gardenman

The lovely Kaity from Australia recently posted a video of a significantly larger aquarium used for breeding hillstream loaches. Not really all that helpful to you, but it's a good video so I thought I'd post it here.

As is often the case, it depends. If your quarantine tank will hold one neon tetra and you're changing water regularly and have plants, then no, it probably doesn't need to be cycled. The waste output from a single smallish fish would be so insignificant that the plants and whatever bacteria happened to be around should handle it fine combined with the water changes. If you're filling a ten-gallon quarantine tank with enough fish to crowd a fifty-five-gallon tank then no matter how well cycled it was, it's unlikely to be able to handle the bioload. Pretty much everything in the aquarium hobby is a balancing act. Bacteria grow relative to the amount of places for them to inhabit and the food available. Lots of places for bacteria to live with lots of food gets you lots of bacteria. A sterile, barren wasteland of an aquarium gets you few, if any bacteria. Sponges give bacteria lots of places to live, so that's why so many fish keepers use sponges. A bacteria laden sponge dropped into a barren tank with no food source will have the bacteria starving and dying off in short order. Gradual changes in bioload work well. My tanks are all grossly overstocked but that's because the fish reproduced in the tanks, and the bacteria were able to keep pace with the fish. If I were to remove 95% of the fish, there could be an ammonia spike as much of the bacteria would starve and die off. If the surviving bacteria weren't able to keep up with that sudden die-off, the ammonia would spike despite an apparent lower bioload. If I gradually reduced the bioload, the bacteria would adjust with the reduced bioload, and all would be well. Such is the life of a fish keeper. It's all about balance and stability. By their very nature most quarantine tanks will experience instability and become unbalanced. Unless you keep an identical bioload in the quarantine tank when you're not quarantining fish and then when you are, there will be swings. Even the meds used in a quarantine tank can affect the cycle (if there is a cycle). In a perfect world, you'd want a very large, stable quarantine tank. That would add a ton to the cost of meds and make it harder to spot issues though. Just do what you feel is best and learn from your experience. If you need to quarantine a fish and you don't have a cycled tank ready to go, toss it into the quarantine tank and keep an eye on it. If the ammonia spikes, change water. If all's good, then kudos.

Yeah, that lifespan isn't great. Predatory Fins on YouTube have a 3,000-gallon acrylic tank that's coming unglued at the top and they have clamps holding it together until they can reglue it. I'd be a nervous wreck about that knowing what I know now. Acrylic window glass replacement gets very brittle over time. It's thinner than the acrylic used in aquariums, but it's otherwise the same stuff. When you read about big aquarium failures, it's nearly always the acrylic tanks. And it's usually in that five to twenty-year window when they fail.

Yeah, that's some serious acrylic. I'm not sure how long it would take thirty inches of acrylic to cure, but it would take a while. I've used acrylic to replace broken window glass before and after five to ten years, it gets pretty brittle. Now replacement window acrylic gets more UV exposure which could contribute to its failing, but age isn't kind to acrylic. A little poking around shows acrylic tanks have an estimated 5-15 year lifespan. Glass tanks pretty much last forever.

I would assume it was an acrylic aquarium. It's hard to make that much glass in that shape. Anything that old (twenty plus years) made of an acrylic might just be getting a tad fragile. Here's an interesting article about large aquarium failures. When acrylic aquariums fail (plasticstoday.com)

Weather is always a factor for me. I tend to order fish and plants when the weather is more moderate (spring and fall.) In the extremes (summer and winter) it's just one more layer of added stress for both the fish/plants and myself.

As is often the case, it depends. Cinder blocks are very strong in some directions (the solid parts) and not as strong in other parts (the hollow parts.) If you were able to park you stand atop the solid parts, it would easily hold the 73 gallons. If the legs were over the hollow parts, eh, it gets trickier. It would probably hold but the risk of failure grows. Solid concrete blocks instead of cinder blocks would definitely be strong enough.

I've always used enrichment with smarter fish (Oscars, Midas cichlids, etc.) Golf balls (floating plastic ones and regular sinking ones,) weighted artificial plants that they can (and will) pick up and move around. A substrate they can move around pretty easily. Hiding some food inside something they can see and have to figure out how to get to it. A clear plastic bowl with a looser lid works pretty well. They like to chase a laser pointer also, so if you're sitting nearby you can have them dashing all around the tank chasing the laser pointer like a crazed kitten. They're generally pretty smart fish, so put their minds to work. They tend to like to redecorate their tanks also, so give them smaller rocks, and driftwood they can move around. There are treat balls that you can fill with treats for dogs and cats that might be usable for bigger fish to bounce around and get food from. (Wet fish food tends to get a bit sticky though.)

Many sumps are designed as you say with baffles to direct the flow of water. Is it necessary? Eh, it depends. If the tank has a huge bioload, you want the sump to be as efficient as possible, then yeah. But in most cases any sump is fine with water flowing over or around the media as much as through it. You do have to be a little careful with baffle design to ensure that if a baffle becomes clogged or restricted that the sump doesn't overflow. You don't want a baffle extending to the top of the sump. In a worst-case scenario you want the water to be able to flow over the baffle and into the next chamber without overflowing the sump. If the baffle goes to the top of the sump a flood is more likely than it is if you keep the baffle a few inches lower than the top of the sump. What's the best media is a never-ending debate. Pretty much anything works. Some work better than others, but anything with a lot of surface area for bacteria to inhabit is good.

As the only fish in a tank, you may be disappointed. They're nocturnal and you tend not to even see them most of the time. They like hiding places and fish that like hiding places tend to hide a lot. They're fascinating to watch on the rare occasions you actually see them, but more often than not you'll be looking at a seemingly fish-less tank as they hide out.

You'll want to test the water. Most rainwater these days is pretty acidic. If mosquito spraying is done in your area or crop dusters fly nearby, there's some risk of chemical contamination also. Bird poop is much like fish poop and will cause an ammonia spike if left in the water, so filtering the water before using it is wise. If the water tests okay and you're comfortable with it, go for it. I've used raw rainwater before with no trouble, but not all rainwater is the same. Just as not all tap water is the same.

Everything is fixable if you've got the money, tools, and time. Things just aren't always cost effective to fix. If money is no object and you've got a university nearby that has a glass welding laser (relatively new technology that's still fairly experimental but working its way to market) they could weld it back together for you. Mind you the cost would likely be in the hundreds/thousands of dollars, but it's possible. (Glass welding using lasers will eventually make one piece glass fix tanks a reality with every seam welded together.) Finding an adhesive that will stick to the glass and some material placed over the broken glass would be the easiest fix to lock the three pieces back together. Hardware stores typically only carry glass in the thickness for window glass replacement. You'd need to go to a glass supplier to get the thickness you need for the cover and that will cost about as much as a new cover. Maybe more. Everything is fixable if you've got the time and money and resources. I would opt to try and find a material, another piece of glass or acrylic, to span the broken section, and some adhesive (silicone? gel super glue?) that would hold and just sandwich the broken parts.

A lot of "breeders" on sites end up being retailers buying fish from wholesalers and then reselling them on Aquabid or their own websites. Local breeders often find they have more customers than fish, and it's cheaper, faster, easier, for them to buy wholesale and then reship them to buyers than to breed them and raise them to a sellable size. They have a steadier supply and fewer disappointed customers. The problem is the customer is often thinking he/she is buying a locally bred fish and never finds out that it's an import. If the "breeder" you're looking to buy from has unboxing videos up, the fish you're buying are likely not locally bred.

Siphons will extract water very quickly in a deeper tank. The strength of a siphon varies with the difference in water pressure. If you're siphoning water from a 42" deep tank that's at eye level with a "typical" gravel vac size tube to a bucket on the floor, you'll fill that bucket very, very quickly. It's pretty easy to make a longer gravel vac even with sectional pieces of PVC that will reach the bottom of even the deepest tank, but as you have more water pressure at a greater height, you'll remove water much more quickly. Since you're not planning to plant the tank, a reverse flow UG filter might be an interesting option for you. A reverse flow UG filter sends mechanically clean water down through the UG plate and floats debris from the gravel up into the water column where it can be mechanically removed eliminating the need for gravel vacuuming. This allows your gravel and substrate to act as a large biofilter also. You just need to have mechanically cleaned water going under the UG plate. You don't want to trap organic debris under there. With a large flow of water rising up through the gravel, any debris in the gravel tends to get elevated and removed by a mechanical filter.

Boiling anything organic can get a bit smelly, so using a barbecue outside for the heat source is often a good choice.

If you have a hang on breeder box like the Marina/Fluval ones, you could load that with snails/scuds and the snails/scuds would work their way out of the box and into the tank where the hungry puffers could nibble away at them. Those boxes have a water inlet and an overflow and with the right flow the snails/scuds would have an escape route from the breeder box into the tank and into the bellies of the puffers.

"They don't last 24 hours." Are you sure they're dead? Nerite snails tend to play possum when moved and just lie there for days or longer. It's kind of hard to kill them within 24 hours with any "normal" water issues. And while dead snails do smell bad, it takes a while for that smell to develop. They don't die and smell bad ten minutes later. It can take hours for the decomposition to reach a point where the smell is significant. My gut suspicion is you're expecting them to move and when they don't you think they're dead when they're just playing possum. Now maybe they were shipped dead or died in transit, but my gut says your water plays the smallest factor in the equation.

A top-down look generally helps you sort males from females. The males will be slimmer while the females will be bulkier.

In terms of products to add, the best is anything from one of your already cycled tanks. Those bacteria will already be adjusted to your water type (and water isn't just water, it all varies) and will cycle your tank the quickest. I used to think fish stores could make a lot of money selling pre-cycled filter media, but if the bacteria didn't like the new water they went to, they could all die and become more of a problem than a help. The bacteria in your established tanks have evolved to thrive in your water. They are optimized for your conditions. Move those thriving, healthy bacterial colonies to a different water source and they could crash. The biomes in our aquariums are likely all unique in some manner and what works in one could fail miserably in another. I suspect the biomes evolve over time as conditions in the tanks change also. The colonies you had when the tank first cycles may not be similar to ones you have five years down the road.

Plecos are good parents, so you don't have to worry about keeping the fry with them. They won't eat them and will live with them. The only time I rear them away from the parents is when a rival female sneaks into a cave and kicks out the existing eggs to replace them with her own. I'll then harvest the eggs rather than leave them exposed in the tank. The fry yield is about the same either way.

I found a site called Fish Laboratory Aquatics that says in-tank breeding is easy. They also say you can keep a ten-inch bluegill in a fifteen-gallon tank, so yeah. Maybe not the best source for info. There's is a thread on NANFA from 2017 on breeding bluegills in a stock tank that might be a bit more relevant.

The best material is aluminum extrusions. The aluminum doesn't rot, is corrosion resistant, and lasts forever. It's relatively easy to work with using simple tools and can even be ordered in kit form from a company called Framingtech.com. Being the best material also makes it the most expensive material. Well, among common materials. There's probably a Saudi Prince somewhere who has an aquarium stand made of titanium with gold plating, but for those of us in the real world, the extruded aluminum is the upper tier of aquarium stand materials. It's what the owner of Tidal Gardens used in his new coral grow out facility. There are a lot of people selling aluminum extrusions online with every type of fitting, connector, and whatnot you can imagine. If you go to framingtech.com and click on the "Solutions" header you can see their fish tank stand options and they'll custom design one for you if need be. Once again though, these are pricey. But if you truly want the best, aluminum extrusions are the best way to go at this time. And you don't have to buy them in kit form. The extrusions are easy enough to work with that you can cut and build one yourself. The kit form is easier, but you can do it all yourself.

Kessils are a good choice if money is no object. If you visit some of the online ADA specialty stores you can find even more expensive options like the ADA Solar RGB that retails for around $1,000.

In the gardening world there are two major types of pesticides. Applied pesticides that are sprayed onto the plant and systemic insecticides that are added to the soil/water and absorbed into the plant. In either case if you give the plant a month or two and don't let the soil come into contact with your water, you should be okay. Some commercial greenhouses these days rely on other means to control insects. A common technique is to fill the greenhouse with CO2. Plants love CO2 but insects tend to have a hard time breathing it. By sealing a greenhouse and bringing the CO2 level up to 1%-2% (or higher) they can both enhance plant growth and destroy many/most insects. This is done mostly on the commercial level as workers in those greenhouses with elevated levels of CO2 need to wear oxygen tanks while the supplementation is ongoing. In some cases, they'll temporarily vent the heater from an adjoining greenhouse into the one they wish to treat and the CO and CO2 from the exhaust gases will serve to suffocate any insect issues at essentially no cost. Once the desired exposure time has been reached, they'll then vent the greenhouse before letting workers back in. Pesticides are expensive, so most growers only use them when necessary. In most cases a plant produced in a large commercial greenhouse should be relatively free of any pesticide that can harm your tank or fish.

Predatory Fins and Stingray Biology have teamed up and opened a store in NY. I don't recall seeing either of the type of stingrays you mention listed on their stock lists, but they will special order fish for customers also.