gardenman

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Much of the time the scam seeds are hygrophila seeds of one species or another. Hygrophila seeds have some medical properties, so they're harvested commercially and then repackaged for aquarium use. They can make some decent looking aquarium plants. Just don't let them out into native waterways.

Territorial fish are interesting. Some are happy with smaller territories while others want more. Sometimes a lot more. There was a video from the Amazon a while back of a cichlid defending a ten-foot radius he'd claimed. He even chased off a large caiman that dared to enter his circle of death. He kept going after the cameraman until the cameraman got outside his circle of death. If you have a fish that claims a ten-foot territory, you're going to need a really big tank to keep it. They get a bit crazed. If you watch your current male apisto closely, you can figure out his current territorial boundaries. How much of the tank he's claimed and how much remains unclaimed largely determines whether you can add another male or not. If he's just laid claim to a tenth of the tank, you can probably add another male. There should be enough room left for the two to co-exist. (Bear in mind male number two may want the same turf as male number one, so there are no guarantees.) Crowding fish often lessens territorial issues. African cichlids tend to be better behaved when in a crowd. The same is true for many South American cichlids. But you don't know if that'll work for you unless or until you try and you can create chaos trying it when it doesn't work.

Canister filters are often called nitrate factories. There's a lot of debate within the hobby as to whether that's true or not. Some insist it's not and that if you maintain a canister filter it's fine. Anecdotal stuff can often be dismissed, but the nitrate factory thing has been around for a long, long time. I'd recommend a thorough cleaning of the canister filter including the hoses and see if that made any difference. It's one of those "can't hurt and might help" things to try out. You'd be amazed at the gunk that can pile up in a canister filter hose. Hose cleaning brushes are a great investment for a fish keeper. Other things to look at would be your substrate. Some leach nitrates. Especially substrates made for planted tanks. Plants need nitrates, so the substrate makers figure it won't hurt anything. You say it's "standard aquarium gravel" but there are all kinds of things sold as aquarium gravel. A buildup of debris under the UG filter grid could be an issue also. If the tank has a glass bottom and you've got it on an old-school angle iron stand, a peek up from the bottom can let you see what if anything is under the UG grid. If all else fails, you can try using a nitrate sponge type of plant like a water hyacinth to suck up the nitrates or add some of the Poly-Filter material to your filtration systems.

There are multiple videos on how to raise brine shrimp on YouTube. One of the "secrets" seems to be a powdered food called Selco. It's been around since the 1980s and seems to be commonly used on a commercial basis. You also have to remember it's also still a fish tank with all of the issues with a regular tank.

IBC totes have a drain at the bottom, and you can get adapters that connect to those drains to let you plumb multiple units together. If you do an online search for "IBC Tote Drain Adapter" you'll find lots of options. Many are for 3/4" garden hoses as IBC totes often get used as rain barrels, but you can also find some for 2" plumbing for larger flow rates. IBC Totes get used for all kinds of things and lots of adapters now exist for those uses.

You always get down to the question of, "How accurate do you need to be?" The pH in a tank will vary over the course of a day by more than the accuracy of most testers. In general, pH will drop in the overnight hours as CO2 accumulates and plants/algae aren't consuming it. The CO2 combines with the water to form carbonic acid which lowers the pH. Then as the day goes on the pH will rise as the CO2 gets absorbed by the plants and algae. Even the best buffered tanks will see some swing in pH values throughout the course of a day. In the real-world, a difference as large as 0.5 (or larger) won't affect most fish. Even in their native habitats things like a large rainfall can significantly alter their pH. Does knowing your pH at this minute is 6.5431 with an absurdly accurate tester change how you treat your fish over knowing the pH is somewhere between 6.3 or 6.7? No. It shouldn't. Ballpark numbers are typically fine for pH. You don't need pinpoint accuracy. You more want to know the trend in pH than the most accurate number at this moment.

I'd go with all 2X4s as the price difference between 2X4s and 2X2s is pretty small. Stronger is better in my opinion. Too strong is better than not strong enough. A lot of 2X2s are just ripped 2X stock and tend to be pretty unstable. Finding good, straight, unwarped, 2X2s is not the easiest task in the world. Finding good 2X4 stock isn't the easiest, but it's easier than finding good 2X2s in any quantity.

The "For Dummies" series has a "Koi for Dummies" book that's a pretty good intro. And there are a gazillion good YouTube channels/videos featuring Koi. Now there's a "koi pond" and a "real" koi pond. You'll see people calling a three-foot round hole with a plastic liner a koi pond. A "real" koi pond will be substantially larger and hold thousands of gallons of water. If it's a "real" koi pond by a koi fancier, it likely has a substantial standalone filtration system of some sort. These can be as simple as a pool filter or something more complicated like a rotary drum filter with a bakki shower. If it's a "real" koi pond, some online research into the filtration and finding manuals or operation guides for that type of filtration may be most helpful. If it's a "real" koi pond it was likely installed by a local koi specialist. There are quite a few littered around the country and giving the new homeowner their contact information might be the best option. They'll know the equipment and can advise the homeowner on the proper set-up and use of it. In the Delaware Valley/NY area Fitzfishponds.com is a big installer of koi ponds. I don't know where you're from, but pretty much every part of the country has a koi specialist retailer within reach. A quick Google should find a koi pond installer in your area who installed it if it's a "real" koi pond. Getting them in contact with a koi pro might be the best bet.

I would overbuild the stand. 2X4s would be my minimum. It's better to be too strong than not strong enough. As to the depth of gravel, anything from an inch or so would be fine. If you've already got the tanks or have a good source for them, then kudos. If not, there's a YouTuber called Serpa Designs who recently posted a video on making 28-gallon tanks using Ikea precut glass. Video below. The dimensions might be a bit different than yours, but I thought I'd post it here anyway, just in case.

There are all kinds of adapters that fit on the drain of IBC totes that would let you interconnect them. The easiest filter then is something like a simple box filled with biomaterial and some mechanical filtration above the totes. Pump water from one of the connected totes up into the filter box, through the filter material, then back down into the other tote. Water wants to seek its own level so as long as you kept the flow rate sane relative to the movement of water between the totes, you could filter a nearly infinite number of them using just one pump and filter box. Just have the pump at one end and the return at the other. Water comes out one end, lowering the water pressure/level in that tote which then draws water from the others and the water then gets returned at the far end. If you do an online search for "IBC Tote Outlet Adapters" you will find a wide variety of adapters to suit whatever need you have in terms of water movement. Two-inch adapters are out there letting you handle a large flow from tote to tote. The 3/4" ones for garden hoses are more common, but larger ones exist also. The big concern would be a leak developing down low and draining both totes and you'd also want/need a screen of some sort to prevent fish moving from tote to tote.

"You would think the company selling this tank would know better." Companies hire product designers and don't really give them much information other than a budget to hit and some general guidelines. The designers often have no clue about the creatures they're designing habitats for. They typically don't keep them as pets and just design something that "looks good" and is sellable. I had the opportunity to chat up one of the product designers who'd made Wardleys' "Sandman" filter quite a few years back. The fluidized bed sand part was brilliant. The pre-filter was horrible. It would clog within a day or two and then let unfiltered water bypass it. When talking to the designer he seemed very confused why I was feeding my fish as frequently as I was and insisted that he'd been told fish only get fed once or twice a week and that's how the pre-filter had been designed. It wasn't designed to handle daily feedings. Yeah. He admitted he'd never kept fish and seemed shocked that anyone would feed them more than once or twice a week. If you think it's bad on the fish side, talk to hamster enthusiasts and ask them which commercial hamster cage is best. They'll quickly tell you none and instruct you on which Ikea cabinet to buy and how to modify it into a good hamster cage. The same is true for most pet products. Bird cages often ignore the reality of birds needing to fly and stretch their wings. Dog houses are seldom well designed. Rabbit pens are often horribly made. Companies just make products to sell and if it sells, that's all they care about. Ethics take a back seat to sales.