gardenman

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.

The swords should rebound fairly quickly since they're already established. As new leaves grow I'd just cut off the old ratty ones. In about a month or so you'll have "like new" plants in the tank with no real risk of disturbing anything,

I wonder if anyone has ever taken a PAR reading in a tank outside under the noon sun to see what the absolute maximum PAR should be. The guy with the PAR of 163 might just be brighter than the sun.

I was confused by the pH too. I thought, "Okay, so their tanks are filled with hydrochloric acid. Interesting. Not the way I'd do it, but whatever."

I like the tea strainer idea. They're bigger than the old diving bells but could work. Widening the holes without breaking the mesh might be a challenge though. It's a pretty fine wire and you'd be making a lot of holes.

Yeah, topsoil is the better choice over a peat based potting mix.

Safe to use, probably. The issue you may have is the clay trapping the nutrients inside the clay. The "organic potting mix" could be an issue also as potting mixes are typically made using peat which can acidify your water. (Not all and there's a move away from peat, but many mixes still use a lot of peat.) Clay can be quite effective at sealing out moisture which could trap your nutrients away where the plants can't get to them.

The old diving bell feeders in the original post were great. Fish stores (back in the 60s and 70s) typically sold them near the checkout for $0.49-$0.79. They were very much an impulse buy as you checked out. I used to have them for every tank. As far as I know, no one makes them any more which is sad. They were amazing. I went on a search for them a few years back and came up empty. They were typically sold in an open box right on the checkout counter. A very easy to use and useful gadget that's no longer around.

Trickers Water Gardens sells them. They're pricey at $80+ each. They're very challenging to grow as they need an enormous amount of really good soil. A 6' diameter two feet or deeper pot is typically recommended if not planted directly into the pond bottom. Think of how many times you've seen a 6' diameter flower pot. Some people use a pool within their pond for the pot. A smallish swimming pool holds just about the right amount of soil for one of those giants. They're a very impressive plant, but generally best left for the pros to grow. Longwood Gardens has one outside in their lily pond area each summer. You need an enormous pond with lots of light (something the OFR doesn't necessarily have in their indoor pool) and a mountain of soil. Buying the plant is by far the cheapest part of the whole operation. If you've got the space, the light, the warm water, and a largely unlimited budget, then go for it. Otherwise, you're better off admiring them from afar. It's kind of like trying to keep an elephant as a house pet. It's a neat idea, but largely impractical. And even as large as the OFR pool is, it would cramp one of those lilies. They get huge.

Freeze-dried food retains much of its nutritional value and the freeze-drying kills any parasites that could be there in live worms. My fish love the freeze-dried tubifex. They cost $18+ for a half pound which is somewhere around 600 cubes. I go through about ten cubes a day so I buy fresh every couple of months. They're much, much less expensive than frozen food and far easier to handle.