gardenman

No landmines, but don't be shocked if some plants don't do well for you. Aquarium plants can be more than a bit fickle. It's not you doing anything wrong, it's just the plants, water, lighting, etc. sometimes isn't what a plant wants and they'll just die on you. I've got four seemingly identical planted tanks, but some plants that thrive in one, die in another.

To be honest, they look fine to me. You've got new growth coming out. I suspect the leaf damage you're seeing is more related to them having been handled. I wouldn't worry about it. Leaves can be pretty delicate and your red root floaters were likely handled quite a bit by the leaves getting them into the tank. (There's no carrying handle on them so people tend to grab them by a leaf.) You may be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If they're anything like mine, they'll grow so fast you'll be weeding them out in a month and wondering how to control them.

Nerites will sometimes just park themselves in one spot for up to a week (maybe longer) when moved or disturbed. The only way to truly know they died is through the smell test or if their innards fall out. A lot of owners will see that the snail hasn't moved for several days and assume it died and toss it. If you're used to more active snails an immobile, newly moved nerite might seem dead to you, but it may not be dead. If it smells dead, then it's dead. If it doesn't smell dead, it's probably alive and just lying low for whatever reason. They're an interesting snail in that regard.

I wonder if American native fish are popular overseas? I know some of our native birds, Cardinals and Blue Jays for example, are popular pet birds overseas. Things we can't keep as pets here are very popular pets there. I wonder if it's the same for fish?

I've read that and I've also read the alternative theory of it being pushed into the ocean from the freshwater streams and rivers that fed the Arctic ocean. I think the being pushed into the ocean from the streams and rivers makes more sense to me. It's a very impressive little plant. If you get it growing someplace where it's happy, you'll have a lot of it. Massive rafts of it being pushed out of the rivers then hitting the saltwater and dying, sinking down into the anoxic regions and lying there makes the most sense to me.

A fish room in a house with an unheated/unfinished cellar would be ideal for cool loving fish. My cellar almost never is much above 60-65 degrees. Our old forced air heater (1950's-60's era?) that was in the basement had a feature to take advantage of that. The back hatch that you would remove to change the air filter was the same size as the air filter. The air filter slid into a channel at the cool air return inlet. In the summer you'd take the cover off and put that in the slot blocking the cool air return line and slide the air filter into the slot that housed the back cover in the cooler months. The fan had a manual switch that you could then turn on. Instead of pulling air from the air return ducts it would then pull in the air from the basement which was cooler. The air filter kept airborne junk out and you got the nice cool air from your cellar coming out the heater vents cooling the house. It was a very clever design and a good way to avoid needing air conditioning. Hassock fans would then circulate the cool air through the rooms. It was a very energy efficient way to cool a home. I assumed every heater had that feature and was surprised to find none did in the 1980s when I had to replace the heater. Everyone had moved to air conditioning by then. You don't have to go too far down into the ground to find 50 and 60 degree temps pretty much year round.

Somehow freshwater fern and ocean don't mix in my mind. The oceans were always salty, so a freshwater plant would likely not survive in the salt water. Even a plant as tough as Azolla. The only reason we have freshwater (unsalted water) is because when water evaporates it leaves the salt behind. When it then precipitates out as rainfall we get freshwater. The theory that the water stratified with salt water down lower and a thin layer of freshwater on top is a bit iffy to me. It doesn't take much of a disturbance to break the surface layer stratification. The poles aren't as affected by tides, but they still have some minimal tides and just that movement should be enough to break the surface layer stratification. I think the alternative idea that the Azolla washed into the Arctic from freshwater rivers makes more sense. Azolla pushes itself around a pond filling every void and Azolla in a slow moving river would push those plants nearest the mouth of the river out into the bays and eventually the ocean creating the layer of fossilized Azolla that was found. To say the stuff grows fast is an understatement. Mine started out as a single plant stuck to a water hyacinth I'd bought. Within a month or so it had covered my 4'X8' pond and I was weeding it out. It's very prolific. It's a fun plant to play with though with it's color variation. Put it in full sun and it turns bright red. A bit of shade and it's a very pretty green. It's a very neat little floater.

Given any reasonable conditions, fish will spawn. And spawn a lot. Egg scatterers like tetras will typically have the eggs and fry eaten, but from time to time one survives and surprises you. The tetras have likely laid hundreds/thousands of eggs depending on how long you've kept them, but the odds of survival are pretty slim, but every now and then one survives. If you ever try to breed them for real, there are a wide variety of options. In the old days marbles were recommended as a substrate for egg scatterers as the eggs could roll down between the marbles and escape predation. Then you'd remove the parents and raise the fry. Breeding mops are often used these days. Some people put screens below the adult fish in the hope that the eggs fall through the screening and the parent fish can't get through the screening to eat the eggs. Very often the spawning fish or their tankmates will eat the eggs as they fall. Even in a perfect setup designed to optimize the safety of the eggs, probably ten percent or more would still get chomped.

It grows insanely fast. The ones I had in my water garden came as a single plant in the roots of a water hyacincth. Within weeks it had covered the pond. (Which is 4'x8'.) It's pretty impressive stuff. Most floating plants grow insanely fast. I just threw out a big bowl of my assorted floaters yesterday and you wouldn't know I got rid of any looking at my tanks now.

Java fern is largely indestructible as long as you don't bury it. Your java fern will do great.

I'm cautiously experimenting with the API Pond Aquatic Plant Food Tablets in my 30 high. They're cheaper (under $7 for 25). They're bigger, so you need fewer. They say one for every gallon of soil. The ratio is a bit higher in phosphorous than I'd like being a 10-12-8, but that's because they're made for pond plants like water lilies and lotus that flower, and flowering plants need more phosphorous. In a fish tank more phosphorous can mean more algae, but so far (ten days in) so good. For those who don't know the three numbers you see on fertilizer labels stand for Nitrogen (good for green growth) Phosphorous (good for flower production) and Potassium (good for root development.) Many people call them NPK. They're always in that order, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. My 30 high has a two to three inch bed of Flourite and I placed one tablet in the left front corner as far down as I could get it under the gravel. I just went with one initially to see what happens. So far, there's been no change in the water parameters, the fish are fine, the plants are fine and I'm planning to add a second tablet to the right rear of the tank later today to see what happens. Have I seen a drastic change in plant growth? No. There's a jungle val that just started to grow before I placed the tablet near it. (It's about three inches from the tablet.) I got some pogostemmon stellatus octopus that had multiple stems so I planted one of the stems directly above the tablet. It's behaving just like the stems in the other tanks so no apparent harm and no apparent gain as of yet. I'm taking a cautious approach as I don't want to create a major headache, but so far, so good. My 30 high is 12"X24" and the gravel bed is on average about 2.5" so that's about 720 cubic inches. One gallon of soil is 0.13 cubic feet which is about 225 cubic inches. In theory, my tank should be able to handle three (and a tick more) of the pond plant tabs per dosing. I'm taking the slow but steady approach of adding one every ten days and seeing what happens. The first tablet went in on the sixth. Today's the 16th so tablet two will go in later today in the back right corner. If nothing bad happens, around the 26th tablet three will go in in the dead center of the tank. Assuming nothing bad happens (which may be assuming a lot) in ten more days I'll add a new tablet to the left front corner again. (Maybe the back left corner instead?) API makes both the aquarium and pond plant tablets. The aquarium ones are around $9 for ten tablets or $0.90 each. The pond ones are around 25 for $7 or about $0.28 each. They say to use 6 aquarium plant tablets in a ten gallon tank or one for every 30 square inches of gravel surface. The 30 high is 12"X24" or 288" square, so one tab for every 30" square would require 9.6 tablets at $0.90 each for a monthly cost of $8.64 as opposed to a monthly cost of $0.84 for the pond variety using three at $0.28 each. The $8.64 a month is $103.68 a year as opposed to $10.08 a year. If the pond tablets work, I'd save $93.60 year that I can use on fish, plants, and other fun stuff. It's a big enough potential savings to make the experiment worthwhile. If things go horribly wrong, I can still use the pond tabs in my pond for the plants out there. I'm pretty confident right now, based on what I've seen, that things won't go horribly wrong.

If it bothers you you can clean it out with a brush or a wadded up paper towel. It typically cleans up easily. I tend to leave it alone and consider it a biological prefilter. It's sucking up some of the nitrates and other impurities before they hit the main filter. When I get annoyed by it and decide to clean it (almost never these days) I would just take a paper towel, wad it up so it fits tightly into the tube and then push it back and forth in the tube with a wooden dowel or whatever I had that was long enough and the tube would be sparkly clean in a matter of seconds. It's not a hard algae to clean.

It's a bit challenging for a bug to do that in a greenhouse though.

I tend to think you can have either a plant-centric tank or a fish-centric tank but it's very hard to optimize conditions for both in one tank. If you want a plant-centric tank, then you should inject CO2, use intense lighting, fertilize heavily, and grow the most exotic plants you can find. Your plants will thrive. The fish, maybe not so much. If you want a fish-centric tank then no CO2 and keep plants that thrive without CO2. (And there are a lot of them.) If you look at the plant-centric, carefully landscaped tanks, by and large the fish are minimal. Do a Google image search for "aquascaped aquariums" and you'll see what I mean. They might have a small school of small fish but the tanks are clearly not fish-centric. They're showcases for the plants and the fish just happen to be there. Injecting CO2 is going to alter your water conditions in ways that aren't ideal for fish. It's the same in humans. Some terrestrial commercial greenhouses inject CO2 for the plants but humans working in those greenhouses often have to wear air tanks and respirators to breathe well. The CO2 injection helps the plants to grow and suffocates insects who could damage the plants. (There are no bug air tanks out there, so they die. It's an effective form of growth stimulating and also pest control in commercial greenhouses.) Too much CO2 can suffocate your fish, cause ph crashes, and can literally eat your equipment in the tank. Those who inject CO2 seem to have more impeller issues with filters due to the carbonic acid. To me, the use of CO2 comes down to what you want as a tank. Is it to be fish-centric or plant-centric? My tanks, jungles that they are, are fish-centric. The plants are those that thrive without CO2. (And boy do they thrive. I'll be weeding out a bowl full in a few more minutes.) I worry more about the fish than the plants though, so the fish are my priority. If you try to balance a system to optimize it for both plants and fish, then life gets more complicated. Some say if you shut off the CO2 an hour before the lights go off and have an air pump that comes on when the CO2 shuts off, that it can off gas the CO2 and prevent a ph crash. Then wait an hour after the lights come on before starting up the CO2 again and shutting off the air. It starts to get more like a job and less like a fun hobby when you try to balance out both. There are many more ways for things to go wrong and more stuff you have to monitor when you use CO2. I've played with DIY CO2 and have considered using the commercial units, but I don't really need more growth than I'm getting now.

The size of a HOB is more dictated by the fish than the size of the tank. In a planted 55 with a small fish load, the sponge filters alone would be adequate. Angel fish and small schooling fish aren't especially messy. (Compared to large cichlids like Oscars or the like.) Angel fish tend to prefer quieter water also, so I'd go smaller on the HOB and use sponge filters. As to placement, in theory if you place the water flow outlet near a sidewall, the water coming out along that wall will help to create a somewhat circular flow of water in the tank with the circular flow ending at the intake where all of the debris will get sucked in. That theory tends to die as soon as the water hits the first corner, but that's the theory anyway. With most filters expelling water on the right then most HOBs should be put on the back far right corner so they create a flow to the right front corner, that will then move across the front of the tank to the left front corner, then back to the back left corner then across the back to the water inlet on the filter. The ninety degree corners, plants, decorations, etc. all tend the destroy that theory as they disrupt the flow, but that's the theory behind HOB placement. In the real world, it doesn't really matter where you put it.

And the eggs that papa pleco had been guarding yesterday are now kicked out, but he's got yet another new batch of fresh eggs in the cave and I've got the eggs he just kicked out in the net breeder with the ones kicked out yesterday. Good thing I ordered the larger hang on breeder box. I'm going to need it.

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's the canopy I build for my tanks and it hides the lights and everything else. I've lost fish to jumping before so I wanted a jumper safe canopy with the glass (acrylic in my case) higher up so the fish can jump without getting injured. It's pretty easy to build using PVC trim boards from Home Depot or Lowes. The PVC cement used for PVC pipes holds it all together. It gives my fish eight to ten inches of jumping space before they hit anything but air above them. The acrylic is recessed down from the top an inch or so to help hide the lighting. The front door on this one swings up to give you access to the tank. It's a pretty easy build. I used PVC half round molding to hold the acrylic in place. I used scraps of PVC to give the door some backing and to block excess light from leaking out around the door. The PVC trim boards come in white, but it paints very easily. The white on the inside helps reflect the light and since it's PVC it just wipes clean and will never rot or decay. I'm a bit biased, but I think it's the best tank cover you can get. The humidity is largely contained inside the cover limiting evaporation. The fish can jump if so motivated without hitting their heads on a cover. (Unless they're an Olympic jumper who can get that high.) Plants can grow out of the water up to eight to ten inches. The only negative is you lose some light intensity from the lights being higher above the aquarium.

Ponds are pretty much self-cycling. Especially if you've got plants in them. I have a 330 gallon pond that has no filtration at all but has the best water of any of my tanks. There is zero ammonia, nitrites, or nitrates. I suspect the soil my lilies and lotus are in is serving as a biofilter for the pond. The water in the pond tests better than my tap water. I've joked that I should bring the pond water inside for water changes and put the tank water into the pond. Unless you've got a big bioload in the pond, you can pretty much just let it do its thing.

As anyone who's seen my tanks can confirm, I like algae. It doesn't bother me at all. It helps remove nitrates, serves as a food source for many fish, and can even host little stuff for fry to munch on. Algae is good stuff. At least to me. Algae is everywhere in nature, so you'll never defeat it. It's far better to opt to live with it. You could start a marine tank in middle America, hundreds of miles from the nearest body of saltwater. Put a light on the tank and before long you'll have marine algae growing in the tank. How does it get there? Danged if I know, but algae is everywhere. There's even sea ice algae that can travel through microscopic channels in the ice seeking food. It's a tiny little algae that's adapted to a unique environment, but there's no real competition for it so it thrives. You could spend your lifetime studying algae and still learn new stuff everyday.

I'm surprised to hear so many people have trouble with anubias. I always think of it as an extremely tough and hardy little plant. At least in my personal experience. It's one plant that thrives in every tank I put it in. I'm only growing Nana Petite and the original plant was tissue cultured so maybe that's why it's been so bulletproof for me. Interesting.

Not fish related, but I was selling stuff on Offer Up and another site and lots of time was wasted when a buyer just never showed up. You'd have multiple chats, agree on a price and location, get there and the buyer wouldn't show up. From what I gather, bored teens use such sites for entertainment with no real plan to show up. I haven't used Craigslist, but I suspect the same problem exists there.

Fish pretty much live to eat and spawn. It's what they do. Happy, healthy fish will spawn if conditions are anything close to being right. Many fish spawn on a near daily basis, but the eggs and fry get devoured and the eggs and fry are so small as to be easily overlooked. If you have a sizable school of neon tetras, they'd be plopping out eggs almost nonstop. For most fish, the population is largely self-limiting as bigger fish eat smaller fish. Corys aren't especially tasty however, so they can avoid being eaten. (Even baby corys know to lock their fins out if something tries to eat them.) There are worse problems to have than too many corys. Other nearby hobbyists, pet shops, etc. may be very willing to take your excess.

In the immortal word of Yogi Berra, "It's deja vu all over again!" Yes, another batch of eggs has been kicked out of the preferred breeding cave. A smaller batch this time, but still a considerable number. (Photo below.) The first group of baby plecos are now about an inch long and starting to move out into the twenty high their breeder box is hooked on. I took off the grate that keeps them trapped in the breeder box and five (at least) have transitioned to the big tank. There are still about a hundred or so in the breeder box however along with roughly a gazillion snails. The newly expelled eggs are now in a net breeder due to the breeder box being well above rated capacity. I have to order another breeder box for the new kids. The net breeder works, but is a bit riskier as fish can peck through the netting at the babies. I'll be lining it with some thin pieces of slate to give them a more secure bottom, but predation will still be an issue. The swordtails they share the tank with find baby plecos with yolk sacs an irresistible treat. There are still some eggs in the preferred breeding cave and papa pleco is fanning away at them, so this could be the case of another jealous female kicking the eggs out and replacing them with her own. So, about six weeks after the last batch, I've got a whole new batch of fry to raise without papa pleco's help. Maybe he's kicking them out on purpose so I get to tend the kids instead of him? Clever fish! These are still a few days from hatching and aren't quite as developed as the first batch were when evicted. That gives me time to order a new breeder box and get it set up.

If you're bored sometime look up "Japanese koi harvest" on YouTube for some videos of them rounding up some of their bigger koi in their mud ponds. The size of some of those fish is very impressive. And by and large, they're still young koi. They're typically just two to three years old. Koi can live much longer than that and they keep growing their whole life. If all you see are the koi in pet shops, you don't think they'll get very large. Even their extra large or jumbo koi are typically a foot or so long. They can get much, much bigger than that.

In the short term with very young fish it's very doable. But a two inch koi today, fed properly will likely be an eighteen inch koi this time next year. They're very fast growing fish when handled properly. They don't ever stop growing either. The largest koi I've heard of was four feet long and weighed over ninety pounds. That would be a very big aquarium fishy. Housing newly acquired koi in an aquarium can be smart as it's easier to observe and treat them while getting them accustomed to your food, but for the long term, it's pretty impractical. They're also powerful fish who can jump with significant power, and most tank covers will lose a confrontation with a large jumping koi. Professional koi keepers tend to use very impressive filters to handle the waste. Rotary drum filters combined with bakki showers is kind of the gold standard for koi keepers. Aquariums are great for the short term, but you really need thousands of gallons to keep them over the long term.