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gardenman

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Everything posted by gardenman

  1. 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.
  2. People tend to think they have to start all over again when a tank crashes. In most cases that's not the case. It's hard to kill bacteria. What happens in a typical crash is the existing bacteria colony simply gets overwhelmed. There's more food (often in the form of a hidden dead fish, snail, etc.) than they can process. More fish die adding even more ammonia to the tank. "My cycle crashed!" In most cases, the cycle is alive and well and thriving, just overwhelmed. Now if you've dosed antibiotics, you can crash the cycle by killing the bacteria, but in most "normal" crashes something died or lots of uneaten food piled up somewhere and overwhelmed the cycle but didn't kill it. Once that situation is resolved the cycle is fine. Maybe even stronger than before. I think crashes are more common in heavily planted tanks as there are more places for a dead fish or uneaten food to hide without being noticed.
  3. Way too many! They were moved here as fry to avoid overcrowding and have grown up in the ten. There are currently four full sized adults, about twenty-ish midsize young adults from their first spawn and maybe another twenty smaller fry from their second spawn. There are also a few smaller younger surviving fry from a more recent spawn. Yeah, all in a ten-gallon tank. Suffice to say I've had to up the filtration substantially. And they're still spawning. To say Super Reds are prolific is an understatement.
  4. In general, in the fish world (especially with African Cichlids) a dominant male will have the brightest colors. Subordinate males will dim down to avoid drawing his attention, but they're still males. It's possible both of your new fish could be males with the subdominant one now feeling more comfortable and starting to let his true colors show. And since they're smaller than your older fish it's possible the one was just slower to develop. Time will tell.
  5. My Super Reds breed in my ten-gallon tank, so you should be able to do it. A smaller tank can make it easier to give them the current they crave also. By the way, I didn't plan on them spawning there, they just did it on their own. Stopping them from spawning is more of an issue than getting them to spawn. If you want to try and spawn the L number plecos, give it a shot. Give them good water, good food, the right conditions, and they'll likely spawn.
  6. A lot depends on the state of the food also. A cooked, more or less sterile product will cause fewer issues than an uncooked, potentially already bacteria laden product. I have no issues putting a cooked, deveined, frozen shrimp into a tank for grazing for a day. I've never seen an ammonia spike from doing so. The shrimp starts out cooked, deveined, and frozen, so active bacteria on it are very unlikely. If a similarly sized dead, intact fish was put into the tank for the other fish to graze on, the bacteria living inside that formerly alive fish would have a big head start on decomposition and you could crash a tank depending on the size of the tank and the dead fish.
  7. I still have a glass Nektonics hydrometer that I just kept floating in my marine tanks all the time. That's "old school" stuff these days as people have moved more to refractometers instead, but it worked for me. You can still buy glass hydrometers. A quick Google search brought up all kinds. Just be sure the one you buy comes in the right range for the water you'll be keeping it in.
  8. Yeah, it's an effective way to sterilize any soil product, but the smell is not ideal. Jim Crockett, the original gardener on PBS's "Crockett's Victory Garden" used the barbecue method. It works and is a lot easier on the nose to do it outside.
  9. There is food that stays relatively safe for a day or so in a tank and fish can graze on through the day. Cooked, peeled, deveined shrimp for human consumption being one such item. They come in all sizes, but for grazing purposes a small one will do nicely. While they will eventually decay, since they've been cleaned and deveined and cooked, there are no active bacteria in them when they hit the tank. That gives the fish time to casually graze and pick away at the shrimp for much of the day. If there's any part of the shrimp left at night, you can remove it, but it gives the tank some food for grazing purposes all day long. Food blocks serve the same purpose but may not have the right nutrition for the fish depending on the fish in question and the fish have to figure out that it's food. When a fish dies in your tank it's loaded with active bacteria and digested and semi-digested food in its gut. While the other fish will peck away at it and eat it, the active bacteria will be starting the decay process and creating ammonia immediately. Processed food like a cleaned, cooked, deveined shrimp is less likely to cause an ammonia spike while giving your fish a grazing food source. And in the wild, most fish will pick at a dead or dying fish, so there's little adjustment for them to eat a dead shrimp. And they're inexpensive as a food source.
  10. A good way to sterilize any soil-type product is to barbecue it. Any soil-type product will smell very bad when heated high enough to sterilize it, so firing up a barbecue outside and putting a pot of whatever soil-type product you're hoping to sterilize on the barbecue for an hour or more should render it very safe to use without stinking up your house too badly.
  11. A product called Selco is what commercial growers of brine shrimp feed them. It's pricey but has been used for decades. It was developed in the 1980s and has been used a lot since then with good results.
  12. Using dye to create uniquely colored fish is not uncommon. Typically a fish is dipped in a lye solution to strip their slime coat, then dyed. It has a high mortality rate, and the color will fade over time, but it gets done a lot. When you see an unnatural appearing fish, it's typically because it's unnatural. Stripes are often added to fishes by injecting dye, but when a fish is overall one color, it's often been dyed. A good clue is to think if you've ever seen an adult version of that fish in that color. If you've never seen an adult fish in that color, then you can assume the young fish was dyed. In order for there to be young fish of a color in stores, there would have needed to be an adult fish of that color. If you've never seen an adult all blue parrot fish, odds are there aren't any and the young fish you see is dyed.
  13. I was going to say it could be critters drinking the water, but the netting pretty much precludes that. A small herd of deer can drink a lot of water overnight. I would say you have a leak someplace. Someone who doesn't like the pond may be intentionally sabotaging it by poking a hole in the liner when no one's around. It happens. We had a local fish store have someone drop mercury into their system which almost put them out of business. A few layers of cheap poly (the 10'X25' rolls are pretty cheap) under the existing liner might solve the problem for much less money than a new pond liner. The poly doesn't last long in full sun, but under another liner it can last a long, long time.
  14. I'm not sure about the Coop but many retail partner programs have rules. Lots and lots of rules. They'll want to be sure you can provide shelf space for their products. They'll want to be sure you have a large enough customer base to make it worth their while to include you. They'll want you to hang banners, signage, etc. in the store, on your windows, or use it in ads. They'll want you to lock into whatever their pricing scheme is. They may want priority placement within the store. They may want competing products removed. They may insist you carry their full range or a certain percentage of their full range of products. They may not want you to sell for them if you're too close to another retail partner. They may insist on a certain amount of return per week/month while in the program. They may insist on certain reorder sizes. There are always rules. You think it'll be easy to get someone to let you sell their products for them. Eh, no. It's often a fight.
  15. The big issue with a closed end versus a closed loop system is pipe diameter. In the gardening world with drip irrigation (where I'm more familiar) a closed loop might let you use 1/2" line in a closed loop system where in a closed end system you might need 3/4" tubing. I would assume the issue is similar in an air distribution system. The cost savings by being able to go with a smaller diameter outlet pipe offsets the extra plumbing parts cost to close the loop. Now if you can use 1" PVC in a closed loop versus 1.5" PVC in a closed end system, the cost difference in making it a closed loop gets offset very quickly by the lower cost of the smaller diameter PVC. You want to have the air you need at every outlet with as little strain on the air pump as possible. Saving $30 in plumbing supplies now only to wear out the pump sooner and make it need replacing sooner can be one of those penny wise, but pound foolish things.
  16. I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying. In a conventional UG filter you use air in the uplift tubes to move the water. If you take off the top of the UG filter uplift tube and slide a sponge filter on there (I'm assuming upside down) where does the air go? It gets trapped in the bottom of the sponge filter housing and will float the sponge filter off. Some might leak out through the sponge, but probably not enough, and not fast enough. Bacteria need to eat and fish waste is bacteria food, so if you don't have enough bacteria, it's a good excuse to add more fish. More fish equals more fish waste which means more food for the bacteria.
  17. To start with, there are wells and there are wells. I have a shallow well. Maybe twelve feet deep. A shallow well is very prone to wild swings. A deeper well (200-300 feet deep) is typically more stable and consistent. If you've got a shallow well your water quality can change very quickly so the water test you did yesterday can be a lot different tomorrow. You'll want to test your well water fairly often to ensure it's more or less consistent at whatever reading you're getting. Now, to get and maintain an adjusted water level takes either time or chemicals. Time is the easiest, cheapest, and often best option. Something like a Rubbermaid Brute trash can will hold 30+ gallons of water that you can slowly alter to meet the parameters you want in your tank. Organics in the water (peat, Indian almond leaves, etc.) will help to lower the pH and soften the water. (Or if you want harder water with a higher pH, crushed coral will do the job.) A cycled sponge filter will help remove the ammonia. A heater can get the water to the right temperature. The chemical options are the pH adjusters and something to lock up the ammonia like Prime. Both methods work. The slow, natural method tends to be safer and cheaper overall, but takes more time to set up and establish. It also takes up more space.
  18. The cheapest solution is to just dry everything out and put it in the sun for a few hours completely dry. Sunlight is a great disinfectant. A dry tank and supplies in full sun for a few hours will be pretty safe to reuse. Not much in the way of microbial aquatic life can survive being dried out and fried under the sun.
  19. Breeding fish (and presumably shrimp) to be larger is typically easier than trying to create dwarfs. Just select the largest fry/shrimplets each cycle to raise and breed and you'll eventually get a genetically larger shrimp. It works in almost every species on the planet including humans. If size is your sole parameter, over ten years you could create a larger than normal red cherry shrimp. How much larger than normal? Eh, I don't know. When you start getting to the extremes in any animal, issues arise. Great Danes have health issues that smaller dogs don't. Some dwarf breeds have all kinds of health issues with some large-headed dwarf dogs are unable to give birth naturally and always need a caesarian. When you go to the extremes, large or small, you run into issues and creatures become a bit more fragile.
  20. It's hard to find a filtering technique/method that doesn't work. Trickle towers work well but can be a tick noisy. Evaporation also increases a bit. If you have some sort of media and some sort of water flow through it, and you don't obsessively clean it, it'll work as a filter. What's best? Eh....it depends on your situation, wants, experience, etc. Pretty much everything works. Sponges, box filters, HOBs, canisters, sumps, and more exotic things like rotary drums and Bakki showers all work. In an absolutely perfect world, this is the best filter ever made situation, you would have a filter that physically removed waste from the water column (most filters just trap the waste but don't remove it.) You'd have a large biofiltration chamber for aerobic breakdown and an even larger anaerobic/plant chamber with very slow water flow for nitrate consumption. The physically removing the waste can be done in a sump using a rolling fleece prefilter. Instead of tank water going through a sock it goes into the fleece filter that traps the debris and then advances the fleece with the debris in it out of the water column. (Rotary drum filters work in a similar fashion.) Lots of makers are hopping onto the rolling fleece filter idea. Klir, Clarisea, Red Sea, Aquamax, and others are all fielding such units these days. If you get the waste out of the water column completely you vastly limit its ability to breakdown and pollute the water. Typical filters simply trap it but keep it in the water column. Get it out completely and it's much less of an issue. K1-type fluidized media in its various forms seems the best right now for biofiltration. More and more hobbyists are exploring the deep mud and bog type sections for nitrate control/removal. Whatever works for you is what's best for you. You can build an extremely effective filter for under $20 (sponge filter, air pump, airline tubing) or spend $20,000 or more. And there's absolutely no guarantee that the more expensive type is better. You can't really go wrong with anything as long as there's media and water flowing through it.
  21. You can see the vastly elongated and often unusable gonopodium on the guy in that photo. The good news for him is he wasn't "clipped." Odds are he'd never be able to mate though due to the length of it. Goliad Farms did some research on shortening the gonopodium of male lyretail swordtails back in 2014 with limited success. They have a blog post from December 2014 on their experiment on their website.
  22. Not all of the time. I bought some for $0.99 off eBay way back when, and they were aquatic hygrophila. They grew well, looked good and flourished under water. They got overtaken by some other plants later on (two years later maybe?) and disappeared, but if I could find what I did with the leftover seeds, I'd do it again. Now having said that, some are pure scam seeds, so you don't really know what you're getting, but the ones I bought were real aquatic plant seeds. I was very impressed by them. (Note: They may have been the often illegal version of hygrophila polysperma which is viewed as an invasive water weed, but they grew well and never left my tank, so whatever.)
  23. One of the issues with longfin livebearers (especially swordtails) is you often end up with a long gonopodium that's no longer functional for the male. There are people who will surgically (well, use an X-Acto knife) to shorten the gonopodium, but I'm not sure how safe, humane, and effective that approach is. The poor guy goes from, "Hello girls! Lookie what I've got!" to being nicknamed "Stubby." And some fish end up with fins so large they can't carry them. They struggle to swim and mostly just lie on the bottom of the tank due to the effort it takes to move all those fins. Quality of life issues arise when you start going to extremes with breeding. Fancy goldfish breeders have taken one of the toughest fish alive (carp) and made it into a fragile and delicate fish prone to all sorts of health and quality of life issues through their selective breeding practices.
  24. Yeah, let me just second the shrimp recommendation. I buy the extra-small, frozen (90-120 or 100-150 count) shrimp made for human consumption and feed them to my plecos along with lots of other stuff. Protein does seem to help encourage breeding and makes for happier fish. The shrimp are precooked, deveined, and "ready to eat." I just drop one in. I don't defrost them, just straight from the freezer. They'll find it and munch on it off and on through the day. The other fish will also pick away at it through the day. It more resembles how fish feed natively where they graze more than sit down for a big meal. You'll find your fish chasing it all around the tank as they peck away at it. Since it's been cooked, and is clean, there's little risk of an immediate ammonia spike from it. A dead fish can cause a spike pretty quickly due to all the gunk inside of them. The shrimp are cleaned, cooked, and quite safe to leave in for an extended munching session.
  25. I'll be 64 in November and have had fish since I was at least six. So that would be around 58 years in the hobby. My grandfather was a fish keeper and handed stuff down to me. My first tanks were the stainless steel framed with a slate bottom. Filters were simple box filters. By my teens I was very active in keeping fish with multiple tanks including my first dive into marine fish. Nektonics was the big name in the marine hobby back then. I still have my old Nektonics hydrometer. My first HOB was a Dynaflow. I eventually had AquaKings and a SuperKing HOB. A diatom filter was my big investment in the hobby. A smaller one first, then a large one. A high school friend had bought a Pacu, thinking it would eat like a piranha, and couldn't get it to eat live food. He looked at me like I was insane when I suggested he try feeding it some fruit. He was amazed when it gulped the fruit down. I've kept just about everything at one time or another. I've used pretty much every type of filter ever made. I've read almost every fish book written in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and most of the fish magazines from that era. My favorite fish have been those with big personalities. Oscars and a Midas cichlid would top my list of favorite fish.
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