gardenman

Otos are one of those fish that the more you try to breed them the harder it seems to be. When you're not trying they suddenly spawn like oversexed rabbits. A local fish store might be more than willing to take them off your hands. They're a fairly high demand fish with a limited supply.

Exactly what I was going to say. Your bunched plants are too bunched as planted. I tend to plant mine a half inch or more apart. If they're still bundled with a rubber band or weight, unbundle them. Keeping them planted will be a challenge as they like to float free until they get well rooted, but they do need space between each stem.

Viruses in koi were a big deal a few years back (probably over a decade now). Whole koi farms and ponds were wiped out. Most koi producers now test regularly and certify their koi as being virus-free.

As is typically the case, it depends. No one in the wild is wading in streams and putting root tabs around for val and sagittaria. If you've got a rich, nutritious substrate, odds are you don't need to use root tabs. If you're trying to grow them in pure sand, they'll need some supplementation.

Stem plants have an annoying habit of not staying planted unless weighted down. And the weights can cause issues of their own if they're applied too tightly. And if they're not applied tightly enough the plants can still slip free and become free floating. Getting stem plants to stay in place long enough to set roots and anchor themselves can be a challenge. I cheat. I use small plastic cups that cat food came in and fill them with my tank substrate that I wet down. Then I cover the makeshift pots with plastic wrap and secure that with a rubber band. I then use a small artist paintbrush handle to poke holes in the plastic wrap and through the substrate and as I slide out the paintbrush handle I slide in the plant stem. I can squeeze ten or so stems into the pot in this manner and then set the pot in my aquarium for a few weeks until the plants root and get a firm grip. The plastic wrap helps to hold the stems in place. Once well rooted and actively growing I can then remove the pot from the tank, carefully slice/tear off the plastic wrap and the plants should have nice roots, be used to my lights/water and can be more easily planted and stay in place. I just got an order of red ludwigia in today and managed to pot up five full pots of it in this manner with nothing floating (so far anyway.) The ludwigia was supposed to be 5"-10" but arrived more like 18"-24" long so I ended up with a lot more stems than anticipated as I trimmed it back and planted the cuttings. I'd been planning for two to three cups and I ended up with five. Not a bad problem to have. Here are some photos of the process and one of the cups in a tank. After a few days to a week to adjust to the tank they should start growing pretty well. Once I'm confident they're all rooted (maybe a month from now) I'll pull a pot and check it out. If there are roots galore I'll them move the plants to their permanent spaces and they should have a better chance to stay in place. This gives me a way to reuse those empty cat food cups and keep my newly planted stem plants in place.

Just be forewarned, the prices of good privately bred guppies can be a bit of a shock if you're used to local fish store prices. Twenty or more dollars per fish aren't uncommon.q

One of the advantages of getting older is you learn that the sky isn't always falling. In my lifetime (62 years) we've all been doomed to nuclear obliteration. It hasn't happened yet. We were going to be burned alive by the hole in the ozone layer. You don't hear much about that these days. We were all going to be attacked by killer bees. It turns out they're not as dangerous as thought. We were in an ice-age for about three years in the early seventies when things were a bit cooler than normal. The reactionaries wanted to immediately stop construction and raze every town and community north of our big cities to build manmade mountains with steel spines to shatter the soon to be approaching glaciers. I still haven't seen one of those glaciers. For a few years they insisted the Gulf Stream was irrevocably moving up the east coast and NJ would have Miami-like weather. Unless Miami is a lot colder than I thought, that hasn't happened. More recently there was to be a wave of pesticide resistant bedbugs spreading across the country and attacking us all. There have been more turning points of one sort or another where we had to act or disaster would befall us than I can even count, yet the predicted disaster never comes. Are zebra mussels going to destroy the planet? Nah. They've been here (much of the country) since the eighties and are likely everywhere that's compatible with them already to some degree. Preventing them from moving from one waterway to another is nearly impossible. Wading birds like herons and egrets tend to transport anything in one waterway to another waterway as they meander around the country. Add in boaters and anyone or anything that touches infested waters and could transport zebra mussels and you'll quickly realize they're not going to be stopped and moss balls are the least of the ways they'll spread. It's just the newest "Oh my God! We've got to do something!" cause for the alarmists. I know, I know, "You don't understand! This isn't like all of the other times people have insisted disaster is imminent! This time it's real!" It's just that when the "experts" have been wrong so many, many times before, that it's kid of hard to believe any new disaster that's predicted. Could zebra mussels from moss balls escape into the wild? Sure. They could also be transported from any of the thousands of already infected lakes, rivers, waterways in dozens, perhaps hundreds of ways that are more likely than through moss balls. Would I prefer moss ball not to have zebra mussels? Yeah. Am I going to bleach everything within a hundred miles of a moss ball to ensure one doesn't escape? No. There are many other more likely ways, for zebra mussels to move to uninfested waterways than moss balls.

"And because this hobby is applied biology, there either are no rules, or the rules have so many exceptions that there might as well be no rules." Yeah, do what works for you. Every tank is different. There are a gazillion variables and you can't control most of them. Just be adaptable, be prepared to pivot and change direction, and by and large things should work out for you. Even the rock solid rules like "Ammonia is toxic to fish" has an exception in that in low pH tanks it's significantly less toxic and maybe not even toxic at all if the water temp is cool enough. According to an article titled "More on Ammonia, pH & Water Temperature" written by Chuck Dinkel, Maryland TIC and by D. Dent – Ecological Labs Inc. At 4 degrees Celsius (pretty darn cold) and a pH of 6.0 (moderately acidic) fish can survive 200 ppm of ammonia. Keep the pH the same and bump the temp up to a more comfy 20 degrees Celsius and they can only tolerate 50 ppm. Keep the temp at 20 Celsius and raise the pH to 8.4 (moderately alkaline) and the fish can only tolerate 0.21 ppm of ammonia. Crazy, huh? A hobbyist who keeps his fish at a pH of 6.0 might insist there's no issue with his ammonia at 10 ppm while someone with a tank with a pH of 8.4 might find it impossible to keep fish alive with ammonia at less than one ppm. Our fish tanks are complicated, confusing, and often contradictory in how they work. Just do whatever works for you and don't be afraid to break a rule or two, or twenty for that matter. If your fish are happy, your plants are happy, and things are going well, you're doing the right things regardless of what the "experts" say.

Yeah, most of the dipping and whatnot is to get rid of snails and snail eggs. Anything you find in the way of a worm on a plant is likely a detritus worm or the like and fish will consider it food if they stumble across it. I don't run especially sterile tanks, so I welcome pretty much any kind of life that wants to settle into my tanks. If there's something obvious like a leech or fluke on a plant I'll squish it and get rid of it, but by and large I just let nature take its course in my tanks. It works for me. If you're trying to win an aquascaping contest and create a showpiece tank, you'll use a different set of standards. I tend to be more fish-centric though and as long as my fish are happy and healthy, I'm happy.

I don't do much other than look the plants over to be sure there's nothing overly obnoxious (leeches for example) clinging to the plants. I like snails so they're not an issue for me. If it's a plant that's prone to shedding (cabomba, etc.) I may swirl it a bit in a bowl in some tank water to try and shake loose any of the already loose bits before it goes into the tank, but that's about the limit of my effort. If the plant is a cutting (and nearly all bunch plants are) I'll take a look at the cut end and see its condition. If it's already soft or rotting I may cut that part off and get some nice fresh, rot-free stem to tuck into the soil as rotted stuff won't produce roots. (If I leave a bit of good growth on the part I cut off I'll leave that floating to see if it grows. If it does, great. If not a quick scoop while I'm feeding the fish later will remove it.) If the plants are in pots, I pop them out of the pot, tease off the rock wool as much as possible and examine the roots for any obvious hitchhikers like a leech. I'll examine the plant also. Plants like crypts often come with multiple plants in a pot that can be teased apart and planted separately. You may buy one plant and find you have three or four in the pot. I've got fifteen (or so) stems of red ludwigia coming and i'ts grown outdoors in a Florida pond so I'll give it a bit of a closer look than some other plants, but I've bought plants from that vendor before with no issues. Plants that have been grown in greenhouses like the Denerle or Tropica ones, or the ones grown from tissue-cultured plants, seldom have any issues at all. Stuff harvested from the wild is a bit iffier, but generally pretty safe.

Under the right conditions just about anything can be considered a weed. I don't find java moss to be overly annoying though. (At least compared to duckweed.) Maybe once every three months I'll go through and remove a bowl of java moss from my four tanks. I take out a big bowl of duckweed and assorted floaters every Saturday. Java moss is growing most robustly in my ten gallon quarantine tank right now (even pearling pretty briskly) and will get thinned out in a few days as I've got some red ludwigia coming that will end up in there. I had a big raft of it growing in my thirty high on the filter spray bar that I removed a while back and it hasn't regrown much. It won't stay floating in a tank. It'll either settle to the bottom or hang up on something like a spray bar, heater, filter tube, etc. and grow from there. I don't find it a problem. I've heard people saying it's impossible to get rid of and you should never put it in your tank, but it's not really a problem for me. At least so far.

Some plants don't like you adding new plants. My thirty high had a jungle of jungle val in it. Absolutely lush and thriving. I was having to trim it on a weekly basis and could have supplied a small pet shop with the runners it produced. Then I found a really big and beautiful Madagascar lace plant at a great price and brought it home and plopped it in the tank. Within days all of the val melted away to nothing. And I mean nothing. The water parameters were all the same. The lighting was the same. The only thing that changed was adding the lace plant and the val just disappeared. Why? I have no idea. In the above water plant world some plants emit hormones to discourage nearby plants and my best guess is something like that happened here and the val was very susceptible to whatever the lace plant emitted, but it was amazing (in a bad way) to watch. Maybe your moss is doing something similar. If you have a spare tank you could move the moss to you might see the other plant rebound.

Goldfish will largely view some plants as the local salad bar, so beware of that. The java ferns, anubias, and crinum should survive okay though. The red dwarf lily will likely be okay also, but will want some root zone fertilization. It's a heavy root feeder. Don't freak out if some plants don't survive. I have four planted tanks with nearly identical conditions and some plants thrive in one, survive in another, and die in another. There's little rhyme or reason to it. I tend to buy plants in multiples and spread them out among my tanks. (Often you get multiple plants in one package if you're willing to separate them.) When I find a tank that makes a plant happy, I'll keep that plant there. If a plant isn't happy in a tank I'll move it to another one and hope for the best. I've got fifteen stems of red ludwigia coming and each tank will get some and I'll see where it wants to grow. It should do well in at least one of my four tanks. I have no idea which tank or tanks it will do well in, but it'll let me know. I find plants more challenging than fish. I can move my fish from tank to tank and they don't blink. The plants are a whole different story though.

It wasn't really a vacation, but when I broke my left femur I was in the hospital for fifteen days and my fish were unfed the whole time and did okay. My swordtails decided that the pond snails that they share the tank with were better than nothing in the way of food and ate them all. The swordtails were still fat and happy when I got back home, but the tank was littered with empty snail shells. Once I started feeding the fish again the snail population rebounded and the snails and swordtails are back living together with no issues.

Reducing water flow is easy. You can simply put a tee fitting and valve on the return to the tank. One side of the tee goes to the tank and the other side goes back to the sump. Simply opening and closing the valve regulates the water flow to the tank. You waste a bit of energy but you can fine tune the flow to whatever you want that way. If you too weak of a pump you can't dial it up.

I wouldn't. In the above water plant world, plants store all kinds of nutrients/carbohydrates in even seemingly dead stems/leaves. I would assume a similar situation took place with aquatic plants. If they fall off and float around, feel free to remove them, but as long as they're attached to the plant, I'd leave them be. They might help the plant to recover.

It's not looking good. I'd just leave it and hope for the best. Crypts are generally pretty tough little plants. I would definitely rethink using the root tabs too near it though. Something's gone seriously wrong with it.

You're on the right track. Just remember to include the sump volume in the five times overturning. A large sump can add a significant amount of water to the system. And the estimated flow rate from the pumps is often a bit overstated by the manufacturers. Your return line is likely to have some bendiness in it which will reduce the flow rate a teeny bit also. The flow rates they post are often under ideal conditions with no bends, elbows, etc. that you're likely to include to get the water from the sump to the tank. Most pumps can be tuned downward in flow rate if need be but they can't be tuned upwards. Better to overbuy on the pump if possible. Assuming a 30 gallon sump to keep the same 150 gallon water volume you now have, turning over five times an hour, you'd be looking for a flow of 750 gallons per hour at five feet in height.

Flourish always looks like that in my experience and always has a bit of a smell. I keep mine in the fridge and just give it a good shake before using it.

It's called pearling. When plants are happy, actively growing, and feeling good, they pearl. (They'll also pearl sometimes when none of that is happening and there just happens to be a lot of dissolved gases in the water, like after a big water change.) As a general rule though, it's a good thing. Plants pull in CO2 and exhale oxygen. What you're seeing is a plant exhaling a lot of oxygen.

That little pink shoot is now an inch tall and growing well and a second shoot has emerged also. These bulbs grow insanely well when they actually grow. The first one is still just sitting there after nine plus weeks. This one is doing amazing in three plus days. Quite the contrast.

From a purely gardening standpoint, filling a hanging basket with garden soil is a bad idea for the plants in the hanging basket. Garden soil tends to compact and becomes an issue in a hanging basket. A potting mix is far better for hanging baskets than garden soil. If however you use just plain old garden soil (topsoil) it shouldn't cause much trouble for the aquarium/tub below it. I use topsoil for my water lilies and lotus and the plants and fish do great. A potting mix can cause more trouble for the tub under it as they're typically fertilized with time release fertilizer that could leach out and many are peat based which could lower the pH and hardness of the water beneath them. If the soil or plants planted in the basket have been treated with an systemic insecticide, things could get unpleasant for any fish beneath the basket. Systemic insecticides are often applied as granules on the soil surface and then absorbed into the plant through watering. If any traces remained in the soil surface it could be leached into the tank/tub beneath it and poison the fish. Systemic insecticides are very commonly used in commercial greenhouses so if you're buying plants for the hanging basket there's a reasonable chance they've had a systemic insecticide applied at some point. In some cases some commercial greenhouses just mix it into the potting soils they use. (A systemic insecticide moves into the plant's circulatory system making the whole plant poisonous to an insect that tries to feed on it.) The chlorine would be an issue for fish in the tub. It's not great for plants either. Much as our fish tanks are a thriving mass of living stuff, so too should be the soil for plants. Good healthy soil contains all kinds of life from bacteria, to fungi, and nematodes and more. Chlorine kills much of the stuff that's good in soil, just as it kills much of the good stuff in aquariums. If you have a choice, you'll find plants do better with rain water than treated water. Those who grow insectivore plants typically water them with distilled water or rainwater with no chlorine or fluoride and minimal or no minerals. You mention soot and I have no idea where that comes from based on your post.

Silly question, but what does membership cost?

With African cichlids, I would add them all at once. Established African cichlids tend to stake out territory and attack anyone who enters "their" space. By dumping them all in at once no one has established territory. They're more apt to get along better all being plopped in at once. There will be no pecking order established to start with that the new fish will have to figure out.

I build my own canopies so the fish have jumping room and top them with the thin acrylic used as window glass replacement. Mine don't bow, but they're glued to the canopy so there's no wriggle room for them. I even put my LED lights right against them with no issues. Here's a photo of one with the front door open looking up at the acrylic and light. I use the PVC trim boards for the canopy construction as it's waterproof and never rots. It's also easy to clean should the need arise and it's naturally white so it reflects light on the inside, but also holds paint well so the outside can be easily painted black. I've had this one in use for three or four years now with no bowing. or issues of any sort.