gardenman

Ugh! Fed-Ex now claims they tried to deliver my package this morning but I wasn't here to receive it. Uh, no. I've been within ten feet of my front door since about six this morning. I was literally six feet away from it at 7:45 AM when they say they tried to deliver it. This isn't even a package I have to sign for, so I'm not sure what kind of weird game they're playing. As a rule Fed-Ex just throws (literally) a package on my front porch and scurries off. They never check to see if I'm here or not. Their own "detailed tracking" still shows it to be in their sorting facility. I'm fed up with Fed-Ex.

If the ammonia truly tests at zero then ammonia didn't kill the fish. Newly bought fish often tend to die simply due to the stress they've been under getting to your home. Fish bought in a LFS (local fish store) often originated overseas, either wild caught or bred in captivity. They were then bagged in large quantities and shipped to an importer. There they would have been poured from the bags into holding tanks. They aren't always handled perfectly at this stage as all the importer cares about is keeping them alive long enough to sell them. Any dead fish would have been removed, but significant losses can occur at that stage of the process. Ten to twenty percent dead at that stage of the process is not unusual. The importer then sells them to a wholesaler. They're bagged once again and shipped off to the wholesaler who then dumps then into holding tanks. The wholesaler typically doesn't do much for the fish other than remove the dead. The big wholesalers then typically sell the fish either to a company like Petsmart or to regional middlemen who then sell the fish to local fish stores. Those sold to chains like Petsmart go to their main locations to then be distributed to local stores. A fish you find in your local store may have been caught, transported, dumped in different water, five, six, seven times or more in the time from when they were caught until they reached your local store. At each stage, they were viewed as stock and the only goal of those holding them was to keep them alive long enough to sell them. Most of the fish you find in stores have been through heck and back and are lucky to be alive. But stress can kill and those fish have seen a lot of stress. Many have gone days or even a week or longer with little or no food. (Well fed fish tend to pollute the shipping water with their waste so those shipping fish will often deprive them of food for days before shipping them.) They'll have been caught and moved an insane number of times. They'll have experienced vastly different water on multiple occasions. To say they're a bit stressed would be an understatement. You as an aquarist think you must have done something wrong when newly bought fish die on you, but in many cases you didn't. I really love the idea of a regional fish farm where every fish sold through the place was raised in that one location and treated like a valued pet the whole time and not a stock item. The startup costs for such an operation would be enormous, but such a system would be better for the fish and ultimately the aquarium keepers.

One final note, take photos and video as you're opening the box. Note the delivery time and the time you're opening the box. Screenshot the delivery notice from whichever shipper is delivering the fish to you. You can prove you did nothing wrong that way. Also read up on the acclimation instruction by the provider. They may be counter to what you think is right, but if you don't do it their way, they can reject your claims if they're really tacky. Also don't assume the fish are dead until proven dead. Some fish can revive from a seemingly dead state when placed in good water. Good luck!

A Matten filter is basically a giant sponge filter. In smaller tanks it'll go across one whole end of the tank. In a larger tank it's typically placed in a corner and curved and held in place by some plastic/acrylic. An airlift tube or small pump is used to move water from behind the sponge which is then replaced by water flowing through the sponge. Many believe it to be the best form of filtration currently available. Swiss Tropicals were the first US company that I'm aware of that sold Matten filters but they've been building a following over the years. They're a very easy, efficient, relatively low cost, very low maintenance filter that's largely foolproof. It's a tough combination to beat. (And yet I don't use one. Hmmm...)

Shipping is a big issue right now. It frustrates those on both ends of the sale. The shipping firms are all a mess right now. I paid extra for two day shipping on a recent order and it's now day eight despite that. The seller is upset as his orders are all dying in the hands of the shipper and he'll have to refund the buyers. The buyers are upset at getting dead fish. It's not a good time to be shipping live stuff. If you do go ahead anyway, try to prepare the fish as much as humanly possible for spending up to ten days in shipping. That would mean a heavily insulated box, packing them with pure oxygen, including decent sized pieces of poly-filter material to help absorb waste, smaller numbers of fish in slightly more water. Double bagging at the very least, and maybe triple bagging. I would largely ignore heat or cold packs as they have limited effective use time (72 hours at most) and just insulate the heck out of the boxes to keep their temps stable. All of that costs you money though, but it may be necessary until shipping gets sorted out.

The type of filter needed is more dictated by the bioload you'll be adding. Six angelfish and a school of tetras could be handled fine by matten or sponge filters. They're not especially messy fish. Six big Oscars would be a whole different story. The plants (a lovely tank in the photo by the way) will help process the fish waste. Things will take a while to go bad in a bigger tank, so you can play around with filtration a bit until you find what works for you. But for angelfish and small tetras in a five hundred, I'd start out small and scale up as need be. It's good to remember also that a heavily planted tank may create more debris that could block an overflow for a sump which could lead to flooding. A loose bigger leaf or two in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead to all kinds of chaos. If the flow to the overflow got blocked, the pump in the sump would drain the sump into the tank, overflowing the tank, burning out the pump and likely any heater in the sump. In an office setting that could be a serious issue. (It's not fun anyplace, but in a fishroom the occasional flood is less of an issue.) A series of matten filters or sponge filters are much less likely to cause chaos. (Assuming you install check valves on the airlines feeding them.)

I'm in a similar situation. I've got eight mystery snails that were bagged and shipped on 2/28 and were supposed to be delivered on 3/02. Suffice to say Fed-Ex two day shipping wasn't two days and they're still out there (on 3/08) meandering around the country. I've set up a large breeder box for them should any be alive when/if Fed-Ex ever decides to deliver them. They'll be starving if alive and I can do some intensive feeding in the breeder box. I've got a batch of Repashy made up for them and added an algae covered anubias for them to munch on also. The breeder box will also be much shallower than the tank, so they won't have to climb high to get to air. I'll temperature acclimate them, but then plop and drop. Snails are messy to transport small distances. Their shipping water is typically a bit murky/muddy after a day or two of shipping. We're on day nine (I think) now, so their water will be a mess. Fed-Ex blames the delay on severe winter weather, but the coldest day at any of their stops had a high of 46 and at no stop was there any ice, snow, or other precipitation, so Fed-Ex is lying. These are biggish snails at one inch, so I'm not optimistic any will be alive, but if they are, I've got a snail ICU set up for them to make life as easy for them as possible once they finally get here. Assuming they ever get here. Breeder boxes are handy gadgets to have for such situations.

For anyone wondering, this is what a ripe female Super Red Bristlenose pleco looks like. You'll notice she's quite roundish in the body compared to a "normal" pleco. She is quite likely rather full of eggs and just waiting for the male to notice. Sadly, he's not really noticing so far. He has checked out one of the caves a few times today and given it a cursory cleaning, but his heart isn't into it just yet. Hopefully in a day or two he'll get a bit more motivated.

A large sump system filtering multiple tanks gives you more stability. A ten gallon tank can crash pretty quickly. Twenty ten gallon tanks with a fifty gallon sump gives you 250 gallons of water which is a bit more stable. As a general rule with aquariums, the more water volume you have, the more stable a system stays. Things can go wrong quicker in small volumes of water than in large volumes of water. With every tank connected, you're dealing with a much larger pool of water. If things do go wrong, they tend to go wrong more slowly and gradually. You can still use sponges and plants in each tank also.

About six months ago I moved some of my older Super Red Bristlenose pleco fry around to other tanks. They were about two inches long when I moved them and unsexable at that size. The two I'd put into my 30 high I'd thought were both males as they chased each other nonstop. A few weeks ago I added seven of the fry from the December spawn into the 30 high to grow out. I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to the two supposed males already in there. They'd largely become background fish who were just there. Yesterday I noticed that one of the two older plecos was getting kind of chubby. A closer look showed that this "male" pleco was in fact a female. The other one is definitely a male, so I've got a young adult pair of Super Reds in that tank now and the female looks pretty ripe. The only real problem is my male in that tank is now largely ignoring her and the caves and just hanging out on the back of the filter tube. I suspect if he showed some interest in her there'd be a new spawn of Super Reds in that tank. She looks primed to spawn, but he's not showing a lot of interest just yet. They're still a bit young, but I suspect I'll see some action there before too long. Neat! I may have to see if I can find some fishy Viagra for the male to speed things up. He's checked out the caves on occasion and was hanging around them for a bit, but now has taken over the filter tube as his hangout. If he continues to appear uninterested I may sneak in a male competitor to fire up the old hormones a bit. A bit of competition tends to stir things up and I've got a lot of males in my fifty who would be only too happy to have a female of their own.

The focus here has been mostly on using drilled tanks for water changes. They can also be used for a central filter system. One large sump filter can handle multiple tanks with just one system that then needs servicing. There's a greater risk of disease spreading unchecked, but that can be minimized through the use of a UV sterilizer.

I use fine pore sponge filters and I don't find that they clog. (I also use mechanical filtration on most tanks with a HOB or canister.) I think a lot of the "gunk" people think is clogging their filter is actually the bacteria that's living in the filter. With a "normal" water flow most sponge filters lack the power to suck in a lot of debris. They're more designed to slowly circulate water through the sponge. Most debris will settle to the bottom of the tank and become mulm rather than get trapped in the filter. If you're using a powerhead on a sponge filter they're more likely to clog, but most sponge filter makers don't recommend using powerheads as slower water flow through a sponge filter is better. If you look at videos of Matten filters in use the water flow is often absurdly slow considering the amount of sponge surface area. When I add food to my one tank that's only filtered by a sponge filter, none of it gets drawn to the filter. A flake will float down an inch (or less) from it and just drop straight down and not move towards the filter at all. They really don't suck in debris with a typical waterflow. I think people see all of the "gunk" that comes out when you clean one and assume it was clogged, but I'm pretty sure that much of what they're washing out is the bacteria they want to keep.

I tend to come down on the "it can't hurt and might help" side of things. I would avoid some of the insanely expensive options, but any of the name brand stuff should work okay. A few years back there was a lunatic fringe company that sold small glass vials of starter bacteria for well over $100 a dose. I would avoid those kinds of products. The "normal" stuff should work okay for you though.

Your problem is you want algae and the aquarium gods are fickle gods. The more you want something, the less likely they are to give it to you. Start chanting "I hate algae!" and the aquarium gods will bestow untold amounts of algae upon you.

Some crushed coral/aragonite mixed in the gravel or stashed in the filter can help a bit.

Mine has gone past the fuzz stage and is just a large brown lump now. I check it every day hoping to see some sign of life, but there's nothing. It's not rotting, so that's good, but it's also not growing. I'm to the point where I want it to do something. Grow, rot, just change in some way. Two months of nothingness is getting a bit tedious.

I use my smartphone to photograph everything when it comes and document everything as I open it. I'll be doing that sometime next week when the eight snails I have coming finally get here, assuming Fed-Ex decides to deliver them. My order is from an e-Bay seller and was bagged and readied for shipment on Sunday with a 72 hour heat pack and insulated shipping container. It was sent Fed-Ex two day delivery and was expected to arrive on Tuesday. It sat in Fed-Ex's Boise facility Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before finally being moved on to Memphis later in the day Wednesday which is where the snails are still as I type this. Fed-Ex insists bad weather slowed the shipment. I looked up the weather in Boise and also Memphis and it's been fine. No precip, moderate temps, and no real weather issues of any kind. The snails should be spending their third day in my tank as I type this, instead they're somewhere in Memphis. I'm not optimistic that they'll be alive when they finally do get here. They still have to go to either to the Philly or Delaware Fed-Ex hubs before they end up on a truck to me. They likely won't be delivered on Saturday or Sunday so that makes Monday the most likely day they'll finally get here. That'll be eight days from the time they were bagged. Suffice to say I'm not happy with Fed-Ex right now.

Would a fish want a bare tank? To a large extent it depends on the fish. Many of our fish come from rivers and don't have crystal clear water. They may avoid plants in the wild. They may be open water fish who like swimming where there's nothing around them to get in their way. They may only venture into the shallow water to hunt for prey then retreat back to the more open area afterward. A beautifully aquascaped, planted tank may be far more foreign and stressful to some fish than a bare tank would be. I've watched a lot of fish collecting videos on Youtube and the different areas they collect certain fish in is amazing. Sometimes they're casting nets in the middle of a river. Sometimes it's right along a shoreline. Sometimes it's in a still lake. It all depends on what kind of fish they're looking for. I've seen them collect fish in water that was so murky that even in the collection container it's hard to see the fish clearly. We tend to take fish from all over the place and plop them in a crystal clear tank with plants from Africa, South or Central America, and weird stuff like castles, shipwrecks, etc, that they'd never see in the wild. Unless a fish came from Texas they likely never saw Texas Holey rock in the wild. We make these tanks using stuff from all over the world to try and recreate a "natural" habitat for the fish that's often something they'd never experience in the wild. We give plecos caves to breed in. In the wild they'd burrow into the mud banks of a river to make their own cave. Most of us don't have deep mud banks in our tanks. Most Oscars you buy these days are raised commercially. They were likely bred and raised to sale size in bare tanks or vats of some sort. They likely have never seen gravel or plants until they hit one of our tanks. They likely have never even seen another type of fish until they hit one of our tanks. They probably spend their first few hours in our tanks going "What the heck is that thing?" They don't know what's safe or dangerous. It's a whole new world for them and likely very, very stressful. A bare tank has less stuff for a fish to stress out about. It's a bare tank. It's likely something they're very used to. Smart fish like Oscars and some of the other bigger cichlids may get bored in a bare tank over time and as they do you can introduce stuff for them to play with or interact with, but to start with, a bare tank may be the least stressful environment for a new Oscar. It's what they're used to.

Zebra Mussels are already here and have been for decades. Power suppliers wouldn't be spending millions removing zebra mussels from water intakes unless zebra mussels were already here. Confiscating moss balls will have exactly zero impact on the situation since the problem's already here and has been here for decades. This is a situation where the government "does something" but achieves nothing. Zebra mussels in an aquarium could become a headache for the aquarist, but in terms of preventing their spread, that's a fight that was lost decades ago.

I have four tanks and I don't mind doing water changes, but the ammonia content of my tap water (well water) is off the scale high. That makes adding "fresh" water more stressful for the fish. I keep my tanks heavily planted and mostly just top off the evaporation with water I store in old kitty litter containers where bacteria in the containers have largely eradicated the ammonia and nitrites, but left behind nitrates, the very thing I'm supposed to be removing with a water change. In most cases the "new" water is of poorer quality than the "old" water I'm supposed to be removing. My fish are thriving in my tanks and so are my plants. (With a few exceptions.)

You're lucky. Here's a photo of mine when it arrived on 1/06/2021 and also a shot of it this morning 3/05/2021. The only difference is mine is now wetter. No growth at all. It's not rotting, so that's good, but it's not growing either. It's just sitting in a big old hole I made in the middle of my planted tank for it. I pulled it out and put it on a paper towel to get a better photo. I've rotated it. Examined it frequently. And nothing. It just sits there. I'm to the point where I'd almost want it to rot so at least I'd know it won't grow. Word of advice to potential buyers, don't make a hole in your planted tank for the lily until you know it'll grow. Otherwise you may be staring at that hole for a couple of months or longer.

I was surprised when my January first order to NJ was shipped without an insulated bag and no heat pack. Nighttime temps were in the twenties and daytime temps were in the thirties/forties. The plants survived but wouldn't have if they'd been left in my mailbox for an hour or two. I bought them in as the mailman was driving away and the plant temps were still in the fifties when I opened the box. I'm early on the mail route and had they been in the unheated mail truck for longer or stuck in the mailbox for long, they'd have been goners. I raised that issue with the Coop customer support and they say they use weather modeling software to determine if heat packs or insulated bags are required. Yeah. If you're shipping something tropical and alive to NJ in January, heat packs and insulated bags are required. The reason I felt comfortable ordering then was due to people here talking about how well packed everything was with insulated bags and heat packs. My $60+ order of plants came with neither. As I told them at least give me the option for a slightly higher fee. I'd gladly cover the cost of the heat pack and insulated bag, but they don't even give you that option. My red dwarf lily is still doing nothing at about eight weeks now since I got it. Is that due to it getting too cool? Is it just a dud? Is it a late starter? I don't know. It's not rotting so that's good, but it's done nothing since I got it. I don't know how cold my plants got along the way I only know how cool they were when I opened the box. I'll likely order from the Coop again, but not in winter. Had I not been there immediately to bring the plants in, they'd have likely all died. If/when I order again it'll be when temps are more moderate. Not too hot or too cold. You just can't safely ship tropical stuff to NJ in January without some protection regardless of what your weather modeling software says.

I have a suspicion egg size matters. Larger eggs like cichlid eggs might be harder for shrimp to handle but the very small, dust-like eggs of something like a neon tetra might get eaten more readily. I'm not speaking from personal experience here, just supposition. Likewise, very small fry might be more susceptible to being eaten by a shrimp as opposed to larger fry like those of a molly or swordtail.

If the other fish in the tank are of decent size, say larger than a guppy, they could eat any pleco fry. Keep that in mind if you do a mixed tank. My swordtails consider baby bristlenose plecos a good treat. Once the babies are an inch or so long they're safe, but until then they're at high risk. I might be a bit nervous about larger female guppies also. Some of them can get pretty big. Small tetras would be ideal tankmates.

Back to the original question, my best guess would be more light. Crinums will survive just about anything, but thrive in medium to high light. If I had to venture a guess I'd say you'd get more crinumy leaves with more light.