gardenman

It could be a slime mold. Slime molds feed on the biofilm on glass. Getting rid of it is easy. It just goes away by itself. It can take a couple of weeks, but it'll just disappear and be gone.

Male swordtails can be very, very slow in developing. I've had two year old 'females' suddenly develop a sword and gonopodium. Most livebearers ship to stores while quite young and the visual difference between platies and young swordtails are largely nonexistent if no sword is visible. Odds are your store got a shipment with platies and swordtails and seeing no swords assumed the swordtails were platies. Odds are someone who bought "swordtails" from that store is wondering why their fish look more like platies and never grow swords. It's very easy to confuse the two if all you've got is an invoice and the bags weren't labeled. "Are these the platies or the swordtails?" It can be a guessing game. They guessed wrong.

I would consider putting shrimp and puffers together a very high risk/low reward venture.

A lot would depend on the personality of the individual bettas. Some are pretty chill and could get along pretty well while others are hyper aggressive. Adding a bunch of female bettas might help quell aggression a bit also and could help keep the boys distracted. (Or it could lead to more fighting.)

I've used a Fluval Breeder Box to drip acclimate fish and shrimp before. I just drain it out first, pour in the fish bag and water then set it to a slow drip. Tank water slowly gets added and the fish/shrimp get a slow, gradually changeover. I tend to siphon out half of the water in the breeder box when it gets close to flowing into the tank so the bagged water doesn't contaminate the tank. Once I'm comfortable the fish/shrimp are acclimated I scoop them out and then dump the water in the breeder box down the drain.

I've offered to catch the fish I want myself on multiple occasions when it's been clear the person trying to catch the fish was overmatched, but no one's ever let me. I don't know what they think I'll do, but they always are horrified at the prospect of someone else dipping a net in their tanks. One fish catcher once dropped a fish I wanted onto the floor then eventually scooped it back into the net and dumped it in the container and was shocked and annoyed when I said I didn't want it after they'd dropped it on the floor. There are some really bad fish catchers out there.

Val is a quirky plant. It pretty much does what it wants to do and in many cases that's melt away to nothing.

Regarding green beans as food for baby plecos, mine have a hard time with the green bean skin on whole green beans. They'll readily gulp down the interiors of the French-style ones however. So, if you have the option, buy the French-style green beans for the baby plecos. The snails will come along and consume the skins later or you can scoop them out. One more thing, if your shrimp are Amano shrimp, they could prey upon the baby plecos. Other shrimp are pretty safe, but Amano shrimp have been known to hunt and kill fry.

I have a ten gallon tank that I use as a quarantine tank for fish I don't trust. Now I just got a fish order in last Friday and I opted not to quarantine them, but to isolate them instead. I got six panda cories, six albino cories, and ten cherry shrimp. Each went into a breeder box attached to the tank they'll ultimately end up in. This was done for several purposes. One, it somewhat isolates the new fish while still having them in the water they'll ultimately end up in. This limits the stress on them when they do get added to the bigger tank. They had no signs of external parasites upon arrival. All were smaller than ideal so I can fatten them up and get some growth on them while in the breeder boxes. I can observe them far more easily in the breeder box than even in the quarantine tank since all of my tanks are heavily planted. There's no risk of a fish picking on the new arrivals when they're in the breeder boxes. They don't have to compete for food with the massive hoard of fish in the big tank. They get their own food. One panda cory died for unknown reasons, but everyone else is doing great. One death after five days for 22 new arrivals isn't bad in my experience. If the panda cory had died in the bigger tank his death may have gone unnoticed. The other fish could have eaten him or he could have been hidden in the plants. By having him in the breeder box, I was able to easily find his dead body and remove it. What I do tends to vary with the fish I'm getting, where I'm getting them from, and how the fish look when they arrive. If the fish are small, appear to be healthy, come from a trusted source, and I have an empty breeder box, into the box they'll go. If I'm a bit iffier on any of those things they're more apt to end up in quarantine. for observation and possible treatment.

I have a water garden full of goldfish and also full of duckweed. The goldfish are almost never fed by me, but they pretty much ignore the duckweed. (Either that or it grow so fast it looks like they ignore it.) The goldfish seem happy though and reproduce in the water garden so they're doing fine.

Trickle filtration is excellent for biofiltration. High-end koi fanciers often use Bakki Showers for biofiltration. The drawbacks to trickle filtration in the home are noise and humidity. They tend to be noisier than many other types of filtration and they tend to have more evaporation which leads to higher humidity in the house. A well designed trickle filter though works very, very well. Aerobic bacteria thrive in trickle towers.

Yeah, gentle is better. You just want water movement over and around the eggs.

I've been intrigued by the idea of making a tank lifting crane. Something like the cranes they use to lift and move boats. (A photo of a boat crane below. Think the same idea, just on a much smaller scale.) If you had a tank maintenance company or did a lot of retail tank sales/deliveries, it could be a smart tool to build. You might be able to make one out of PVC pipe, but the extruded aluminum might be more effective. Steel would be cheapest and strongest, but also heaviest on its own. Old steel bedframes made of angle iron could be a good starting point. A few nylon straps that would slide under the tank then crank them up to lift the tank, wheel it to the new location and then ease it back down onto the stand. (If you were bold you could even try moving tank and stand together.) It could be built to be adjustable for height, width, and length. It could be a handy gadget for the right person/store. Creating one that would walk up steps would be an issue, but for flatter areas it could be a very effective and cheap way to move heavy tanks. Just a one or two person team could even move a tank and stand like Cory's 800 gallon one with the right type of crane like that and have essentially no risk of damaging either the tank, stand or workers. You could even rent the crane out to hobbyists who need to move a big tank. Now if you need to move a big tank you need five, six, or more big strong guys/gals to help you out. With something like this, you could pretty much do it yourself. Drain the tank down. Lever up one end enough to slip the nylon strap under it. Repeat on the other side. (Maybe the middle also if it's a long tank.) roll the tank crane into position. Lift up on the straps. Wheel the tank/stand to where you want it. Lower the tank. Lever the tank up to remove the straps. Wheel away the crane. All done and no one dies. When you need to move a boat you could find twenty or thirty beefy guys/gals to pick it up and move it, but the boat crane is much easier. The same could be true of fish tanks. I think it's a doable project. If you're building custom stands also, you could even build lifting points into the stand.

Dan's fish room has a YouTube video out on raising corys. The white eggs are typically infertile but in his video he'd separated them out and to his surprise, at least one hatched. So, don't give up on them. He moved his eggs to a separate container and added five drops of hydrogen peroxide to the water and did frequent water changes. Some people use methylene blue to help the eggs. Cory eggs are pretty tough and at least some should survive anything you do to them. I always like to add air to keep the water circulating, but others don't.

Jungle Val can be a bit quirky. I have one that's doing great right now, but it did nothing at all for months. I'd just give it time and hope for the best.

I sent an order off to Aqua Huna on Tuesday (using the link on the Coop page so they get some payback) and the fish arrived today. Not bad. I ordered six albino cory catfish, six panda cory catfish, and ten cherry shrimp. Everyone was alive when they got here. One albino cory cat was barely alive, but seems to be improving. He's now sitting upright and moving occasionally. He was curled up and apparently dead on his side in the bag, but is looking better now. Kind of interesting in that you see no gill movement for several minutes then about ten seconds of rapid breathing, then back to nothing for a minute or two. Everyone went into a breeder box after being acclimated so I can feed them more intensively and keep an eye on them for a few weeks. As anticipated, all are quite small, but that's not a big issue for me. The photos on Aqua Huna show the fish relative to the size of a penny, so I knew what to expect. Small fish tend to disappear in a bigger planted tank though, so by keeping them in the breeder box for a bit I can better monitor them and fatten them up. They aren't competing with the horde outside for food in the box and they're not crowded. The breeder boxes circulate water from the tank through the boxes so the fish are essentially in the big tank, just outside it in the breeder box. Each breeder box is attached to the tank the fish will eventually go into. The albino corys are on the thirty high, the panda corys are on the twenty high, and the shrimp are on the ten gallon tank. The cherry shrimp were interesting. They were very pale with essentially no color until they hit their breeder box that has a clump of java moss with lots of algae on it. The box also has a lot of algae growing on the walls of the box. It was like someone hit a light switch. Within ten seconds of being put in that box they were colored up and feeding. They've also got a piece of cholla wood in with them for more shelter. These are my first shrimp and they're pretty impressive little critters. They're very active. Eleven of the twelve cory cats are doing great. The twelfth guy is improving. Going from apparently dead to not dead is an improvement. The ten shrimp all look great. I was surprised the shrimp came in a breather bag and wasn't sure about floating the breather bag to temperature acclimate so I ended up hanging it half in the water and half out. The bags were all 74 degrees when they got here and my tanks are about 76 so there wasn't a huge difference anyway. I followed the Aqua Huna acclimation instructions (though I really wanted to plop and drop the albino cory who wasn't looking good.) So far anyway, I'm very happy. I'm still half expecting to lose the one albino cory, but corys are tough little fish, so we'll see. One good thing about getting fish small is there's little to no impact on the bioload. Each breeder box of fish has maybe the same bioload as one of my swordtails.

One good thing is ammonia loses toxicity as the water temp decreases. A level of ammonia that could kill your fish at 80 degrees may have no impact on them at 55 degrees. Because bacteria are more active at higher temps, you'll need a larger bacteria colony to achieve the same result at a lower temp. I like to think of bacteria as eating bites per minute of ammonia (and nitrites). Your total waste output is their pie. If the bacteria are eating twenty bites per minute, the pie (fish waste) will be gone soon. If they're eating one bite every twenty minutes and new pies (fish waste) are added every six hours, you may have a lot of pies piling up before long. How do you get the pies eaten faster if your pie eaters are only eating one bite every twenty minutes? Add more pie eaters. (In this case more beneficial bacteria.) You'll want lots and lots of places for beneficial bacteria to live in when you have a cold water tank. Undergravel filtration is something you may want to consider with a fairly deep sand bed atop it. Deep sand beds can develop anoxic areas, but an undergravel filter tends to minimize that risk while giving you lots of places for good bacteria to colonize. A three to six inch deep sand bed in a cold water tank with an undergravel filter could be a very good solution to housing enough bacteria.

To begin with, I doubt that your crypt rot is pH related. I have crypts growing in water that's got a pH around 8 with no issues. You really just want to keep your pH stable as much as anything. If it wants to be 7.6 then let it be 7.6. There's not that big of a difference between 7.2 and 7.6 so I wouldn't stress out about it.

Maintaining a live daphnia culture is quite a delicate balancing act. You have the same nitrogen cycle issues you have in an aquarium, with the added headache of a wildly reproducing critter (every 3-4 days they can spawn and those babies can then reproduce in 5-10 days) that you're always on the verge of either starving them or fouling the water. Green water is a good food source for daphnia but maintaining enough green water to feed the daphnia can be a challenge. Those of us who keep livebearers always have to monitor the population so we don't end up with too many fish in a tank, but our livebearers tend to only spawn every 28 days or so and then the babies need a few months before they're able to spawn. The daphnia life cycle is vastly quicker. Daphnia magna can lay over 100 eggs at a time. If you start out with one in a culture tank and they have 100 babies, you're suddenly at 101. In three days another 100 get added so you're up to 201. In three more days another hundred so you're up to 301. In another three days another hundred get added so you're up to 401. Then the first batch are now old enough to spawn and they each (all 100 of them) lay a hundred eggs. That's another 10,000. Yikes! And every three days they have another 10,000 and then the next one in line adds another 10,000. In a very short period of time there are more daphnia than people in the world and you're desperately trying to balance their food and the nitrogen cycle. They aren't the easiest critters to culture and it's no wonder cultures crash easily. Populations can explode rapidly overwhelming even the most efficient biofiltration and eating every scrap of food you can provide. They can be a very challenging food source to culture. They're great when they work and the culture doesn't crash, but the odds of the culture never crashing are very, very slim.

I'd never seen frozen tubifex worms, just the freeze-dried, but a quick Google revealed that Hikari does indeed make them. They claim to triple sterilize them. (Radiation? Chemicals? Heat?) They claim that makes them safe from parasites. I might be more concerned about how the triple sterilization affects the nutritional value and integrity of the worms. I just use the freeze-dried and my fish love them and I've never had an issue with parasites or other problems with them.

The med trio is more designed to intercept anything that's not readily visible. It's not a miracle cure, but a preventative to try and stop stuff before it can get out of control. If you've got a fish with active ich, fungus, or a clear bacterial infection, treat them accordingly. The med trio is more designed to intercept any latent issue before it flares up in your main tank and causes chaos. It's the proverbial ounce of protection. When you've got a problem you need the pound of cure. It's too late to prevent a problem. Now you need to fix it.

I've got two older male Panda Cories and I've got six more Panda Cories coming from Aqua Huna this week to hopefully get a few females to add to the mix. It'll be a few months before I know if there are any females, but with any luck come the fall I may have them breeding. It may be next spring depending on the age/size of the new ones. I'm anticipating them being a bit small.

Since they're in the breeder box now, you can just move the breeder box with them still inside it. The water in the box will drain out and you can then just carry the breeder box to the tank you want them in and set it in there. If you're worried about them being out of water, or don't want water dripping, then fill a bowl, basin, pot, pan, whatever with some tank water and move the breeder box to that and transport the breeder box that way. If you don't want them in the breeder box in the new aquarium, just let the breeder box sink and they'll meander their way out.

Orchids (by and large) are epiphytes and would die if left in water for any period of time. They're used to hanging out on the branches of trees. The most common orchid sold to the general public are the phalaenopsis orchids. They're quite easy to grow. By and large, orchids like a cooler night than a day, so if your home is too stable in terms of temperature it may not trigger them to flower. Moving them outside in the warmer months in a shady location can provide them the temperature swing they need to trigger flowering. Many like a 20 degree swing from warm to cool at night and most homes don't have that large of a swing. Setting them outside for the summer can often trigger a reluctant orchid to bloom.

Young koi can get to twelve to eighteen inches in a year. (Twenty four inches isn't unheard of.) They'll be fine in a 130 gallon pond for that year, but then things start to get a bit crowded. Now some never reach that size, but a decent line of koi should get at least twelve inches long after a year. There are relatively low cost "instant pond" solutions using above ground swimming pools as a pond that can let you house even very large koi for a bit. Digging a larger pond with a liner isn't all that difficult either. I'd let things be for a bit. See how they grow. If they're growing too fast, you can find pond owners who will take them off your hands for you. I'm kind of intrigued that you have a grocery store that sells fish. I've never seen that around here. Interesting.