You can get canister filters for tanks as small as 10 gallons for well under $100 also. Using a canister filter in this manner might cause more wear on the filter as it's pumping the return water out against the water pressure in the tank, but I doubt that it would be a huge problem.

I'm posting a cover photo of a booklet produced by the University of Delaware many, many years ago and photos of the pages from inside showing the construction of a DIY undergravel filter to help you out. To give you some idea of how old this booklet is, the price for a 20 gallon tank then was listed as $17.94. I believe it was published back in 1975, but there's no copyright.

I got an order from Aqua Huna with ten cherry shrimp in a breather bag and their instructions were to float the bag, so I did, but I propped the bag up so only half was underwater and half was still exposed to air. There was enough contact with the tank water to equalize the temps, but the bag was also still exposed to the air for gas exchange. It worked fine. When in doubt, try and prop up the bag so half is exposed to the air and half to the water. Technically, you shouldn't ship in breather bags as live fish are supposed to be double bagged and you can't double bag a breather bag, but people do what they do.

Regarding costs, watch for the dollar a gallon sales at the bigger pet shop chains. That's a great time to buy tanks. People selling used tanks often ask for far more than you can buy a new tank for. Sponge filters are cheap and very effective. Lights by Nicrew and the sort are quite good and very affordable. It doesn't have to cost a fortune to start a new tank. If you take advantage of a dollar a gallon sale ($29 for a 29 gallon tank) and use a sponge filter ($5-$10), air pump ($10-$15), Nicrew-type light ($20-$30), You're well under $100 for a 29 gallon tank. Something like pool sand or Safe-T-Sorb as a substrate will be very affordable.