gardenman

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.

You'll want to swish some fresh tank water into the Tupperware container a time or two a day, but it'll work fine in the short-term.

My well water has insanely high ammonia levels out of the tap. I use old kitty litter plastic containers to store the tap water and the ammonia decreases in those and it becomes more usable. Those bottles have their own bacterial colonies going to use up the ammonia. After a few days in the bottles the water is reasonable.

I have two of the Fluvals and just ordered a third. They're a handy gadget. I've got an Aqua Huna fish order coming (6 albino cory cats, 6 panda cory cats, and 10 cherry shrimp.) I'm expecting them to be smaller than I'm comfortable with putting into the tanks they're going to eventually be in, so they're all going into the breeder boxes so I can observe them more closely and get some size on them before I add them to the bigger tanks. Each type of fish will be going into a separate tank so I needed one more breeder box. The two larger breeder boxes will hold the Cory cats and the smaller one, now covered in algae, will hold the shrimp, who will enjoy the algae. It'll give me a chance to observe the new fish/shrimp up close to see if they have any issues. Once they're in the tank fish tend to disappear from sight for a bit. (I have one oto that I see once every three months or so.) Little fish in big tanks with lots of plants tend to be hard to keep track of. Little fish in a breeder box attached to the big tanks, not so hard to keep track of. I can feed them intensively in the breeder boxes with no competition and get some size on them and spoil them a bit before they get added to the chaos that is my bigger fish tanks.

Not to go totally off-topic, but Poly-Filter has been around for decades and supposedly removes ammonia from the water. Many wholesalers include chunks of it in the fish they ship to protect the fish from ammonia in the shipping process. I'm assuming there's simply a sprayed on coating of some sort on a foam matrix that then gets released in the water. Perhaps whatever they use as a coating is also what Prime uses? It's fairly expensive stuff and wholesalers aren't noted for wasting money on stuff that doesn't work. You see quite a few fish shipped with chunks of Poly-Filter though.

I just put the net over them on the wall and give them a little nudge or two and they eventually unlock and try to swim away and end up in the net. They'll often lock out their fins when in the net and become a bit entangled, but I just put the net into the new tank and hang it there for a few seconds and they'll unlock their fins and swim away.

The apisto and the kribs could munch on a baby or two. My Neon Swordtails hunt, kill, and gulp down young pleco fry when given the chance. Amano shrimp will occasionally hunt down slow moving fry also. The cardinal tetras are not a threat and I wouldn't worry too much about the cory cats. but the rest of your fish might try to make a snack of a baby pleco or two.

Cuttlebone is an aquarium safe alternative way to get extra calcium into your tank. Pet shops sell them in the bird supplies and they can take a while to sink in a tank, but they will eventually sink. They're mostly aragonite so if you don't want to add aragonite in the form of crushed coral, you can simply drop in a cuttlebone or two. (Cuttlebones are easier to remove than crushed coral also if you decide you don't need them later.)

I don't think you can have too much biofiltration, but you can definitely have too much circulation. I like to have two filters on each tank. A sponge and either a canister or a HOB. That's gives me insurance in case one or the other fails. I keep a spare air pump or two around also.

I use a net with my Super Reds (short-finned.). They may get caught in the net, but just leave the net hanging in the new tank for a few seconds and they'll untangle themselves and swim away. As to eating, mine love meatier foods like freeze-dried tubifex worms pressed against the glass, or shrimp pellets. They'll also eat French-style green beans. They'll nibble on algae wafers, but it's pretty clear they're not their favorite food. Tubifex worms are their favorite food, followed by shrimp pellets, and green beans.

You may very well lose some to predation, but even young bristlenose plecos are not that easy for a fish to swallow whole.

The only way to stop egg predation is to separate the eggs from the fish. A piece of window screening precisely cut to fit in the tub could allow plants to grow under the screen while the fish were trapped above it and any eggs they laid would fall through the screening to protect the eggs. Then you have the problem of protecting the young fry from the parents as they might be able to swim back up through the screening and get eaten. Also, future eggs laid in the pond that feel through the screening could get eaten by their slightly older siblings already under the screening. Those trying to breed egg-scatterers on a commercial scale tend to move the parents from tank to tank after they've spawned and let each batch of fry grow up in the tank they were spawned in.

Males can get a bit feisty with one another. You can try it, but expect one to try and become the dominant male. If you go with males, many is better than two. It spreads the aggression. Three is better than two. Five is better than three. More males tends to reduce issues.

The plastic needle point canvas has hole spacing that's about right, but forming it into a sphere strikes me as being a tad challenging. The old ones had a metal washer coated in plastic as the weight with a hole in the bottom you could stuff tubifex cube into. The Plasti Dip stuff for tool handles would coat a washer pretty easily and some hot melt glue could secure it to the dome if you could make the dome. It's the making the dome part that has me a bit stumped. A golf ball and a heat gun makes some sense, but alas, my heat gun has died and I don't really need one for anything else. I kind of hate to buy a heat gun just to try making a dome out of plastic needlepoint canvas. But, I may have to give it a try at some point.

I've seen fish with bent/damaged fins get better with time. It's not bad for the fish. It just is what it is. When it comes to breeding, you have to weigh the pros and cons. Does the fish have some other quality that you can't find in another fish in your group? Are you willing to cull mercilessly should the bent fins be genetic? (Bear in mind most of the people who get your fish down the road won't be breeding them and will just want a pretty fish. Breeding in a 'weakness' such as a deformed fin becomes more of an issue for you down the road than for anyone else as most others won't be breeding them. If people don't want deformed fish, your market dries up.) If your fish with bent fins has a color, pattern, marking, etc. that you've never seen before, then breeding with the bent fin fish may be the only way to pass on those genes and by selective culling you may be able to breed out the bent fins, but keep the color, marking, pattern you want. There is no absolute answer. Maybe at some point bent fin angelfish become a trend and people will pay a fortune for them. It's working now with short-body fish. Twenty years ago short-body fish would have been culls. Now they're selling for hundreds/thousands of dollars. It's a strange world sometimes. Who's to say angelfish with massively deformed fins won't become a trend down the road. You could be on the cutting edge of a new trend in designer angelfish. Maybe someday a Kardashian will be carrying a portable aquarium/purse with a bent fin angelfish in it that derived from this one. You never know.

Exactly! That's the only downside to putting the air down lower. If your power goes out and you don't have check valves, or a check valve fails, that whole air system can get flooded and destroy the air pump and more. With the air system higher up, gravity keeps the water down lower where it belongs.

If you have a pair of any livebearer they'll make their own buddies. Lots and lots of their own buddies. So many you won't know what to do with all of them. Will they be somewhat more stressed out on their own? Yes. Will you be less stressed out not trying to figure out what to do with 5,000 fry if they don't have a "buddy?" Probably. So it largely comes down to who you want more stressed, you or the livebearer? I'd suggest keeping your own stress lower by keeping just one of each.