gardenman

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.

My Super Red Bristlenose Plecos line up like little soldiers around four each afternoon waiting for the tubifex worm cubes to be pressed on the glass. I typically put nine or ten in their tank and within minutes they're gone! The swordtails do sneak in and grab some, but the plecos really love them. I'm now buying a half pound of them at a time.

I bought a lily bulb at the coop in early January and it got here on January sixth. I gave it almost ninety days (I think) before letting them know it was still just sitting there doing nothing and they sent me a replacement. which is growing great while the original is still just sitting there and doing nothing.

@Gator The number of fry a guppy can have largely varies with the size of the female. I've heard of a single female having 200+ fry at once. On average you're looking more at 20-60, but larger numbers aren't uncommon. As to separating the cory eggs from the parents. Their eggs are typically very sticky but careful use of a single edge razor blade (some people use a credit card) can scrape them off the glass without harming them and then they can be hatched and raised in a breeding box or separate tank. As to fish smelling the food, yes. Back when I had a marine tank I had a starfish who would know the instant tubifex worms hit the tank and head towards them.

Interesting. I get what you're saying about the depth of the water controlling the water pressure, but you're also adding more water volume to the combined tanks. I keep having this picture of someone attaching a ten gallon, dollar-per-gallon Petsmart sale tank near the top of the six million gallon display tank at the Atlanta Aquarium and saying, "It'll be fine." Technically the ten gallon tank is still just holding ten gallons, but that's a whole lot of water on the other side looking for a place to go. Back on topic, in a normal use situation (not six million gallons on the other side) I would think you'd be fine.

Glass is somewhat flexible which is why larger tanks typically have bracing in the middle of the tank. That black plastic with the annoying bar in the middle is designed to prevent the glass from flexing. You talk about glass lids and a plastic top. If you removed the plastic frame from the top of the tank or anything structural (a piece of glass for example) that was glued in the middle of the tank, then you're letting the tank flex and that's not good. It will lead to a much bigger problem than the top not fitting. In your photo there's what looks like silicone residue near the handle on the top edge of the glass. If you removed a structural member that was glued in there, that's why your tank is now flexing. Glass is expensive and thicker glass is much more expensive, so tank makers tend to use as thin a glass as possible and then use braces for extra support. If you remove the braces you weaken the tank and the glass will flex and ultimately fail completely.

Do hydra hitchhike on brine shrimp eggs? Brine shrimp eggs are harvested in salt water and hydra are freshwater, so no. You probably had a small hydra population that was largely dormant until food came along in the form of baby brine shrimp. When fed well hydra can double in number every two days, so it doesn't take long before that one starving, unnoticed hydra became a lot of hydra. In just twenty days one hydra becomes 512 at that rate. Day one, one hydra. Day three you then have two hydra. On day five you're up to four. Every two days the number doubles and by day twenty it's 512 and very noticeable.

My baby Super Reds often start out with a lot of dark markings but those fade as the fish matures. Odds are the dark markings on your fish will fade also.

In general, I would think three koi in a thousand plus gallon pond would be okay. Now, a lot depends on the shape of the pond. Koi tend to be long fish so a wider/longer/shallower pond is better than a deeper narrower pond.

I wonder if that's why my jungle Val all melted when I added a Madagascar Lace plant? Granted, Val doesn't really need a reason to melt. It just does it sometimes, but the timing was interesting. Within days of adding the Madagascar Lace Plant the jungle Val was gone. And there was a lot of jungle Val. Hmm... perhaps I should look around at planted tank photos and see if anyone is growing both in the same tank.

This is an interesting situation. You're not pumping dramatically uphill which is good. The 1/4" diameter feed pipes means you don't need enormous head pressure as you won't be pushing against a lot of water. (Smaller diameter tubing is easier to move water through. Try sucking water through a drinking straw or airline tubing and a one inch pipe. It's a lot easier to suck water through the straw.) I was going to suggest an RO booster pump as the fittings are the right size, but have read that many require at least 20 PSI on the input side and you couldn't guarantee that with the totes. A cheap pond pump might give you the power you need. Part of me wants to recommend a well pump/pressure tank setup and treat the totes like they're a well, but that might be overkill. (Probably would be overkill.) I'd probably opt for a cheap pond pump and see how that goes. I buy the cheap under $20 ones for my fountain and rain barrels. The one I'm using in my rain barrels to auto water my box planters has a 3/4" outlet and pumps the water about 1 meter vertically. It's rated at 400 GPH. You probably wouldn't need one that was that powerful. I might target one in the 150-200 GPH range to start with and see how it works. If it works, great. If not, you can always use it for something else.

The thread titled "Wherefore art thou Nitrogen" got me thinking. Can water absorb nitrogen from the air? The air we breathe is 78% nitrogen. We use air stones to inject oxygen into the water. CO2 can also be absorbed by water. I've never heard if nitrogen from the air can be absorbed by water though. How does the air entering our tanks vary from the air leaving our tanks? I would assume a deeper tank would alter the air more since the bubbles would have a longer exposure time to the water. Smaller bubbles would likely also result in more exchange. Does the exchange only work one way? Does tank water just gain oxygen and CO2 and the air gets nothing back? Or does the air absorb stuff from the water also? If I put a hundred air stones in a tank would the water absorb enough nitrogen to feed my plants? I'm starting to wonder if there might not be a lot more going on with that air/water interaction than we assume. Commercial fish farms often inject massive amounts of air as do many koi keepers. Is the air/water interaction part of the reason sponge filters are so effective? Hmm...must do some research. Off to Google I go.

Depending on their size, if they're small enough, a turkey baster works pretty well. For larger fry a shrimp net works well. They're a small, fine meshed net that's maybe 2" X 1.75". You can get round or rectangular ones. I'd go for the rectangular one for a breeder box. They're a very nice, very small, fine mesh net designed not to hurt shrimp, so they're pretty safe for small to medium sized fry.

In a perfect world you'd have a constant stream of fresh water going into your tanks in a flow through fashion. A YouTuber is building a fish warehouse on a stream for exactly that purpose. He's going to divert the water from the stream into his facility and then run it through his tanks and then back out into the stream. Some fish keepers use a drip system that constantly adds fresh water to the tank as the old water overflows out. I'd considered doing that until I did the math and discovered at the rate I wanted I'd go through over 17,000 gallons of water a year. I was looking at using a half gallon per hour emitter on each of my four tanks. That would use two gallons per hour in total, but at two gallons per hour I'd end up using 17,520 gallons per year. That's kind of a lot of water. I don't generally do water changes due to bad well water and by and large my fish do fine. My tanks are heavily planted. The fish are well fed. Which helps to replace trace elements as any that aren't absorbed by the fish get pooped back into the tank. I just top off the tanks when they lose water to evaporation. Whatever you do, I'd recommend being consistent at it. If you do a 5% change every other day, you should be fine. You probably don't have to do that much though if the tank is well established and nicely planted.

Mine don't other plants at all. They'll clean the algae off of them which I like, but the plants don't suffer at all.

You might be able to grow impatiens underwater. I know they'll root in water and form "water" roots. The big issue for plants grown underwater is CO2. Air has a lot of it. Water, not so much. It's why growers grow aquarium plants emmersed. If a plant can figure out how to breathe underwater, it should survive, but not thrive.

It'll plant itself. You don't have to do anything. The roots will go down and anchor it and it'll be fine. As a general rule in planting anything, higher is safer. Plant something too deep and it's more likely to die. This is true of terrestrial, above ground planting and aquarium planting. There are a few exceptions to that rule but they're few enough that it doesn't matter. (And even the exceptions won't die if planted too shallowly.)