gardenman

The answer to which is rarer, is neither. Both are equally available as far as I know. Both are commonly bred and readily available from a number of sources for similar prices.

Attached garages tend to make pretty good fish rooms. They have a concrete floor, electricity, sometimes running water is already there, or at least nearby. That big garage door can make moving larger tanks in and out very easy. They're also pretty easy to reset back into a garage when you move down the road.

"Natural pleco caves" would generally be mud holes in the side of a riverbank. Most of us don't have mud in our tanks, some silly nonsense about it being incredibly messy and most hobbyists actual want to occasionally see a fish and not just muddy water. There are roughly a gazillion pleco cave options out there. Mine prefer a piece of 1" (too small) PVC pipe with an end cap. They have a slate cave I made for them. They have the clay watering spikes, and larger PVC pipe with end caps, but the males fight for and breed in the little 1" PVC pipe. It really is too small for them, but it's what they like and what they use, so there's that. If you're not breeding them, they'll find a place to hide out. It may be under the edge of a sponge filter, behind the heater, behind a filter tube, etc. so they don't "need" a cave unless you're trying to breed them. If you're trying to breed them, then hit them with a variety of options and see which they choose. Mine love the undersized PVC. Go figure. They can barely squeeze in it these days, but it's what they like.

Nitrates are a somewhat controversial subject. Some sources claim that nitrates as high as 200 ppm are completely harmless for older, established fish. Some people insist you need to keep them at very low levels. My nitrates levels are always sky high. A big part of the reason for that is that my tap water is sky high with ammonia and the ammonia ends up becoming nitrates. I don't find high nitrates to be an issue. Now I'm not keeping overly fussy fish. Mostly neon swordtails (way, way too many of them.) Super Red Bristlenose plecos (once again way too many of them.) And a few assorted odds and ends (panda corys, a lone oto who makes an appearance once every three months or so, a couple of leftover platies, and probably a bit more that doesn't come to mind.) Oh, and lots, and I mean lots of ramshorn snails. The last time I lost a fish was about three weeks ago and that was the first loss in about three months and that was a three plus year old swordtail. (He'd have been four in August.) My swordtails and plecos continue to breed and thrive. (As do the ramshorn snails.) Every week I remove a very large bowl full of floating plants (mostly duckweed, but also frogbit, salvinia, and dwarf water lettuce.) All of the tanks are heavily planted and there are fry everywhere. I just don't worry about the nitrates these days. The fish are doing great, so that's what truly matters. Chasing "ideal" water parameters can cause more harm than the good it achieves. As long as my fish are happy, I'm happy. And my fish are very happy. Two male swordtails are actively courting a young female a few feet to my right as I type this.

I suspect your fish have just matured into adults. Young humans tend to do stupid stuff when they're young and then later in life look back and ponder, "How did I ever live through all of that? What was I thinking?" It's a fish eat fish world out there. (Actually it's an everything eats fish world out there.) Young fish may not realize that but as they grow and mature they start to realize how dangerous the world is and start acting more appropriately. You pretty much see it across the animal kingdom. Your puppy or kitten will do things that an older dog or cat won't even consider trying. Part of maturing is limiting risk and it carries across many/most animal species. Your fish have matured their way past their wild, reckless, youth and are now settled down and living as responsible adults. I suspect a geneticist could find a maturity gene of some sort that dampened down reckless behavior as a creature ages if they looked for it. Very few people, or animals for that matter, behave as recklessly as adults as they did in their younger days.

For me, it depends. As a rule I always temperature acclimate, but there's an exception to the rule. If the fish is clearly in dire distress and the water in the bag is bad, I want them out of that bad water as quickly as possible and even the fifteen minutes or so to temperature acclimate may be too long. Then I just tear open the bag and pour the fish into a net and they go right into the tank. Any fish I get through online sources, I temperature acclimate if the fish are doing okay then plop and drop. I want them out of the bag water and into my water as quickly as possible once the bag is opened. I pretty much plop and drop every fish these days but I tend to buy cheaper fish. If I'd invested more in a fish I might drip acclimate. It would be interesting to see someone do some testing on how long it takes the water in a fish bag to change once exposed to air. Fill a bag with fish, leave them in it a day or two as if it was being shipped and they're in there breathing and pooping away, then open the bag and start monitoring the change in the water when exposed to fresh air. How long is there before the water starts undergoing significant changes? Do you have ten seconds? Ten minutes? Ten hours? I don't know. You could record the quality of the water when you bag the fish, then immediately upon opening the bag, and then at certain intervals after opening until it stabilized. In a perfect world the bag would have something like an IV bag port where you could draw water from it at various times also to see how it changed before being exposed to air just from the fish being in the bag. Testing whether replacing the air in a bag with pure oxygen made a difference or not would be interesting also. A couple of sites I've seen say the oxygen tube should be placed under the water and the bag filled with oxygen in that manner. When I've seen oxygen used to inflate bags it's always just been done from the top of the bag. Testing whether the waste-absorbing filter sponges often used in shipping are effective would be interesting also. Almost everything we "know" about bagging, shipping, transporting, and acclimating fish is anecdotal and seems based on assumptions. Some real research could give us a better understanding of what's truly best. I've poked around to try and find some research and have found an article from the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program at Purdue University that pretty much says what we all assume to be true. There's also an article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information that suggests that breather bags are better as there's less mechanical disturbance of the fish. (They aren't sloshing around in other words.) There's lots of information on bagging and transporting aquaculture fish but it all seems to be more based on "that's how things are done" than any real research behind it.

Ramshorn snails are doing a great job on my algae. Since I've added them I haven't had to scrub any algae off at all. If all else fails try adding a few of them. (Which will become many of them in short order, but the algae will be under control even if the snail population isn't.)

The likelihood is that any driftwood, rocks, etc, you buy came from such a river so no real harm in using it. I just wouldn't count on them being wildly effective in cycling a new tank. A natural river can have lots of other factors controlling the ammonia and other levels that aren't in a tank. A piece of driftwood in a river may have far less beneficial bacteria on it as there's likely a lower fish concentration and less ammonia available to feed it and more things competing for what ammonia is available. We may have a piece of pothos in our tanks to suck up excess nutrients. A river may have a whole grove of willow trees doing the same thing. By the time any water gets to the driftwood/rocks those willows and other trees, or other factors, may have cleaned up all of the ammonia leaving no food for the bacteria you're hoping is on the driftwood/rocks. With no food for the bacteria there's no bacteria that survives. We tend to view things like ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates as problems. In nature, they're more viewed as fast food with lots of potential consumers fighting for them.

I typically only clean the front and sides of algae and let it grow on the back wall. That said, since adding ramshorn snails to my tanks, algae is losing the fight to survive. I bought twelve ramshorn snails (six red and six blue) off of eBay in the fall and popped them in my ten gallon quarantine tank. The tank has needed no algae removal since they hit the tank. In early January I got a plant order from the Coop that included one larger red ramshorn snail that I popped into my larger breeder box. That one snail is now about fifty and that breeder box sparkles. It looks cleaner than it did when brand new. Additional smaller ramshorn snails/eggs were apparently on/in the plants as there's a giant school of them in my twenty high where many of the plants landed and once again, no algae issues. I've moved a few to my thirty high and I haven't had to clean the glass on that even though there are relatively few snails there. (So far anyway, there will be more in the very near future based on how quickly they reproduce.) If you want algae in a tank, don't add ramshorn snails to the tank. They're remarkably effective at eliminating it. I've had nerites, mystery snails, bladder/pond snails, and none have been as effective at removing algae as the ramshorns. I don't know if I've just gotten magical ramshorns or what, but they've been the best algae eaters I've ever seen.

Yeah, the 75 gallon tanks are pretty much the minimum way to go for a small school of discus. If you just have a bonded pair, a 40 breeder, or even a twenty high, can be adequate, but with more than a bonded pair, you need more space. Lots more space. He was looking at $439 for the 51 gallon tank, so when you can get a decent tank, stand, cover and light for $499 at full price and $299-$349 fairly often on sale, the 75 just makes more sense. Assuming he had room for the 75.

Male plecos will demonstrate their egg fanning technique to try and impress the girl plecos. Your fanning pleco is almost certainly a male because of that behavior. If a girl pleco is suitably impressed by a male's egg fanning technique, she'll consent to lay her eggs for the male to fan them. Then she'll wander off to go shop, grab a bite of food, maybe take in a movie or something, while the male is trapped in the cave for days/weeks/months looking after the eggs and fry.

A 30" wide tank doesn't really give them a lot of room to get away from one another. I'd be more inclined to go with a conventional 75 gallon tank (48" long.) Petsmart routinely has the full Marineland 75 gallon setup (tank stand, cover, light) on sale for $299-$350. (It's at full price of $499 as I type this, but it's often on sale.) A 48" long tank can use more vision blockers here and there to give fish a place to get away from a more dominant fish. I'd be pretty comfortable with a few discus in a 75.

I saw a YouTube video quite a while ago where a guy made a hillstream loach tank in a 40 breeder by siliconing in a piece of glass a few inches up from the bottom of the tank, creating a false bottom that was open on either end. He then used one of the gyre pumps at one end under the false bottom to create a circular flow in the tank. The water would come into the bottom section at the left, get shoved across under the false bottom to the far right where it would then emerge and flow back towards the left. He used sponges, eggcrate, and netting to prevent the loaches from getting pulled under the false bottom. He added caves with openings parallel to and perpendicular to the current flow for the loaches to hide out and also used some large rocks in places to lessen the flow in those areas. It was a pretty impressive setup. He even had some plants in the tank, but they were mostly growing horizontally due to the current flow. His substrate was mostly river rock and broad flat stones. It was a very neat looking setup. The sponges were his filter. It was essentially a mountain stream in an aquarium. To give you some idea of flow, the small gyre pumps typically pump around 2,000 gallons per hour. The bigger ones can do up to 6,000 GPH. There was a lot of flow in a 40 breeder. The loaches seemed very happy though.

A lot of the endangered species aren't really all that endangered these days. There is no shortage of Asian Arowanas. They're captively bred in absurdly high numbers. It's still illegal to own one in the States though as they're "endangered." There are probably more living Asian Arowanas today than at any time in the history of the species. It's likely their total numbers are many times that of what they've ever been in the wild. There are farms raising tens of thousands of them each year. And there are lots of Asian Arowana farms. There is no need for anyone to catch one in the wild as there is a virtually endless supply of captive bred ones. Every US hobbyist who wanted an Asian Arowana could get one and the impact on the number in the wild would be zero. Heck, every hobbyist could get ten and it would have no impact on the number of wild arowanas. But they're still banned. Why? More for appearance than anything. In the real world, the ban has no impact. As to invasive species, most people worry about the alpha predators like the snakehead, arapaima, etc. The claim is often that they'll kill everything and eat it. The thing is, they live with lots of other life in their native habitat. They don't kill and eat everything. If they did, they'd end up starving. The predator/prey ratio has to be right or the predators starve. Nature finds a balance. If you have one zebra and a hundred lions, you won't have a hundred lions for long. If you have a hundred zebra and one lion, you'll lose an occasional zebra here or there, but they'll also be giving birth to new ones and things stay in balance. The whole "If those snakeheads breed and have large spawns they'll kill and eat everything!" folks forget that once they've killed and eaten everything, they'll die. They will quite literally starve themselves out of existence. Nature finds a balance. And the native predators will eat the snakehead fry and young fish also, so the "invaders" can actually help feed the native fish. There are a lot of people, bureaucrats, politicians, who think they have way more control over things than they do. At the very least they want more control. In the real world, nature finds a way to keep things under control. If the predator/prey ratio gets out of whack, the predators starve. Problem solved! Wading birds will pick up fish eggs from someplace with fewer predators and deposit them in the now predator free area and they'll thrive there until a new predator comes along. Nature finds a way.

I laughed when I saw that they specifically included Blue Whales as an animal you couldn't keep. Ah, dang!

If you read the regulations you'll find that you're not allowed to keep a blue whale in NJ. Pity! It would be quite the centerpiece in a big enough tank. I raised cockatiels, lovebirds, parakeets, and green singing finches back in the eighties when this law first took effect. It pretty much crippled my sales. To sell the birds to a pet shop I'd have to get a special license and also a license for each of the birds (other than the parakeets and cockatiels that were exempt). To sell them to individuals privately would require me to be responsible to fill out the permit applications and forward them to the state. It was just a mess. I moved on to other endeavors.

The challenge with the "short-body" trend is that we're likely to see the same issues we see in exotic goldfish with swim bladder/digestive issues as the fish mature. A very significant percentage of exotic goldfish (the original short-bodied fish) develop swim bladder issues and other issues due to body compression. I'm not sure we've learned the lesson that distorting fish beyond certain parameters is unwise. Asian breeders (and others) are now creating short-body versions of many tropical fish and my gut says it's a bad idea. Instead of learning from the generations of deformed goldfish, we're repeating the same mistakes only now with tropical fish. At this point the shorter the body, the higher the price, and the more desirable the fish is to those looking for short-body fish. I just don't think the short-body trend is wise for the fish or aquarist. Goldfish were hardy, largely indestructible fish in their original form. Fancy goldfish with their compressed bodies are anything but hardy and indestructible these days. They've been selectively bred to fit a certain profile rather than to be hardy and healthy. Is there a market for short-body fish? Absolutely! Is it good for the fish? Not likely. Fish that a few years ago would have been culled are now being selectively bred to pass on their deformity. And the greater the deformity the more valued the fish are. It's just a trend that strikes me as a bad idea. There is a market for them though. I just don't think it's the right direction for the hobby. I'd rather see fish being bred to be hardier, healthier, and longer lived. I don't think selectively breeding for the short-body trait gives you any of those three things. It certainly hasn't in fancy goldfish. That's my two cents on the whole short-body issue. I cringe when I see the balloon mollies. Some of them can barely swim. It's not a trend that I think is wise. But there is a market for the short-bodied fish.

Yeah, it's the API ones I'm using. So far, so good. They're a whole lot cheaper than the aquarium ones and seem to be working well for me. They recommend using them by the volume of soil you're fertilizing, so that's what I did. In my thirty high the substrate should hold three of them, but I just do one at a time every two weeks and it's working for me. I put one in my left front corner. Then in two weeks one goes into the back right corner. Two weeks later one goes in the middle, then in two more weeks I'm back to the left front. This is an old established tank that's been set up forever (twenty plus years?) so if there is an ammonia spike (and I haven't detected one) the bacteria might just be gulping it down before it registers. The only drawback is those tabs have more phosphorous than aquarium tabs as they're made for flowering plants (water lilies and lotus) and flowering plants want more phosphorous. Higher levels of phosphorous can lead to increased algae, but I haven't seen that being an issue as of yet.

There are a couple of easy options. One is to keep using the existing light but to add a diffuser/shade cloth to it. You can block out much of the light in that manner. Something simple like a strip or two of electrical tape on the clear plastic covering the lights can dramatically reduce the light reaching the tank. Another option is to simply let the duckweed cover the tank and absorb the light. It can be very effective in blocking light from getting deeper into the tank. Just some t-shirt material placed over the clear plastic can diffuse the light and dim it down significantly. Greenhouse growers use shade cloth to diffuse light and it's very effective. It's pretty easy to modify your existing light to put out less light. You can play around with various options on the clear plastic covering the LEDs to find the best option for you.

Yeah, if you go to their exempt animal list, any animal of any type that isn't specifically exempted requires the permit. (Or could require the permit depending on how much they want to harass you.) One of the beautiful things about living in NJ is you never have to ask "Is there a law about (insert name of anything here)?" There is. Everything is regulated. In my township you can only put your trash out after 6 PM the night before trash day and before 6AM the day of trash pickup. Forget to put it out the night before and it's after 6 AM on trash day? Too bad! You can't legally put your trash out even if the trashmen haven't shown up yet. (To be fair, the police don't even attempt to enforce the law, but it's there if they chose to.) Where you put your trash can is also heavily regulated. (Not that anyone follows the rules.) NJ has so many rules/regulations/laws that you can't go a full day without breaking a handful (or several handfuls) of them without even trying. The vast majority of the rules/laws/regulations get ignored, but they're there and can be used to harass you if the authorities decide to make an example of you. We're not one of the freest states you'll ever find yourself in.

Getting a cory to eat will be the least of your problems. They won't let themselves starve to death. They'll eat. Now if you're trying to transition a large predatory fish off of live food, it can be more challenging.

Water Lily fertilizer tablets are pretty cheap and usable in aquariums. I'm doing it in my thirty high with no trouble. I bury one deep near my root feeders every couple of weeks and so far, so good. I decided how many to use by the volume of substrate I have. My tank should handle three of them, but I just use one every two weeks (or so) and the plants are doing fine, no ammonia spikes, no algae blooms, no real problems at all that I can see. You can get 25 in a pack for about $7. They're bigger, solid, and fish safe since people use them in their water gardens. They don't float or cause me any trouble. (At least not yet.) I was nervous trying them, but they seem to be working very well.

The NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife have two lists on their site (both PDFs). One has a list of animals requiring a permit for possession, and one has a list of what animals are exempt. You might as well just look at the list of exempt animals though as everything else (according to their site) requires a permit. If you think of breeding anything that requires a permit and selling them to pet shops, you need a special permit that costs $100. If you Google "NJ Exotic and nongame wildlife permit" you can find all kinds of stuff.

That should be fine. Baby plecos tend to be pretty docile little critters.

Angelfish are effective baby predators, but when they get bigger, they may decide to nibble on the occasional adult endler and ignore the fry. Angelfish can get quite large especially with unlimited live food to nibble on. As to swordtails, they tend to breed so much that their offspring become a bigger problem than the guppy/endler fry. I've got well over a hundred swordtails now after starting out with eleven three years ago and there are swordtail fry in my tanks all the time.