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gardenman

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Everything posted by gardenman

  1. gardenman
    Here are some photos showing the process. In the first photo is my coffee grinder empty. In photo two is the coffee grinder with the Tetramin Plus, three freeze-dried tubifex worm cubes, and two and a half algae wafers. In the final photo you see the finished, ground up fish food dust, for lack of a better word in it's plastic storage container. It's a very, very fine powder. Just a tiny pinch becomes a cloud of food in the tank. The beauty of grinding your own food is you can make it out of whatever you want, as long as that item is dry. If I wasn't allergic to freeze-dried blood worms I'd use them also, but I sneeze badly whenever I'm around them. A simple $20 (or so) investment in a cheap coffee grinder means you'll never have to buy fry food again and can customize it to suit your fishes. It's one of the best investments you'll ever make as a fish keeper.
  2. gardenman
    I make my own. I have an old coffee grinder that I use for fish food. Depending on the fry, I use different stuff. Almost all types start with a basic flake food (Tetramin Plus typically) then I add either freeze-dried tubifex worms/brine shrimp/shrimp pellets for more carnivorous fry or algae wafers for the vegetarians. Then I just grind it up until it's as small and fine as I need it. A coffee grinder lets you grind it very, very fine. A coffee grinder like I use costs about $20 brand new and pays for itself in no time. (Just don't use it for coffee after making fish food in it.) You can grind pretty much anything that's dry into as fine a powder as you need for your fish. Since you're using the food you're already using to make food for the fry there's no real transition down the road. The fry will already be used to the food since it's what they've been eating all along, just now in a larger form. With a coffee grinder you're never out of fry food as long as you have adult fish food. Just grind some up and in a matter of a minute or two, you've got fry food.
  3. gardenman
    Less of a possibility and more of a certainty. I got two red ramshorn snails in my order. I was happy about it as I like snails and had just bought some red and blue ramshorn snails a few weeks earlier. They were very small and in a completely different tank from the ones I'd bought, so I was happy. If you absolutely don't want snails then tissue-cultured plants are your only real option.
  4. gardenman
    My tanks use a homemade cover where there's about eight inches of space between the waterline and the acrylic cover/light. That gives mystery snails lots of space to lay their eggs. Here's a photo of one of my covers. There's plenty of room for the snails to crawl above the waterline and lay some egg cases. It keeps the humidity inside the top very high also. It should be a nearly ideal way to raise mystery snails.
  5. gardenman
    The Marina/Fluval boxes are made with overflows, so unless you go with an enormous pump you shouldn't have an issue. There is a breeder box with a water pump pre-attached made by Finnex. It's a bit more expensive ($30-ish), but it might be just what you want. If you Google "Finnex External Refugium Hang On Breeder Box" you should find it for sale.
  6. gardenman
    A missing baby pleco showed up after disappearing for eight days. I'd moved two of the baby Super Reds to my thirty high tank last Saturday and only one had been in sight since then. I'd assumed the other one had died, gotten eaten, been sucked into the filter, etc., but this afternoon he magically appeared and is doing fine. In fact, he hasn't been out of sight since popping back up. It's a densely planted tank and apparently he was just lying low.
  7. gardenman
    You can also sell the egg clusters on e-Bay these days. I was very tempted to try buying the egg cluster, but the prices were very similar, so I opted for the bigger snails.
  8. gardenman
    Same here. I was born in 58. The times have changed. My current smartphone is more powerful than the first five computers I owned. Lasers barely existed in 58 and cost a fortune, now I play with my cats with one that I bought for a couple of bucks. Welding together glass aquariums seems like a logical step forward. As you said acrylic aquariums are solvent welded together forming one complete unit. They're welding glass in labs now using lasers, so it should move from the labs to production lines fairly quickly. Given the volume of silicone that tank manufacturers consume the cost of the lasers should be able to be offset over the long term. Other than aquariums and architectural use, welding glass together has few commercial uses.
  9. gardenman
    Putting the sword plants in pots might be your best option. Treat them like a waterlily in an outdoor pond with a layer of large gravel/stones atop the soil to prevent the fish from uprooting them. Goldfish and koi are notorious for uprooting plants, so doing what pond keepers do might be your best option.
  10. gardenman
    I have a pet theory that with modern lasers you could fuse the glass together and eliminate adhesives completely. Isamu Miyamoto of the University of Osaka in Japan (along with Finnish researchers) has experimented with using lasers to weld glass. Why not use a laser to more or less weld the glass together to make an aquarium? Doing so could radically reduce manufacturing time for aquariums and the whole process could likely be automated. You'd need a jig/fixture to hold the pieces of glass and then a robotic arm to guide the laser, but no curing time for the tanks. They'd go straight from the assembly line to shipment. No chance for leaking as they're essentially one piece of glass after the welding process. No ugly silicone seams. No need to ever reseal a tank. They'd be leakproof.
  11. gardenman
    A Midas Cichlid could be a good option also. Mine used to watch everyone and everything going on. The tank cover I used back then had openings on either end and if you walked by without giving him attention, he'd splash you to remind you he was there. He loved to ambush our cats when they'd walk by. He'd see them coming and wait by the opening and then give them a splash when they were in range. The drawback to any of the big cichlids though is they tend to want to redecorate the tanks to suit them and not your style. When bored, my Midas would move the gravel from one side of the tank to the other. He lived about eight years then developed swim bladder issues before dying. In a 125 you could go with an arowana. They're large and impressive, but a bit lacking in personality. It would be a bit small for a koi, but they have very much dog-like personalities and can be pretty interactive. (Bear in mind the right koi can get up to four feet long and weigh ninety pounds in perfect conditions, so a 125 would be a bit cramping. Mind you, most don't get that big, but some do.) I've never kept a Fly River Turtle, but from what I've seen of them on YouTube (Predatory Fins, Off the Deep End Aquatics) they seem very, very personable. They're also very expensive here ($1,000 or more.) Supposedly they're insanely cheap in China ($5 or so) and sold for food and medicinal purposes there. A 125 might be a bit cramped for one, but it would definitely be unique and something most people hadn't seen with lots of personality.
  12. gardenman
    Making a perfect tank divider for fry is a big challenge. It seems like everyone who uses Matten filters ends up with fry behind the filter at some point. Not just from swimming down the airlift tube either as some will use netting over it to prevent that and fry still find a way behind it. It doesn't take much of a gap for fry to find a way through. Even materials like the woven plastic may have big enough gaps in the weave for small fry to wriggle their way through. It seems sometimes like the harder we try to keep a fish out of a place, the more determined they become to get there. Getting a combination of something fine enough to stop fry from escaping, but porous enough to allow good water flow is challenging. A fine netting material, like that used for brine shrimp nets would be ideal, but it would require a tight fitting framework to hold it in place.
  13. gardenman
    I kind of figured that myself. That's another reason I went with the Ivory snails as they may be easier to sell/trade down the road. You don't see them much locally. The more common varieties are pretty regularly available, but the Ivory ones are a bit more rare.
  14. gardenman
    I opted for a safer alternative and ordered eight ivory mystery snails instead. The seller promises two day delivery by Fed-Ex and includes an insulated box and heat packs for safe shipping, so I went ahead and ordered them now. I was intrigued by the egg cases, but they have a hundred eggs (more or less) and were of mixed varieties of mystery snails, so there was no way to know what you were getting. The price was pretty much the same as for the egg cases so I went with the sure option. I don't really need a hundred mystery snails. Eight is a more manageable number. These are already 3/4"-1" so they're a decent size also. I like the idea of ordering the egg cases, but considering the similar costs and uncertainty, I opted for the surer thing.
  15. gardenman
    I doubt it. They're very prolific but the time it takes to go from planktonic-sized fry to sellable snails would be a very long time. They are so prolific in the wild that harvesting the wild ones is very inexpensive and they ship easily. The article at aquariumbreeder.com is pretty extensive and contains links to several scientific articles on the breeding and life of nerite snails. Getting them to lay eggs is the easy part. Everything else is hard.
  16. gardenman
    Could you do it. Yes, but it would take some serious adapting. You can buy premade K1 reactors that are made for that specific purpose for probably less than it would cost you to buy and adapt a Ziss filter. You only tend to see reactors marketed to the marine hobbyists, but they can also be used in freshwater. The issue with the K1 type media is it's most efficient in highly oxygenated water. Even in the very high-end koi filters like the Nexus line they inject air to optimize the K1 type media. The K1 type media can sometimes more clump together than remain fluidized in just a pure water stream also. That tumbling and bouncing around helps to keep the media clean and functioning at a high level.
  17. gardenman
    And you'll want cast acrylic too, not the extruded stuff. There are lots, and I mean lots, of videos on You Tube showing the process.
  18. gardenman
    It could be a slime mold. They eat the biofilm on glass and other surfaces then disappear.
  19. gardenman
    It could be the nerite eggs. What we see as eggs are actually egg cases holding up to seventy very small eggs inside of them. I never noticed a white haze in my tanks with nerites, but it's possible.
  20. gardenman
    I've been looking to get some mystery snails for my tanks and was surprised to find many people on e-Bay selling the egg cases. Has anyone bought the egg cases and raised the snails from them? What's the procedure like? I'm waiting for the weather to moderate a bit before placing an order but I'm intrigued by the idea of ordering the egg cases and raising them myself.
  21. gardenman
    I'd always assumed someone somewhere was breeding them as they're so very inexpensive. It turns out I'm wrong. It appears they're all wild caught. I did find an extensive article on breeding them at aquariumbreeder.com and was surprised to find that the "eggs" we find in our tanks are actually egg cases and inside those cases are about seventy real eggs. That gives you an idea as to how small the baby snails are when they hatch. We're talking very, very small. Given the number of "eggs" my nerites laid, when you consider there are seventy fry in each one, they're very, very prolific in the wild. My tank would often have about a hundred egg cases (that I'd thought were the eggs) scattered around the tank. At seventy snails per egg case, mine would have hatched out about 7,000 snails from those hundred "eggs." Yikes! When they hatch they're free swimming planktonic and attracted to light. Feeding them becomes a bit of a challenge given their extremely small size. Suffice to say, you won't make any money breeding them. You could go broke trying, but getting them to a sellable size would take months/years. They are interesting though.
  22. gardenman
    I use the Marina/Fluval hang on breeder boxes. The Ziss boxes cost more due to the way they're made with the fine stainless steel mesh embedded into the side walls. The fine mesh helps to keep fry inside the box while still allowing water circulation. The Marina/Fluval boxes use a grate that tries to trap the fry, but the grate openings tend to be a bit large and some fry can escape unless you add a piece of sponge or wrap the grate in some cloth. The Marina/Fluval breeder boxes use an airlift to pump fresh tank water into the box that then overflows back into the tank. Circulating water through a breeder box is important. It keeps the fry in the same water as their parents in the attached tank.
  23. gardenman
    Just a side note. Fish becoming inactive could be a sign that the tank has gotten cooler. Check your water temp. It's possible your heater failed and the tank is now cooler and your fish are slowing down as a result. It could also be too warm if taken to extremes. Warm water holds less oxygen so fish can have more breathing issues and slow their movements down so they don't run out of oxygen.
  24. gardenman
    Silly question, but do you have a male in with her? If not, then the eggs aren't fertile. If yes, then they could still be fertile.
  25. gardenman
    As a rule things like bio balls are made for bio filtration and not mechanical. Evolution Aqua has a new koi filter called the Tempest that uses K+ material (typically used for biofiltration) as a mechanical filter. I haven't been impressed by what I've seen of it. The filter does trap debris, but the backwashing process seems very inefficient to me and lots of debris remains trapped on the walls of the Tempest and in the K+ media. I think for that to really work well, they've got to improve the back flushing. The guys at Quality Nishikigoi on YouTube have been playing with it and raving about it, but even in their cleaning videos you can see a lot of gunk left behind. (Bear in mind, they're also sellers of Evolution Aqua products, so they won't diss a product they're selling.) Filtering out solids is best left to mechanical means, like filter pads, rotary drum filters for things like koi ponds, sponges, etc.
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