gardenman

If you could get the wholesale price of test strips low enough, it would be neat to swish one in the tank a customer is buying fish from, then give them an unused strip to take home to test their water and compare the two. Of course, the colors on the used test strip would change over time so you might need to scan it and print out a color match for it that wouldn't change.

The water lily family is pretty big with a wide range of plants in it. On the "Holy cow! That thing's huge!" side of the family you have the Victoria Amazonica that can have leaves up to ten feet in diameter and a 25 foot long stem. Kind of big for the average home aquarium. (Though the biggest I've ever seen had leaves about six feet in diameter. Still pretty big, but not ten feet.) On the other end of the spectrum is Nymphaea Thermarum which has leaves of under an inch. So when something is labeled "nymphaea sp." it could be just about anything. As long as it's reasonably healthy and growing, I'd just accept it for what it is. It's pretty no matter what. At some point it may decide to put out floating leaves, or it may choose not to. Plants tend to have minds of their own and do what they want.

Bristlenose plecos are tough little fish. They'd prefer it a bit warmer, but could handle 67 without much trouble. They shouldn't bother the goldfish. Your only real issue will be getting food past the goldfish and down to the pleco and making sure he/she gets enough to eat. Goldfish (also known as water piggies) tend to love the same food as plecos and aren't the best at sharing food. When a goldfish sees food their first thought is "Mine!" Making sure enough food gets down to the pleco will be your biggest issue. I have a feeding frenzy among my plecos every morning when the green beans hit the water and again every afternoon when it's tubifex worm time. They love to eat. Getting food past the goldfish and to the pleco will be your biggest issue.

Yeah, floating plants tend to be rather prolific and are easily removed, thus taking the nitrates with them. Every Saturday I remove a large bowl of excess floating plants from my tanks. I leave enough behind so the next Saturday I'm back removing them all over again. Are they perfect? Eh, probably not, but they do suck up nitrates quite well. Duckweed grows the most prolifically in my tanks, but frogbit and salvinia are doing pretty well also. Red root floaters seem to have largely given up the fight. I also have water hyacinths floating around in three of the four tanks. Oh, and water sprite. I've got Seachem Denitrate in both of my canister filters (though I think they called it something else when I bought it Matrix! That's it!) and frankly I don't know if it works or not. It can't hurt and might help, but I haven't noticed any huge swings in my tanks with it. I tried making a deep mud bed in a tank once using an old two liter bottle with the top cut off and filled it with top soil and capped it with some sand. As far as I could tell it just took up space. Maybe there wasn't enough of it. Maybe it needed a slow rate of water flowing through it instead of just sitting there. Who knows, but it didn't really impress me and I never repeated the experiment. The theory was if things went bad, it would be easy to remove the bottle. Things didn't go bad, but I didn't notice any real change either. My outdoor water garden has water lilies and a lotus in it and they're all planted in top soil and the water quality out there is nearly perfect year round, which is kind of amazing since there's no filtration at all. My limited experiment in the tank though showed no real change.

The authors of that article probably don't understand that there are two types of bloodworms. The marine bloodworms they link to are those used for catching fish and are large to very large and not typically used to feed our pet fish. The fish food type bloodworms are freshwater and the larvae of midge flies. They're completely different animals. The bloodworms I'm allergic to are the fish food type and the little guys up to an inch or so in length. They're the midge fly larvae. The bloodworms they link to are the worms that stay worms their whole lives and get quite large, often a foot or more in length. If you've got big fish you could feed them the bigger bloodworms, but if I was guessing, I'd bet the person mentioned was feeding her fish the midge fly larvae instead.

With me it's just the freeze-dried ones. The frozen have no impact. The freeze-dried have my eyes and nose running like mad. I've fed the live ones in the past with no issues either. I used to handfeed live bloodworms to my Rock Beauty and Mandarin back when I had a marine tank. No problems whatsoever, but the freeze-dried ones just kill me.

You might consider adding some floating plants also. They can help suck up excess nitrates and are easy to remove when they get overgrown. Plants like frogbit, red root floaters, and dwarf water lettuce are especially easy to control. Duckweed is more of a pain, but it really absorbs nitrates.

There are roughly a gazillion factors on the amount of stock that an aquarium can support. The size and health of the bacterial colony being the biggest. If you've got the right bacteria in the right amounts there's really no upper limit on how much stock a tank can hold. If you don't, even one fish can be one too many. It's best to start small and slowly ramp up capacity.

Plecos are pretty tough little fish. You can pretty much assume he's well until proven otherwise. Put some food in just before the lights go off and chances are it'll be gone in the morning.

Mark Cauvain from the YouTube channel "Mark's Aquatics" Has done a few shows on collecting wild food from puddles in Great Britain. He's got a pretty good channel. He recently dropped a rock through the base of his palaudarium (sp?) and is regrouping from that.

Sure. The Fluval/Marina breeder boxes use an airlift to move water from the tank to the breeder box and then it flows through the breeder box before overflowing back into the tank. You could simply fill the breeder box with some crushed coral and the water would flow over/through it and then back out into the tank picking up the calcium along the way. The flow rate is adjustable also using a valve that's included with the boxes.

Crushed coral is the best long term, slow and steady method of raising KH. There are all kinds of ways to deploy it. You can fill an old-school box filter with crushed coral and run an airline to it and it'll work a bit faster than mixing it in the gravel and give you more control without costing you space in your existing filter, though it does take up space in the tank. You can also fill an external breeder box (the Marina/Fluval ones for example) with crushed coral and hook up the airline to them and slowly circulate tank water through the crushed coral. The breeder box can hang on the back of your tank and be largely unnoticeable. You don't need one of the big ones for this purpose. If money is no object, you could plumb in a reactor (more commonly used in marine tanks) and fill it with crushed coral. Things like Wonder Shell and the cuttlebones sold for pet birds can also be used.

Bloodworms are midge fly larvae. Midge flies spend most of their life as larvae (what hobbyists call bloodworms) and only a few days/weeks as adults. They can live as long as two to three years as larvae. Midge flies are absurdly common, there are reportedly over 1,100 species in North America alone. Many aquarium plants are grown in open ponds in places like Florida or overseas, then shipped to wholesalers, and retailers. A few companies (Denerle, Tropica) grow most of their plants in greenhouses where the odds of anything unwanted getting in is slimmer, but even then a rogue bloodworm would not be unusual. Keeping midge flies away from water is nearly impossible and sooner or later one would penetrate even the most secure of greenhouses and lay eggs. Those eggs would become blood worms and live for 1-3 years as bloodworms before emerging as flies again. You basically got free fish food with your plant. It's nothing to worry about.

Yeah, the rainwater by itself would do little. It's a predator versus prey issue. Our fish tanks tends to have far more predators than prey which makes supplemental feeding necessary. If you have one lion and a thousand zebras, the lion will do fine. If you have a thousand lions and one zebra, things tend not to go so well. In the wild, fish can forage for food. If they strip a rock clean they can swim a hundred feet downstream to a rock that's still covered and feast on it. The rock they'd stripped clean will then have a chance to regrow and be ready for another feast in a bit. Most of us don't have fish tanks large enough to allow a fish to swim a hundred feet away to forage for food. They're trapped in a relatively small box. When they've eaten all of the food that's available, it's gone and they're still trapped in the box. They'll be forced to nibble on whatever they can find and eat stuff as it grows, but that's not typically enough to sustain them. The fish density in our aquariums is typically many times that of what would be found in the wild. Some fish, cory catfish being a good example, show the foraging instinct through their glass surfing. When there's food readily available they burrow down and chomp away. As soon as the food is gone they start looking to move outwards to find more food which ends up with them coming up against a glass wall that they then cruise up and down trying to find a way around or through it. To grow enough aufwuch to sustain even a single oto long term would require quite a large tank with very limited stocking, Putting rocks, driftwood, tank decorations outside in water and letting stuff grow on them then rotating them into the tank could be useful, but labor intensive. And there's some risk of bringing in the wrong stuff.

I have water that's very high in iron and it stains lots of stuff orange/red, but it doesn't stain the water. The plastic bottles I use to hold spare tank water all get an orange-ish/reddish coloration over time. It looks like you have driftwood in the tank, it's possible your pH has dropped a bit and the more acidic water is leaching more tannins from the driftwood. Driftwood breaks down over time in an aquarium also and it's possible a section has deteriorated and released a pocket of more tannin rich material. Those would be my best guesses.

I have the same one and it works great. I use it for a lot of stuff besides my fish. If I'm frying some food, it gives me a nearly instant read on the oil temperature. I also use the laser pointer on it to annoy my cats and also the fish who love to chase the red dot. It's a good tool.

Goldfish tend to produce a lot of waste as they eat a lot of food. I'd go with at least two bigger sponge filters and watch the water quality but as biofilters go, sponges are hard to beat. It should be okay in terms of biofiltration.

I don't think pure oxygen would be harmful to your fish as fish are packed with pure oxygen for shipping on a regular basis. It's pretty much the norm for long-term shipping, so it wouldn't be overly harmful. Would it help them? Eh, probably not. Unless your fish are gasping at the surface each morning when the lights come on, your plants are unlikely to be adding too much CO2 and using up enough oxygen overnight to make adding supplemental oxygen necessary. My plants don't typically pearl during the day as I don't add supplemental CO2, but first thing in the morning there will be some pearling as the plants take advantage of the CO2 produced overnight.

If you have a basement, they tend to stay pretty cool in the summer months. Moving the tank down there and setting it on the floor, should keep it quite cool. Another alternative is once you get a few feet deep into the ground temperatures tend to drop into the 50s and 60s. You could run a loop of tubing out a window and down into the ground and circulate the tank water through that loop using a pump to cool the tank. It would be a bit of a pain to set up initially, but would be a cheap and effective option.

Mussel procreation is interesting. The Wisconsin Division of Natural Resources has a nice article on it. Female mussels must be downstream of male mussels in order for the sperm to reach them, The eggs then are fertilized and the female mussel holds them until they develop into larvae called glochidia. At that point she then releases them and they need to find a fish host to latch onto. Most glochidia are very host specific and need a very specific fish to latch onto. Without that host, they die. If they try to latch onto just any old fish, they die. If they don't find a host, they die. (As long as puffers weren't a host fish, the puffers as mussel eater plan should work.) It's not easy being a baby mussel. After a few days to a few weeks the glochidia float off their host fish and settle into the substrate as mussels. They can take from two to nine years to mature and can live as long as 70 or more years. (Assuming there are no hungry puffers around.) If you're a Marimo Moss ball importer, keeping a few eagle-eyed puffers with an appetite for mussels in the tanks with the moss balls might just solve the problem. Though it's largely a matter of closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out as zebra mussels are pretty much everywhere already. Moss balls are a minuscule part of the problem. According to the US Fish and Wildlife folks as of 2011 zebra mussels had been found in all of the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, California. Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. And that was ten years ago. I'm betting they're even more widespread now and not because of moss balls. I'm kind of betting they're everywhere now and not just in the thirty states listed back in 2011. (New Jersey isn't listed on that list, but also has them.) Their presence on aquarium plants is likely to have a minimal impact in the real world problem.

I may be way off base on this, but it's occurred to me that putting puffers in with moss balls should eliminate any mussels on the moss balls. Puffers eat things like mussels and have a seemingly insatiable appetite, so combining mussel infested moss balls and puffers should end up with fat, happy puffers and no mussels on or in the moss balls. Kind of a win-win solution to the problem.

Wild caught fish often come to you as adults. It's what those catching them caught, so you get old fish that may be near the end of their lifespan. Add in the stress that goes along with being wild-caught and going through the shipping process, and it's something of a miracle any ever live. I wouldn't stress out about it too much.

Ah! That depends. There's stainless steel and then there's stainless steel. The mesh posted is a 304 grade stainless steel, which, if correct, is pretty safe for aquarium use. 316 stainless steel is better and has more corrosion resistant properties, but is much more expensive. You see lots of "stainless steel" stuff rusting rather badly these days as it's not up to grade. I've heard of people with high end "stainless steel" appliances who find they're rusting in a year or two after purchase. Not good. In terms of "fish net" material, oddly enough a fabric store is a good place to look. They tend to sell lots of mesh type fabrics I'd wash anything very well to be sure there were no dyes or enhancers in the fabric if using cloth though.

You could try siliconing another piece of glass over the cracked area, but I wouldn't use the tank someplace where water damage would be an issue.

I use crushed coral in my tanks as my water has high iron hardness, but quite literally no calcium hardness. I don't generally mix it in the gravel though I simply add it to my canister filters. That gives me more control over it. If you're planning to get your discus from an online vendor (aquabid, ebay, etc.) you can typically email them through the site and ask them what their pH and water parameters are. You may be surprised to find that some are raising the discus in water not unlike your own. (Hint: Don't tell them your parameters first or they'll magically have the same parameters to get you to buy their fish.) If you're getting your discus through a local store, things get iffier. It takes days/weeks for a fish to adjust to new water and unless a local fish store has had them for a while the discus are likely still adjusting to that store's water. The store could have water exactly like yours, but if the discus have only been in that water a few hours or days, it doesn't really help a lot.