gardenman

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.

They really do lock together nicely. If you had multiple ponds, some in sun, some in shade you could write messages in the green Azolla in the red Azolla ponds and the red Azolla in the green Azolla ponds. It would be a neat little attention grabber in the right retail market or for a garden tour.

Java fern and anubias are pretty much bulletproof in my experience. I've had java moss melt away in all but one tank initially though, but the moss that grew in the one tank grew so well I was able to transfer some to the other tanks where it had melted previously and now it's growing well everywhere. By and large I find aquarium plants to be a bit fickle. If I buy stem plants I separate them and plant one in each of my four planted tanks to see where it does best. All four tanks should be the same, but plants don't agree. Some will grow like weeds in one and not at all in another. I've got some dwarf sag that came last week. When taken from the pot there were two plants a smaller one and a larger one. The large one got planted in one of my bigger tanks under supposedly better lighting and is surviving, but not thriving. The smaller one went into my 10 gal QT tank and got uprooted by the pleco in there, but is thriving in mid-water, entangled in some java moss, so I haven't replanted it yet. It's getting lots of new growth, new roots and looks great, so I'm letting it hang out there for a bit. It's doing better than the one that's planted in supposedly better conditions. We had a local Mom and Pop fish store called Evan's Tropical Fish that was literally run out of their back porch and they sold me my first water sprite, many, many years ago. It died. They kept giving me more every time I shopped there and it always died. Then one day, one small nearly dead branch had a bright green little plantlet emerge and from then on I had all of the water sprite I could ever use. I've got tons of java fern in every tank and I don't even remember where I first got it. There are literally hundreds of them now. Anubias Nana Petite was bought a long time ago and it's all over the place now. I just moved a foot-long section of it to a plastic Sterilite container filled with water that I have under some plant lights as I don't need it in any of the tanks and it was just floating around. I hate to throw it away, so it's sitting there until I get a new tank started and need some plants. (It's got lots of plant life company in the Sterilite container also. I'll have to start weeding stuff out before too long.) I think there are plants that will grow just about anywhere, but you won't know which they are until you try and find out. A plant that's supposedly easy to grow for most may never grow for you, but a "difficult" plant may thrive for you. You just never know.

From what I've seen most professional breeders use a 20 high with a sponge filter. Their tanks are typically bare with either a breeding cone or a piece of slate as a breeding surface. The smaller tank makes it easier for the fry to stay near the parents. The flow rate on the sponge filter should be pretty slow too. You don't want a boiling mass of bubbles coming out. I've seen too many cases of fry getting behind a Matten filter for me to recommend them in most breeding setups. There's typically a gap somewhere that the fry find or they swim down the airlift tube into the area behind the Matten filter. Unless you have a foolproof way of sealing the edges and bottom of a Matten filter and use a fine mesh to cover the airlift tube you're apt to lose fry behind a Matten filter in a breeding setup.

Breeding to help offset the cost of the hobby is probably a good goal. To make a profit you have to make more than you spend and on a hobbyist scale that's not so easy. To make enough to lower the costs of the hobby is easier however as anything you bring in lowers your costs. To set up a ten gallon tank in the fashion you suggest from scratch, with quality materials, fish and supplies, you're probably looking at somewhere between $100-$200. Say your monthly operating expenses are $20 (electricity, water, food, time, etc.) To make a profit from a single ten gallon tank would be challenging as there's only so much stock you could raise there. But to simply help offset your costs is easy. Whatever you sell each month, plants, fish, snails, shrimp, reduces your costs. If you're able to clear $15 a month you've reduced your costs for the hobby from $20 a month to $5 a month. That's not bad. I've bought plants online from hobbyists and when I calculate out their shipping costs (mailing costs, box, plastic bag/container, paper towels, shipping label , etc.) and the time it takes to pack them and take them to the post office, and then the selling sites' fees, they might be making a dime to a quarter per plant. And that's not including their tank costs, lighting costs, etc. They'll never get rich at that rate, but anything they do make helps offset their hobby costs. Back to your original question. Will the guppies eat the baby shrimp? If the baby shrimp will fit in their mouth, they'll eat them. In a ten gallon tank there's not a lot of room to hide. There will be a lot of predation. Some will survive though.

And don't buy a lot. If any of the floaters do well in your conditions you'll have more than you know what to do with in a very short period of time. I bought a mix of red root floaters, frogbit, and salvinia minima from eBay with six of each, and I've got dozens/hundreds of each now and I'm throwing away excess plants. There are a few sellers offering a mix of floating plants at a fair price (I think I paid $6.99 shipping included) and that's a good way to experiment. Some people want to sell you a cup of duckweed. That's way more than you need.

Azolla is neat in that in full sun it turns very red, while in shade it's very green. I've grown it in my water garden before and toyed with using the different colors to make messages from the fish. Have the solid green carpet of Azolla then use the red Azolla to write "FEED US" or "NO FISHING" or something similar using some red grown in full sun. The colors last a while before fading so it would be doable. You'd have to make a stencil for the messages, but it could be fun. It would be a good way to surprise visitors to the garden. "Just ignore the fish. They're always nagging me for something." In a few days the red would fade and you'd be back to the solid green carpet and could do a new message. It could be a pretty effective marketing tool in a retail water garden setup. People would wonder how you did it.

In theory, if you add a planted freshwater refugium with the right substrate (typically fairly deep) and adequate lighting to a sump, you can pretty much eliminate water changes. Or so some say. The theory is you can leave the refugium light on 24/7 to keep the plants actively absorbing nitrates nonstop and that the minerals in the soil used will replace the trace elements the plants and fish need. The deep mud bed will harbor the bacteria that consume nitrates and will release nitrogen gas and oxygen. Real world results, at least from people not selling the specialized substrates, seem mixed at best. Most people claim there's little to no difference, while a few claim great results. I've toyed with eliminating all of my filters and placing one large sump in the basement to handle all of the filtration, except for the quarantine tank. My upstairs tanks have been in the same locations for twenty plus years, so they don't get moved a lot. Plumbing it all up wouldn't be terribly hard and drilling the holes in the floor doesn't really bother me, but the risks (big leak, broken pump, etc.) make it less than ideal, I've pretty much just opted to go with very heavily planted tanks instead and that's working out very well for me. A pump to move the water from the refugium back upstairs to the tanks would need to be quite powerful (about a twelve foot lift) and it's just not worth the trouble for me. If I ever get the stuff to play with I might try building a really long DIY HOB with a refugium and light built into one of the chambers. Even a big HOB these days is typically about 18" wide, but on a 55 gallon tank you've got more like 46" of space available. Use a pump in the tank to supply the HOB with water, then have mechanical filtration at the start, then biofiltration (fluidized k1 media perhaps) then the refugium, then a final mechanical filtration stage to remove any plant debris and finally a really fine water polishing stage before it flows back into the tank. A typical HOB is about 4" deep (front to back) so if you make the multi-chamber HOB 4" deep but say 44" long and a foot deep (top to bottom) you get a lot of potential filtering area to play with and not use up any more space than you already use.