gardenman

In the plant world, a plant that doesn't get enough light gets the opposite of stunted, whatever that it. They tend to get leggy as they reach upwards for whatever light they can find. The spacing between leaves gets longer and the plant becomes very thin and spindly as it desperately searches for light. That's assuming there's enough light to grow at all which is a pretty low standard for most plants to meet. In trees, the best trees for lumber are those that grew in a denser forest type setting. The interval between branches, which become knots in lumber, is longer as the trees would grow upwards more searching for light. A tree that grew in the middle of an open field will be a lot knottier than one grown in a dense forest as it didn't have to compete for sunlight and thus didn't grow as much vertically as one in a denser forest. In an aquarium, stunted plants are more likely due to a nutrient deficiency, water temp difference, substrate difference, etc. The reaching for light still happens in aquatic plants, assuming there's enough light to grow at all. Once whatever was causing the problem is resolves growth resumes and you'd never know there was a problem. I wouldn't worry about your plants being permanently stunted.

I saw a funny thing the other day where someone suggested slugs are just snails that lost the house in the divorce. Slugs in the garden are something I've learned to live with. Slugs, much like snails in our tanks, prefer to feed on dead stuff over living stuff. So, when I pull weeds I leave them lying on the ground near the plants I want to protect and the slugs eat those dead weeds rather than my more desirable living plants. By and large that works for me. It makes the garden look a tick messier with dead/dying weeds lying around, but it feeds the slugs and preserves my more important plants. After a few days just the stems remain behind and the slugs will get around to eating those also. I'm not sure if I've trained the slugs to eat the weeds or if the slugs have trained me to leave them dead weeds to eat, but it works. The weeds get pulled, eaten, and the slug poop arguably helps feed the good plants. The pulled weeds also kind of serve like a mulch until eaten by the slugs. I've learned to live in harmony with the slugs and to put them to use. God knows I never run out of weeds to feed them.

You're lucky yours is doing so well. Mine's still just sitting there doing nothing since I got it on January sixth. The good news is it's not rotting, but it's also not growing. It's just lying there. I'm closing in on eight weeks of it doing nothing. It's not a huge problem, but I did clear a nice big space for it and to have no growth is kind of annoying. Still, it's not rotting so there's that. It may still spring to life, but I'm getting a bit doubtful. I think I may have gotten a dud, but then again, maybe not as it's not rotting. I just keep watching it, rotating it, checking it, and wondering if it'll ever show signs of life.

And in an odd quirk, even snails and shrimp that find copper toxic in certain doses need a little copper in their system. Their bodies use copper to make hemocyanin. Hemocyanin is the shrimp/snail equivalent of our hemoglobin. It transports oxygen through the bloodstream. If you could create a copper-free environment for shrimp/snails, they'd die from the lack of copper. They don't need a lot, very little actually, but they need some.

Water circulation in freshwater tanks is of questionable need and can even be detrimental. Having an area where debris accumulates can be helpful in gravel vacuuming and tank maintenance. You know where the bad stuff is and can focus on that one part of the tank. Just the movement of fish through the water helps to circulate it some. If you're keeping fish that are used to high flow rates like hillstream loaches and the like, more circulation is better, For most freshwater tropical fish though less circulation is better. In the marine aquarium world where you're often keeping reef fish that are used to waves breaking over/around them, it's a different story. They often need more current and the back and forth flow of water as waves roll in and out. As a rule, freshwater fish don't deal with waves or strong currents all that often.

I've never seen it. I used a fairly coarse black gravel in with my goldfish a few years back and goldfish being goldfish would mouth the gravel and eventually chewed off most of the black leaving just some odd grey looking gravel in its place. They lived a normal life and never had any unusual issues. I wouldn't worry about it.

My goldfish don't eat duckweed unfortunately. Even in my outdoor pond they just push it aside to get to the pellets. I guess if I starved them enough they'd eat the duckweed but I prefer not to starve my fish to get them to eat stuff I don't like.

Yeah, I feel you. If I reach into the tank to do anything my arm comes out coated with duckweed. I keep towels by my tanks and they're layered in duckweed from where I've dried my hands on them. It's here, there, and everywhere. All it takes in one tiny little piece of duckweed and before long you're buried in the stuff.

Yeah, sure you can. Just scoop it out. (Ha!) Sadly duckweed is not that easy to get rid of. If you're not willing to live with duckweed for the rest of your life, and possibly longer. don't get started with it. There are much better floaters that you can legitimately just scoop out, but duckweed, not so much. I'd recommend frogbit as an easy to remove floater. It's big, grows well, but is easy to remove. Dwarf water lettuce would be another option. I've modified a surface skimmer to remove duckweed and it still comes back. The stuff is amazingly persistent. Getting rid of it is much more challenging than just scooping it out. It's very good at removing nitrates though. I remove a big bowl of it every Saturday and by the next Friday you'd never know I'd touched it. Mine started out as one small leaf stuck to a water hyacinth I bought for my water garden that I kept inside until my pond warmed up enough for the water hyacinth. Literally pounds of it have grown from that one leaf.

Other than having to burrow a hole in the duckweed to let the food through, massive amounts of duckweed do no harm. If it crashed and all died at once (highly unlikely) it would be a huge issue, but barring that (and does duckweed ever die on its own?) it should be no problem. I've had over an inch thick bed of duckweed in one tank and the tank was fine. The tank was pretty dark due to all the duckweed, but it was fine otherwise.

I'm a believer in UG filters though I'm not currently using one. My old marine tanks used to flourish with the Nektonics UG filters. The only issue I have with traditional UG filters is that you're not necessarily using all of the gravel as a medium. Water will take the path of least resistance which means areas nearer the lift tubes will get more flow while those farther away may get none. A reverse flow system where filtered water (to remove the suspended gunk) is pumped under the plate of a UG filter and then flows up through the gravel under some force largely solves that issue if the volume of water being pumped in is adequate. Another solution to that might be to have an S-shaped snake-like open channel under the UG filter where air gets pumped in at one end then flows through the snake-like shape to the outlet tube. In theory, this air movement could grab water all along the air channel and pull it to the outlet. The fresh air though could also stratify somewhat and only the air at the top of the channel would move through the system leaving the air/water lower in the channel undisturbed. Some baffles here and there would solve that though. The University of Delaware made a booklet titled "Keeping A Marine Aquarium" by Christopher Valenti many, many years ago that showed how to make your own UG filter. (No copyright date so I don't know when it was published, but in the 70s feels right. To give you some idea of how long ago this was published, the filter recommended to supplement the UG filter was a Dynaflo and was expected to cost $15 for a 20 gal tank.) I may try making a DIY UG filter using their plan and then adding some sliced PVC to make the air channels and see how it works.

If you have a tank with a lot of snails and you're doing water changes, how do you keep the snails from going down the drain? Baby pond snails are very, very small and if you're doing gravel vaccing as you change the water, you'll gravel vac out multiple baby snails. It's not a question of intentionally putting them there as much as could they survive if they ended up there. As Maggie points out ammonia would be an issue. As would soap and detergents. Now all of that could get diluted depending on your water usage so even those factors wouldn't necessarily preclude snails from surviving. I don't think they could ever reach a population density where they'd be a problem, but I could see a scenario where they could survive in a more modern septic system.

The thought behind seahorses is that they're a shallow water fish in the wild. Shallow water is more prone to fluctuations in salinity due to things like heavy rain. Seahorses can be found in the Thames estuary which is brackish due to the Thames River flowing into it. You don't hear of tens of thousands of dead seahorses washing ashore after every heavy rainstorm, so there's some adaptability already there. Seahorses only live 1-5 years, but a female can lay as many as 1500 eggs at a go. That's a lot of fry with some level of genetic variation from fry to fry. Over a ten to twenty year period you could have a hundred generations or more of fry born. A gradual decrease in the salinity over those ten to twenty years, might just produce a true freshwater seahorse. Would it be easy? No. Is it even possible? Maybe not. It could be interesting though.

An advantage to pond snails is they make a good emergency food for your fish also. I broke my femur three years ago and spent 15 days in the hospital. My thirty high had lots of neon swordtails and lots of pond snails when I went into the hospital. When I got back home it still had lots of swordtails, but the snails were gone! The swordtails, who typically ignore them, decided escargot was better than nothing, so they ate the pond snails. There were lots of empty shells, but no snails. The snail population has since rebounded, but it was interesting to see. The swordtails are back to having no interest in the snails again now. When there's nothing else to eat, fish will eat the snails. (At least mine did.)

If you feel you absolutely have to take off the bottom trim, I'd try using a thin narrow metal putty knife around the outside and bottom edge of the trim to try and separate the silicone from the trim. A metal putty knife is handy as you can hone a cutting edge onto it if need be. Most plastic trim is somewhat "L" shaped, so attacking it from both sides should get it free. A heat gun might more melt the plastic than soften the silicone. You pretty much have to cut the silicone to remove it. A thin, narrow, sharpened putty knife should do the trick.

My neighbor recently had a new septic system installed and it's an Aerobic Treatment system with an air pump/blower and multiple chambers. Pond snails could probably survive in such a system. More modern septic designs often incorporate air pumps and don't just rely on anaerobic decomposition. Also even in older systems water dumped into a septic system would have some measure of oxygen in it anyway and some new water would be entering the system fairly regularly. It might be enough to keep a few tough snails alive.

Since guppies are a fresh water fish, transitioning them from brackish water back to freshwater shouldn't be overly challenging. Just do so gradually. I've been intrigued by the idea of a long-term experiment with seahorses to see if you could develop a freshwater seahorse over the course of multiple generations. Seahorses breed fairly easily (by marine fish standards anyway) in aquariums. Start with a largish breeding colony at full salinity then over the course of a few years gradually reduce the salinity generation by generation. Those best suited to survive in the lower salinity would survive while others would die. It could take ten, twenty years to finish, but the ultimate goal would be a full freshwater seahorse that would thrive and reproduce in freshwater. It might not be possible at all, but it could be an interesting experiment. If you could pull it off, the market for a freshwater seahorse could be huge. You could try the same thing with clownfish and other easier to breed marine species also. (The tank space to try and create a freshwater great white shark would be more challenging.) We've seen discus go from only being able to be bred and kept in very acidic, very soft water to fish that can now be kept and bred in nearly any water over multiple generations. Why not try transitioning some popular marine species into freshwater over multiple generations? Freshwater seahorses, freshwater clown fish, I'd keep them if they were available.

Angelfish often outgrow wonky fins and other issues. Give them some time, good food, good water and you might be surprised how good they turn out. In my experience they have weird growth spurts and sometimes during those spurts hey can look a bit off. They ultimately tend to grow into nice fish though. If you look at some very beautiful adult humans and see them as kids you're shocked at how they started and how they ended up. It can be the same with fish. Barring grossly obvious issues (missing fins, bents spines, missing eye, etc.) they'll likely turn into a pretty good, if not exceptional fish.

I use acrylic on my tank covers and it works fine for me. Mind you, it's glued into place, but no warping, no discoloration, and it handles moisture just fine. Here's a photo looking through the door of my thirty high cover up at the lights/acrylic. This is just the window glass replacement acrylic sold at Home Depot or Lowes. (Probably Lowe's but it's been a while since I bought it.)

Spring will be here before you know it. I'm in snowy NJ right now, but my daffodils are a couple of inches out of the ground. They'll start flowering in a few weeks. The most-protected ones anyway. From mid-March on the threat of snow needing shoveling largely disappears. I divide the year into two halves instead of four seasons, the warming half and the cooling half. My daily average temperature bottoms out around January 21st then starts to slowly rise until July 21st when it tops out and starts to decline again. Despite all of the ice, snow and cold, we're now a full month plus into the warming half of the year. That helps me mentally cope with winter. The days are getting longer now, average temps are increasing each day. In another month we'll be two full months into the warming up cycle and the world will look a lot different than it does now. I typically start mowing my grass in the second half of March. A month after that and spring will be in full display with lots of flowers and plants up and growing. In May the threat of frost disappears and the gardening season is in full swing. Then when the brutal heat gets too much, from July 21st on I can tell myself we're in the cooling off half of the year and it'll keep getting better each day. It's a psychological game I play with myself, but it works.

I typically reseal the whole tank when one seam leaks. It's just easier to me. You're going to be dealing with the silicone, the vinegary smell, the scraping, the taping of the edges, anyway, so I just do the whole thing. one tube of silicone tends to go a long way and reusing it months/years later is often impossible so I more or less use it all up at once and end up with an essentially brand new tank. I typically start with the back bottom seam, then the two back side seams so I get some experience handling the silicone again and by the time I get to the front, where it shows, I should be pretty good at it. Be sure to pull your head out of the tank on a fairly frequent basis as the fumes inside can get a bit strong if you keep your head down there too long. Painters tape is your best friend if you want nice looking seams with straight edges. Just put it on the glass leaving an eighth of an inch to a quarter inch of glass showing at the seams (an eighth of an inch if you're supremely confident in the strength of the silicone and a quarter of an inch if you're a bit less confident. Squeeze out the silicone in the space between the taped edges and then smooth it with your finger. Then peel off the tape and voila, clean, straight edges. Easy-peasy. Ventilation is your friend. Your head will be down in that tank from time to time and the fumes can be a bit annoying. Follow the manufacturers directions on how long to let the silicone cure, but I tend to go until I no longer smell the vinegar then wait another day or so. Single edge razor blades do a nice job of removing the old silicone. Some rubbing alcohol preps the seams for resealing. It's not a horrible job, but if you're doing one seam, you might as well do them all.

How many pumps needed? Arguably none. The three sponge filters will prevent stagnation. Most aquarium plants come from largely stagnant ponds/pools or slow moving streams. If you have catfish, plecos, or the like, they'll keep things on the bottom stirred up and moving. If you're injecting CO2 some extra circulation can be handy to disperse it more evenly through the tank, but even that doesn't take much. Most of the wave maker type pumps are more designed for reef tanks where you have waves breaking over the reefs. Most of our freshwater fish never experience waves or super strong currents. Plecos, and hillstream loaches being the exception. Most of the typical aquarium fish just meander about in largely still water. If you see gunk building up someplace you can vacuum it out during a water change.

Overseas flights have been widely disrupted so any fish like hatchets that aren't raised domestically are harder to find right now.

I just got a nano air pump and I was pleasantly surprised by the air output. Mine's more for emergency use and maybe I just got a good one, but it seemed plenty capable of powering a sponge filter and even my K1 fluidized type filter. My plan is to rotate it from filter to filter for five to ten minutes at a time during a power outage. I expect it to give adequate airflow to each of my filters though based on my tests. It could be the power brick you have it plugged into isn't delivering enough power to it. Different chargers provide different amperage levels. The USB plugs on a computer typically deliver 500 mA. A typical older iPhone charger delivers 1,000 mA. Some more modern chargers go much higher. Most of us tend to just use whatever USB brick is lying around, but a different one might give the pump a boost. Especially if the one you have it plugged into is an older model.

If you live in an area where basements are uncommon, your home is likely built on a slab. That solves the weight issue to a large extent. At least on the first floor. If the house has a crawlspace then weight becomes an issue again, but most areas where basements are uncommon (Florida for example) tend to have homes built on a slab. This is especially true of more modern homes. It's just cheaper and easier to build on a slab than to enclose a crawlspace. With the threat of radon gas and other issues (moisture, bugs, etc.) most crawlspaces have to be sealed, typically with concrete, so if you're going to put the concrete down anyway, you might as well just build atop it. Dimensional lumber used for flooring joists has gotten fairly pricey in recent years so if you don't need to use it, most builders won't. Many fish rooms get built in garages, so that's something you might want to keep in mind. You typically already have a solid concrete floor. (If it holds up a car, it'll hold up fish tanks.) Water and power are often nearby. (Hot water heaters tend to live in garages.) The space is typically pretty easy to insulate, heat, cool, and ventilate. There's typically a window or two for ventilation and portable/window air conditioner to use in the summer. Heat can come from a variety of sources depending on your location and needs. Having something like a kerosene heater as a backup can be easily done in a garage also. And getting tanks and racks in and out is very easy with a full garage door that opens and closes. Noise from the air pump shouldn't bother the rest of the house if it's in the garage. You can typically get to and from the garage pretty easily also. A two-car garage gives you lots of space to play with, but even a one-car garage makes a nice sized fish room. Cars don't melt in the rain, so they can be kept outside if need be. Water spilt in a garage isn't a big issue either. Garage floor typically slope to the outside so wet, snowy cars can drip away and the water just runs outside. Garages tend to be made for higher humidity since wet cars end up in them fairly often. Simply Betta on YouTube had converted a spare bathroom into her fish room, but now has her home on the market so the fish room had to be converted back to a bathroom. It's much easier to convert a garage back into a garage. Open the garage door, drag out the fish room stuff and the garage is back to being a garage. A garage can go from a fish room back to a garage in a single day with minimal effort. Also should you have a prolonged power outage, it's pretty easy to set up a generator just outside the garage door and run the cord under the door to power the fish room. (Just watch out for neighbors stealing the generator. A common issue during long power outages.) So, keep in mind garages as much as spare bedrooms when looking at homes in your area. Regardless of the house construction, most garages will hold a fish room quite nicely and have fewer of the problems that you have with a fish room inside a home. Some HOAs get a bit edgy about homeowners leaving a car outside a garage. You'll want to check that out if it's an issue in your area. If no one leaves a car in their driveway, chances are the local HOA prohibits it.