gardenman

I've got about 110 Super Red Bristlenose fry now in my little Marina hang on breeder box. They've got a piece of cholla wood, an old maple leaf, a chunk of Anubias Nana Petite that's covered in algae, some Repashy Soilent Green, canned green bean, I dropped in a couple of pieces of the TetraColor granules today for them also. When they get bigger (they're about a half inch long now) they'll get some freeze-dried tubifex worms also, but the worms are just a tick too big for them now. The Marina breeder box is on the outside of my heavily planted twenty high tank that is well established and I've got about four pond snails in the breeder box also. The box is nice in that I can circulate water through it to keep the water in the box fresh. It's moving about a teaspoon of water every second or two through the box so there's always some fresh water circulating through. That helps to eliminate any water quality issues. At this stage you can see their internal organs so you can see if they're eating and based on color, what they're eating. As to catching them in a planted tank, my older Super Reds are suckers (pardon the pun) for freeze-dried tubifex worms and get three or four cubes every afternoon. When I want to catch one or more I just put the cubes in pressed against the glass and I have my pick of ten or more plecos that are easily caught as they're distracted by the tubifex worms. The photo below shows about fourteen of the thirty or so in the big tank on or around the tubifex worms. When the worms are in the tank, you can pretty much collect the plecos by hand. They get very distracted eating the worms. They ignore the net, your hands, and everything else and focus on the worms. They love them.

Baby plecos eat a lot. It's hard to overfeed them. You always get some die off with baby fish. Some might have genetic issues. Some might get killed by tankmates. Some might lose out when competing for food. The babies when young still have their yolk sac which is pretty fragile. Their hearts are right there and somewhat exposed. Even something as small as an endler, pecking at the wrong place could kill a baby pleco pretty easily.

Food. Lots of food. Mine get green beans (about a can of them a week.) Freeze-dried tubifex worms (3-4 cubes a day in my big tank). Wardley shrimp pellets. Repashy Soilent Green. And whatever flake food manages to escape the ravenous swordtails. They're eating machines. I put a handful of green beans in about a half hour ago, and they're gone!

They're a really neat little fish. I highly recommend them. That's four of the thirty-some that are in my fifty gallon tank. I've got a hundred-plus week old fry in a breeder box also. These guys breed remarkably true to form. I got my original seven through catfishtown on eBay. They originals were only about an inch long when I got them in August of 2019, but they've done very well.

I have caves made of PVC pipe with end caps (1" diameter and 1.5" diameter) about six inches long. Mine breed most readily in the 1" diameter pipes even though they barely fit in them. Oddly enough the one they breed in the most is the one at the left front corner of the tank where there's near constant activity passing by. The secluded caves in the back parts of the tank are largely ignored. Here's a photo of one of my males in the one inch diameter tube.

Fifty is on the lower end of the normal scale for a big female guppy. A mature adult female guppy can have 200 at a time, but 100 is more the norm. They can spawn every 28 days (or so.) They typically start spawning ((small spawns) at around three months of age and live for about three years. Everything pretty much eats baby guppies, including mama guppy, so you almost never get a full-sized spawn unless you take extreme measures and isolate mama guppy and protect the babies from her. And truth be told, the world would be knee deep in guppies if they weren't eaten. If you have an average female who gives you 100 babies each month and those babies all start popping out a hundred babies each month when they're three months old, the numbers start to get pretty ridiculous, pretty quickly. Unless you know what to do with around two million guppies at the end of the first year, it's a good thing the other fish eat baby guppies.

Baffles are used to direct the water, but they don't have to be perfectly watertight, just strong enough to direct the water where you want it to go. That gives you some leeway in what to use. Glass and acrylic are the "normal" things to use. They're cheap and relatively easy to work with. In theory you could use bricks, or other block-type material to create baffles also. (Just be careful that what you use doesn't adversely affect your ph. What you're trying to create with baffles is a path for the water to travel that optimizes contact with your biofiltering material. A typical set of baffles would have water coming in at one side, going through a mechanical filter media (socks typically) then down and under the first baffle and up through the first set of biofiltering material before overflowing the next baffle and down to a pump. (additional chambers can be added as needed.) Water tends to choose the path of least resistance though so very often the actual water movement will just be through a small part of your biofiltering material. The best way to overcome that is to use a fluidized bed type of biofilter using something like the K1 bio media and a powerful air pump to keep it circulating in the biofiltering chamber. Off the Deep End Aquatics on YouTube has a nice above tank sump with a fluidized bed section on one of his plywood tank builds housing his Arowanas and rays. His is above the tank rather than below the tank but it gives you a nice idea of how one should work.

The cholla wood is very popular with the fry. It's been in the breeder box about two hours and it's stuffed full of baby plecos.

It's a biofilm. Some plecos, otos, snails, shrimp, etc., view it as food and will devour it. If you don't want any of those in your tank than chemical means are your only real option, but even then the film is likely to recur. Driftwood is an organic material and will breakdown in water and attract bacteria/fungi which will then create a fresh biofilm.

Could you build a tank stand out of 2X2's? Yes, but the challenge is in the construction. There's very little mass of wood to work with. Conventional construction techniques like lap joints, mortise and tenon joints, doweled joints, etc. are more difficult and less strong when dealing with smaller pieces of wood. Fasteners have less wood to get a grip on. Adhesives work okay, but once again with less surface area, there's less strength. One of the big concerns would be the stand wracking. If you bump into the end of a stand made entirely of 2X2's there's a very much higher risk of the whole thing collapsing. You could help counter that with a plywood back or cross bracing but that's complicating the construction more and requiring more materials. There's a company called Framingtech.com that makes aluminum stands using extruded aluminum. They're absurdly expensive ($547 for a 40 breeder size) but are sleeker and cleaner than a 2X4 stand. Imagitarium makes an all metal stand for 40 breeders that's currently $64 at Petco. When you're looking at 2X2X8's that are listed at $10.72 each and start adding up how many you'd need, that $64 starts to look pretty good. If you absolutely must build one yourself and you want a sleek and cleaner looking stand that won't collapse and you're not the type to move the tank around, you could use the wall of the house to support the back of the tank by securely (very securely) mounting a 2X2 cleat to the wall of the house (definitely hit at least two studs) then use some 3/4" plywood (or something comparable) attached to the wall cleat extending out with a simple pair of legs under the front of the plywood to hold it up. You'd want the back of the tank as close to the wall cleat as possible and you'd want the legs to be nice and strong, but a wall supported tank could work. There's going to be a lot of shear stress on the fasteners used to secure the stand to the wall, so you'll want to avoid fasteners with low sheer strength (like drywall screws) and use something more like a lag bolt that's built for sheer loads. Joey, the King of DIY on YouTube mounted his 120 gallon tanks in a similar fashion.

The big issue with drilling a tank is you don't absolutely know if a tank is made of tempered glass or not until you try cutting the hole. Then you can find out the hard way that it was.

I'll probably try trading them with a few local fish stores. I bought mine on eBay through a seller called catfishtown in August 2019. They were three for $19.99 and he had a buy one pack get one free sale, so I got six (seven actually as he threw in a spare) for around $35 after shipping costs. They spawned for the first time in April 2020 (or so). They had around twenty babies in that first spawn and they've been spawning off and on ever since. I typically just leave the eggs and fry in the big tank and let whoever survives survive. Papa pleco kicked these eggs out for some reason, so I scooped them up and moved them to the breeder box. It'll take about four to six months to reach a tradeable size, but then I'll see who offers what in local fish stores. I've got about thirty now in my big tank and most of them are two to three inches long. They're a very neat little fish.

The very neat and highly maintained planted tanks are pretty, but in the real world, my tanks turn into a jungle pretty quickly. I like jungles though so it works out well for me.

In the case of the twenty gallon tank, you should be fine. Bacteria live all through your tank, not just in the gravel. The two sponges should house more than enough bacteria for six Corys. (Just a note, Corys and crawfish don't always do well together.) The fifteen gallon is a little trickier. For light stocking I would think you'd be okay. I'd keep an eye on the level though. If you see ammonia starting to spike, then moving your sponge filter to the fifteen gallon tank for a bit should help with that. I wouldn't throw a lot of fish in the fifteen right away, but with light stocking you should be okay.

The babies are all taking advantage of the slate cave this morning and that made counting a tad easier. The photos below show the horde as shot and then the next one with the black dots indicate each individual fish as I counted them for a total of 108 baby Super Red Bristlenose Plecos. That's more than I'd thought. They're starting to eat real food now so the feeding will have to keep pace with their appetites.

How does the fish look from a top down view? The profile shots in your photo aren't that unusual for a Cory. They all tend to slope up from the head to the base of the dorsal fin then slope down to the tail. There may be a bit of a deformity towards the lower end of the dorsal fin area, but it's not horrible. Spinal deformities are typically more apparent in a top down view of the fish. If the body is straight from a top down view and not "S" shaped, then this probably isn't a spinal deformity. There's a lot of muscle structure around fins and the hump towards the back of the dorsal fin could just be because you've got an Arnold Schwarzenegger of the Cory world with overly developed back muscles to control his dorsal fin. A top down view would tell you more.

A center standpipe could be a weir. Think of a weir as a dam. It's typically glued in and sealed so water can only get in from the top. That way if a connection under the tank fails, only a bit of water comes out instead of the whole tank.

Pothos could do the job with just their roots in the water. Floating plants would have some benefits as well as drawbacks in your tank. They grow fast. They won't compete for the carbon dioxide in the water column as they'll pull all they need from the air. They're easy to remove as they overgrow the tank. They're cheap. And they're pretty tough little plants. The chief drawback is they'll block the light from your planted plants. I'd probably try to focus on larger floating plants to remove nitrates. If you weigh a water hyacinth that covers a square foot of the tank and duckweed that covers a square foot of the tank the water hyacinth would likely weigh a lot more. Why is this important? A lot of a typical water hyacinth's growth is above the water. It's a bigger, bulkier plant that would therefore have more plant that needs to be fed. Nitrates in your water is its food. A square foot of water hyachinth or water lettuce should therefore consumer more nitrates than a square foot of something smaller that sits only on the water surface. (Or so I'm assuming.) If you opt for a floating plat the bigger ones like water hyacinths and water lettuce would be my recommendations. They're far easier to control than duckweed and they have more mass to absorb more nitrates. I'll add a photo of a water hyacinth and it's three babies below. It's adrift in the sea of duckweed in my thirty high. A big plant is far easier to weed out than lots of little ones. (I have modified an Odyssea Clean 100 Surface Skimmer to vacuum up duckweed however and it works pretty well. Just enlarge the openings on the three sides of the skimmer cut to accept duckweed and you've got a duckweed vacuum cleaner.)

That Wyze Pan Cam is a pretty neat gadget. Under $40 too. It's hard to beat. The problem with testing something like a smart plug on one tank is you get into the one tank mindset. It worked for the lights on on one tank and I have four, so I bought three more plugs. I even got them all up and working well for months before realizing I could have done it all with just one smart plug and a power strip. Oh well, I'll have some spare smart plugs once I swap everything out.

I'm 62 years old and have been keeping fish since I was six or so, and I've never heard of anyone drilling holes in the bottom of a tank for an undergravel filter. The older style of overflows with the internal weir used to have bottom holes, but that's about the only time I ever saw holes drilled in the bottom of a tank. The weir would, in theory anyway, prevent the whole tank from draining should there be an issue with the bottom seal on the hole. The water would drop to the top of the weir and stabilize there. Drilling a hole into the bottom of the tank without a weir to stop a flood is pretty risky stuff. For those who don't know the weir is like a dam with a screen or gated opening at the top to allow water in. That area behind the weir stays dry until water reaches the inlets at the top of the weir. Should there be an issue, water would only drain down to the opening at the top of the weir and then stop, preventing the whole tank from draining. There were corner weirs (the most common), back weirs, and even center weirs on bigger tanks. A hole in the bottom of a tank without a weir is a recipe for disaster.

I love the smart plugs. I bought one as an experiment and liked it so much I put one on all of my lights. What I didn't figure out was that I should have just bought one and plugged all of my lights into a single power strip and use the one smart plug to control the whole power strip. So, I've got four smart plugs doing the job one could do. After the holidays I'll redo everything and switch it over to just one smart plug controlling the lights. I've also got a Wyze Pan Cam so I can keep an eye on my tanks when I'm not there. I can look left, right, up or down and zoom in using the cam. It's very handy. I can be on my phone anywhere in the world and as long as I have a connection, see how my tanks are doing. A new Wyze cam will be coming in January that will not be the panning type but a fixed view one that'll go on my bedroom tank so I can keep an eye on that also. The Wyze cams will even send me an alert if my smoke alarm goes off. Handy!

Here's a not so great photo from yesterday showing the babies in the remodeled breeder box. They're piled up four and five deep in the right front corner of the box, but you can see eight on the slate. Over the next few days the yolk sacs should disappear completely and they'll become eating machines. The tank water is now going into the box at a slow pace of about a teaspoon per second. (Measured by holding a teaspoon under the outlet of the breeder box.) That's decent water flow, but not too crazy. This is the Marina breeder box by the way. Amazon now sells an Ista box that looks the same. Finnex makes a similar box but theirs has a pump to move the water which would probably move too much water too fast for many baby fish. The baby plecos might be okay but other fry would have a hard time.

I would prefer to never drill the bottom of a tank. When something goes wrong in such a situation, the whole tank drains. There are easier ways to hide airline tubing. You can simply silicone it into a back corner and then run it along the back bottom of the aquarium and even include elbow and tee fittings with short airline tubing stubs with plastic air valves to feed current, and future needs. All of the stuff along the back wall can be siliconed in place and buried in the gravel. Someone would really need to search to figure out how you got air down there. It's easier to hide the airline tubing than the sponge filter. You can buy all kinds of airline tubing fittings these days. Two ninety degree plastic elbows, one to turn the airline from vertical to horizontal at the corner where it's glued in and the other at the far end with an airline tubing stub and valve. However many tees and valves you might want for future expansion, one every eight to twelve inches seems about right. All of that except for the tubing coming down in the corner could be hidden under the substrate and invisible. Need to add an airstone later? You know where the available stubs are, simply dig through the substrate, find the valve, open it to blow out any substrate, close it, attach the airline tubing to the airstone, adjust the airflow using the valve, cover everything back up with the substrate. Boom! You've got invisible air wherever you want/need it.

Just an update if anyone's interested. The baby plecos are doing great. Most of the yolk sac has now been absorbed. They're now more like 70% fish and 30% yolk sac. A few are even more fish than that. There have only been three casualties and those were fry that hatched out inside the egg mass and apparently couldn't escape. It wasn't until I was removing the old eggs that I found them. The airstone has been removed from the breeder box and the air-driven water supply tube inserted to send fresh aquarium water to the fry. The airstone is better for circulating water around the eggs, but now the babies are pretty close to starting to eat and then poop, so connecting them to the big tank's biofilter is now more important. The exit gate for the water has the fine grate on it and also a piece of filter material to stop any babies from deciding to head for the big tank. I've added a small piece of slate leaning against the wall of the breeder box to give them a cave-like place to hang out, but they tend to cluster together in a corner of the box instead. About six take advantage of the cave now. The first little (emphasis on little) piece of Repashy Soilent Green has been added. No apparent interest in it just yet, but in a few days they should really start feeding. I'd collected a big bag of old maple tree leaves a few years back to experiment with as a replacement for Indian Almond leaves, but I never got around to doing anything with them so one of them has been added to the breeder box. We'll see if they nibble on that or not in the coming days. I've got some Cholla wood coming from Amazon and if any of it is small enough, it'll go in there also. I may have to cut/break off a piece. The babies are now about 3/8" long and filling out a bit. No apparent albinos in the group as there are lots of black eyes staring back at me whenever I get down to watch them, but no red eyes. Still impossible to get a real count on the number of babies but 80+ is a reasonable estimate. A few are getting more adventurous and starting to free swim a bit more away from the pack. That will increase in the coming days. Right now about ninety percent of the fry are in about five percent of the breeder box. In a few days they'll be all over the place. There's this orange wriggling blob now in the right front corner of the breeder box but in a few more days they'll spread out all over the box. I've got an in-tank net breeder ready to go when they get more adventurous to move some to, to prevent the breeder box from becoming too crazy. You just have to be careful with the net breeders as some fish learn to peck at babies from the outside of the net and suck them through the net. It's not as big of an issue with free swimming fish, but for bottom dwellers like plecos and corys who are likely always on the net, it can be an issue. Once these guys get to a half inch or so and fill out a bit it's not as big of an issue. I've got two papa plecos guarding new clutches of eggs in the big tank, but those guys/gals will be on their own. Typically, only three or four survive to adult size in the big tank due to the swarm of swordtails in there. The other plecos don't bother the fry but the small fry are like candy to the swordtails.

I've got duckweed, red root floaters, salvinia minima, frogbit, water sprite, water hyacinths, and dwarf water lettuce all as floaters and I love them. (Not so much the duckweed.) The frogbit, water sprite, water hyacinths, and water lettuce have long roots that go deep into the water if that's a look you want. The salvinia and red root floaters have shallower roots and don't descend into the tank as much. The deep roots give fry hiding places if that's a priority of yours. All of them need to be weeded out fairly frequently or they'll block the surface completely.