gardenman

And the eggs have all hatched this morning and there are about 67 baby Super Red Bristlenose plecos now hanging out in the breeder box. (I say about 67 as even counting them in the photos is challenging and I'm likely to have miscount a little bit.) There appear to be no unhatched eggs which is good. I'll go in later and remove the empty shells but there are too many baby plecos too close to the empties right now to make that easy. They'll spread out across the breeder box as the day goes on and I'll then swoop in with an old baster and suck out the empties. I'll start adding a little bit (emphasis on little bit) of food starting tomorrow in case they start feeding before fully absorbing the yolk sac, but the algae on the plant gives them some food also. Here's a photo of the whole blob all hatched out and distributed through the breeder box. These are arguably the easiest fish in the world to spawn and raise.

We're up to nine hatched out this morning at 10:30 AM with many more to come. For those who think I'm exaggerating about the 70% yolk sac and 30% fish, here's a photo of one of the newly hatched out guys/gals already putting their sucker mouth to work on the side of the breeding box. That huge orange blob is the yolk sac. The little sliver of flesh is the fish. The rest of the eggs all look very good and you can see the little eyes of the unhatched plecos and their spine through the egg cases. They should all be hatched over the next 24 hours or so.

You might want to look into grow lights instead of aquarium lights. They tend to be more red/blue spectrum and less "white." Most aquarium lights are designed to make viewing the fish optimal and plant growth is a secondary consideration. If you don't mind the red (purplish) glow then a pure plant light might be your best option.

The general rule with all fish is if another fish will fit in its mouth, it'll eat it. That includes faster growing fry eating their slower growing brethren. People talk about a "dog eat dog", uh, no. It's a fish eat fish world is more accurate. Parent fish eat fry, fry eat one another, fry eat eggs, parents eat eggs, if eggs could figure out a way to eat fry or the parents they probably would. To some extent it's necessary. If you ever do the math on how many guppies could be produced in one year from one original pair, it's a staggering number. Mature guppies can produce as many as 200 fry every 28 days. The fry can start spawning at 3 months. If half the fry are female, you start getting into some pretty astronomical numbers pretty quickly. If they all survived, the world would be knee deep in guppies in a few years time. If you do the math, assuming 100 new fry per spawn with 50% female and the fry spawning after three months, you end up with around 2 million guppies at the end of the first year from that one pair. And that number increases drastically each month after that. You need one heck of a lot of baby brine shrimp to feed that horde.

I'm of 'the better safe than sorry" school and would probably recommend removing the dime-sized fry, assuming you could do so without unduly upsetting the parents. You don't want to be chasing them around the tank with a net like a mad person and freak out the parents who then may destroy their newly laid eggs, but if you can gently and quietly remove the fry without causing undue ruckus, it might be safest. That would protect both the older babies and new ones. You'd just want to do it in a manner that would be the least upsetting to the parents. Dime-sized fry might find the wrigglers of newly hatched babies irresistible and gulp them down.

My Super Red Bristlenose Plecos are mostly carnivores and partially vegetarian (mostly on green beans.) Even with thirty-plus Super Reds in my 50 gallon tank, I have to scrape the algae. In fact, I'll be doing it later today as it's building up pretty good. If there's anything meaty (shrimp pellets, tubifex worms, etc.) in the water they swarm all over it.

Making Repashy is easy-peasy. I make small batches at a time so I use a teaspoon of Repashy to a tablespoon (3 teaspoons) of boiling water. Stir it up to blend and then let it set up in the fridge. When ready to feed, cut off however much you want and plop it in the tank. I have about 30-ish Super Red Bristlenose plecos of various sizes with another 50+ eggs hatching out and mine are mostly carnivore. They inhale freeze-dried tubifex worms, and shrimp pellets. They'll eat Soilent Green Repashy but I don't think they love it. They also love canned green beans. (I buy them the $0.50 cans at Walmart and they eat a full can a week and that's just giving them some every other day.) Algae wafers are largely a no go for them unless they're starving. I wouldn't worry about them getting constipated or having issues with the food. Your pleco would probably like the Wardley shrimp pellets. They're a nice cheap sinking food that my guys (and gals) devour. Freeze-dried Tubifex worms are a favorite of theirs also. Press them firmly against the glass and the plecos swarm them.

For anyone wondering what a brand new, just hatched Super Red Bristlenose Pleco looks like, here's a photo of the first of my fifty-ish (probably more) babies. I'm also including a photo of the breeding box with the somewhat algae covered piece of Anubias Nana Petite, the air stone and the rest of the as yet, unhatched eggs which should be hatching over the next day or two. The little guy is mostly clear, about a quarter of an inch long and about 70% yolk sac and 30% fish. He or she will be absorbing the yolk sac over the next few days then getting more free swimming and start looking for real food. The Anubias has enough algae and gunk on it to give them some nibbles between feedings and I'll be giving them lots of food options once the yolk sac is absorbed. (I've tried counting the eggs in the photos and while impossible to get an exact count, I'm pretty sure there are more than fifty.) So, we'll have to see how many survive, but my success rate with these guys/gals is typically pretty high.

I like the idea of putting a big air pump in my basement with a loop of PVC pipe around the basement with outlets leading upstairs. Small holes drilled in the floor/wall near tanks for air to arrive where needed. That would let me supply tanks in every room and the noise would be in the basement. To the best of my knowledge no one makes wall plates for air distribution (like for cable, electricity, or ethernet) but if the aquarium hobby took off, there could be a market for that. A wall plate with an airline nub and a control valve built-into the wall plate. Put one (or more) on every wall plumbed into a central air distribution system and you could have a pretty neat setup. Want a tank in a room? Simply run some airline from the nub to the tank and turn on the valve. Instant air. You could branch off 1/2" supply lines vertically from the main loop into the wall cavity and then use a 90 degree elbow to send it through the drywall/plaster. Cut the length of the piece from the elbow so that with an end cap it was flush with the finished wall surface then drill and tap in the air valve.

I like the idea of using the USB air pumps as an emergency filter using a power bank during power outages. I've never really trusted them as a full time air pump, but as an emergency or transport air pump they make some more sense. I may have to pick up a few. As for how many sponge filters in a 75 gallon tank, I'm an over-filtering kind of aquarist. More is better to me. I have at least two filters on every tank. Typically one sponge filter and either a HOB or canister. I just feel more comfortable with more filtration.

One more note, they'd be very unlikely to starve in an established tank. There are a ton of microorganism in most established tanks and a baby Cory doesn't need much to survive. Most likely something else ate them or they got sucked into a filter.

Removing the eggs is easier than catching the fry. When I see Cory eggs they're typically on my glass, so I use a razor blade to gently scrape them off and transfer them to a breeding box or net. If they've bred on a plant leaf I'll just snip off that leaf and move it to the box/net.

I've never had a problem with any brine shrimp eggs. They always hatch for me in decent numbers. I'd probably avoid the no-name ones on eBay, but companies like brineshrimpdirect.com, San Francisco Bay, and others have been fine for me. It's one item I'm not overly picky on the brand.

I've got Malaysian driftwood in one tank with them and some Wish driftwood (looks like grape vine) in another tank. Mine love green beans and Tubifex worms. I've tried them on Zucchini and cucumbers and they just ignore them. The same with algae wafers. I've tried several varieties with them and they'll eventually eat them, but they're not passionate about them. They also love shrimp pellets. First thing every morning the whole tank gets some flake food and I put shrimp pellets in each front corner and I've got plecos lining up in the corners for the shrimp pellets. In the afternoon the tanks get more flakes/frozen food and the freeze-dried Tubifex worm cubes (3 or 4 cubes depending on my mood) get pressed on the front glass. There are usually three or four plecos hanging out where the cubes go and as soon as the first one is pressed into place, they're swarming over it. They get so aggressive going after the cubes that they tend to knock them off the glass before they get to eat them all. I've tried them on Repashy, but they seem largely uninterested in it. I go through a full can of green beans a week with them and I could probably go through two or three if I kept dumping them in. They get the $0.50 cans of green beans from Walmart and they seem to love them. They're pretty neat fish. The nice thing is the babies eat what the adults eat. Once the yolk sacs are absorbed, they just chomp down whatever you feed the big guys/gals. They're arguably the easiest baby fish to feed. I'll just plop a green bean, a couple of shrimp pellets, and a small corner of a cube of Tubifex in and they'll be happy as can be and chomp away. They grow pretty quickly. My first batch from April are now sexually mature and starting to show signs of breeding. My biggest guys/gals are about three to four inches long now and they were maybe an inch or so long when I got them. They're a very impressive little pleco. Not great on algae though. I still have to scrape the glass despite there being about thirty plecos in my bigger tank. (I maybe feeding them too much stuff they like more than algae.)

As has happened before my Super Red Bristlenose plecos have kicked the eggs out of their cave, so the kicked out eggs have been moved to an external breeder box to finish maturing. I've got about fifty eggs in this batch and papa pleco is already guarding a new clutch of eggs in the cave, so I guess he decided these were mature enough to survive on their own outside the cave. The eggs are pretty far along as you can see the backbone and fairly well developed babies in the eggs. They're probably a day or two from hatching. They've got six caves in the tank but really like one more than the rest and always seem to breed in that one. I'm guessing another male dispossessed the male that was in there and tossed his eggs out and then brought in his lady friend to lay fresh eggs. Not a big deal. The eggs are in good shape and should hatch in the external breeder box and I'll raise them there until they're big enough to rejoin the group. These guys are so easy to breed and so prolific that I truly wonder why their prices are so high. Out of the fiftyish eggs, I should get 30+ plecos, maybe more. This is probably the fifth breeding of this colony since April. Most of the time I just leave the babies in the tank and the swordtails pick off most of the young fry as I don't need a gazillion of them, but these will get raised externally. I've got 30+ of the Super Red Bristlenose plecos in my 50 gallon tank and two or three in most of my other tanks. Local pet shops sell them for $30-$40 each which is kind of crazy given how prolific and easy to raise they are. The parents are from catfishtown on eBay. I got them August 2019 and they started breeding in April 2020. I'd like to get a breeding colony in each of my tanks. They're a pretty neat little fish.

When you say high tech I'm assuming you're adding CO2. There's a balancing act that goes on between nutrients (fertilizers and CO2) and light. You need enough light for the plants to be able to use the nutrients. I'd start out with the one Fluval and if you're not getting the results you want, supplement the lighting. I've seen people (Fish Boy USA on YouTube for example) with cheap LED lights off of eBay that grew amazing plants. I don't think he uses CO2 either. Growing aquatic plants is a juggling act between the right light, substrate, water conditions, nutrients, and the right plants.

The only real reason would be trace elements and that's somewhat iffy as a reason. Just topping off evaporation might refresh those enough. You could also just use a remineralizer at a reduced rate to supply those. There's lots of chatter about fish emitting growth restricting hormones that have to be flushed through water changes, but the folks at Goliad Farms have a long article about that. They theorize that live plants absorb those hormones, or neutralize them in some manner. Which kind of makes sense. I've got a horrifically overcrowded tank that's heavily planted and I've got an abundance of 4"+ neon swordtails thriving in it along with about thirty Super Red Bristlenose Plecos who are growing very well. It gets no real water changes, just topped off after filter cleanings when its canister filter tosses out a couple of gallons and water lost through evaporation. To say the fish are thriving in there is an understatement.

In my experience, aquarium plants do what they want to do and we're just along for the ride. I've got four planted tanks. The same substrate in each. The same water in each. Similar lighting (6500K LED) in each. And plants that thrive in one tank wither away and die in another and vice versa. Some plants are completely agnostic and thrive wherever I put them (Java fern, java moss, anubias nana petite.) They just grow and grow well in every tank. Duckweed does very well in three of the tanks, but not so well in the fourth. Red root floaters thrive in one tank, survive in another and die in two. Water sprite literally grows like a weed in two tanks, survives in one and dies in another. I brought in some water hyacinths to hold over the winter. They're doing great in one tank, hanging on in another and died off in the other two. Rather than chasing the water paraments I recommend buying an assortment of plants and seeing what does well in your tank. When you know what likes your water/substrate/light combination, you'll get a lot of it. My 30 high had an absolute jungle of jungle val. I added a Madagascar lace plant and the jungle val all melted away. It all died. I tried replacing it and no go even after removing the lace plant. Aquarium plants are quirky little things. I can grow everything in the way of terrestrial plants with no trouble. Aquarium plants are a whole different story for me. I marvel at the people who can get anything to grow in their aquarium. I'm not one of them. I can grow orchids just fine, but some aquarium plants just keel over within days of hitting the tank. The stuff that grows for me grows very, very well. I remove a bowl full of excess growth every weekend. I just never know what's going to grow in which tank.

You might want to look into drip irrigation supplies for gardens. You can buy drip emitters that will slowly drip water into your tanks. Be forewarned that they aren't always as precise as they claim to be. You'll want to test the real world flow rate yourself. Some are adjustable from 0-10 gallons per hour while others come preset for a specific flow rater (more or less.) Drip irrigation systems are pretty easy to adapt to aquarium water change systems. If your tanks have an overflow you can leave them running pretty much nonstop if you're using the 0.5 gallon per hour ones and you don't mind using 12 gallons a day per tank. You can get timers, filters, supply lines, pressure reducers and everything you need in some drip irrigation kits for a very small price. (Oddly enough even sites like Wish have some pretty comprehensive kits.)

There are lots of possibilities. Andy is right, your ph should be higher. A ph of 8.2-8.4 is pretty much the norm for a marine tank. As a rule, smaller volumes of water are harder to control than larger volumes. Three liters is a pretty small volume of water. When things go bad in a small volume of water they go bad quickly. A larger mass of water (5-10 gallons) might give you more stability. My house stays around 73 degrees, but it varies by several degrees. The temp will drop down to about 67 before the heater comes on and heats it up to about 77. It averages out to 73, but there are swings. In a big volume of water the swings don't matter as much due to the large volume of water. In a smaller volume of water the water can pretty much change with the temp changes. If your bowl finds sunlight at any point of the day the three liters might heat up pretty quickly in the sun. Even the light over it might help to cook the brine shrimp in a small volume of water depending on the type of light it is. You might also want to look at alternate feeding options. There are several brine shrimp feeding formulas out there, some of which use human baby food (pureed sweet potatoes and peas) as a base. It's possible your spirulina powder is still too big for them. Once a day is not feeding them often enough from what I've read. They require multiple feedings a day. Many small feedings are typically preferred over one or two larger feedings. If you can't be there all the time, some sort of drip feeder that lets a small volume of food mixed with your salt water drip into the tank slowly might be a good option. Something as simple as a small water bottle (the 16.9 oz size or even smaller) with a hole drilled in the top and a piece of airline tubing glued into the hole and then either an airline valve or a tight knot tied into the tubing to control the flow rate to just a drop every thirty minutes or so, might be effective. (You'll have to be sure you're not restricting things so much that it's preventing the food from getting through though. An aquarium autodoser, like the Jebao ones could be handy for feeding if you have one lying around. They can come on up to 24 times a day so you could schedule in hourly feedings for the brine shrimp. One end of the feed tube would go into what food source you were using and the other into your grow out container. Every hour it could administer a couple of drops of food to your shrimp. It could also be some impurities in the salt you're using. You never want to use iodized salt. Back when I kept marine fish I would find that if I bought larger volumes of salt mix, that I'd have to really stir them up before use as the salt in boxes or buckets would stratify in shipment. It's not as big an issue if the salt came in bags as they'd get tossed a round a bit more. Coarser grains would be on the top and very fine powders at the bottom. While they blend all of the ingredients at the factory, when they get shipped the vibration from traveling tends to shuffle the lighter stuff to the top and the smaller, heavier stuff to the bottom. If you just take what's on top, you're not getting a true mix unless you stir it up or use the whole volume at once. If you're using a marine mix a few tablespoons at a time, you might be getting an odd mix of ingredients.

There are two issues you'd have to deal with. The first is obviously nitrates. You could put the used water in a large tub/bin outdoors and fill the tub with something like water hyacinths or potted marginal plants like cattails that are very good at pulling nitrates from the water. Once you got the nitrates back down to a reasonable level you'd still have one issue though and that would be the trace elements. They'd be diminished. You could use one of the additives like those used for RO water in shrimp tanks to help replenish them however. Another option would be to collect rainwater to use for your tanks. Your roof likely sheds a ton of water each time it rains, enough to fill your tanks several times over. Collecting it and storing it could be an issue, but it's doable. (I use Rubbermaid trash cans and also Tuff Stuff 110 gallon stock tanks from Tractor Supply Co to collect rainwater.) Rain water tends to be a bit soft and acidic so adding some crushed coral or aragonite to the storage container would be wise. (Unless you're keeping discus, angelfish, or fish that like soft, acidic water.) Rain water needs to be filtered before use due to stuff on the roof mixing in with it, but it can be done. A heavily planted tank with moderate or minimal stocking can be maintained fairly long with no water changes also. I have high ammonia levels in my tap water, so I tend not to do large water changes and my fish are fine, but the tanks are very heavily planted.

My well water is off the scale in terms of ammonia. I never use it fresh from the tap because of that. I have a bunch of old plastic kitty litter containers that I use to hold the water until I need it and after a few days in the bottles it's more manageable. I suspect I've developed bacterial colonies in there that feed on the ammonia in the water. I also use Prime as an extra step just before putting it in the tank and there's never a problem. The kitty litter bottles last forever, are essentially free and would just go for recycling if I didn't reuse them to hold water. (I use Cats Pride Scoopable litter and it comes in 12 lb bottles for under $6 at Walmart and each bottle holds about two gallons or so.) The only real long term issue is nitrates. When you start out with a ton of ammonia, you end up with a ton of nitrates. Water changes don't solve the nitrate issue as you're just dumping in more when your initial ammonia levels are high. I keep my tanks very heavily planted to help contain the nitrates then toss out the overgrowth of the plants to physically remove the nitrates, but my nitrate levels are always higher than I'd like, but my fish do fine.

Assuming the lighting was normal the whole time, then something likely ate the algae in the water. Once whatever it was that ate the algae ate it all, they likely died of starvation and that could account for your nitrite/nitrate spike. The algae would be flourishing in higher nitrite/nitrate levels so the lack of algae rather strongly implies it all got eaten.

I'd be fine doing it with smaller tanks, but as the tanks grew larger, I'd get more nervous about it. Especially over the long term. Glass is an interesting material in that it's not truly a solid or a liquid but is an amorphous solid. The old stained glass windows in cathedrals are measurable thicker at the bottom than the top. The glass wasn't made that way, it flowed (very, very slowly) downwards due to gravity. You can even see this to some extent on more modern (1800s-early 1900s) glass. In a larger tank with not just gravity but hundreds of pounds of water trying to move the glass and just silicone holding everything together, I'd get a bit nervous about everything holding up well. The absolute worse place for a tank to spring a leak is in the bottom seam. Without a fully supported bottom you're putting more stress on that bottom seam. I've had two tanks (my 50 and 30 high) spring leaks in the last few years, but both leaks were midway up a side seam. That's not fun but even if not caught (and both were caught early) at most the tanks would have drained halfway. If it was a bottom seam, the tanks could have fully drained. Can you do support atank on just the ends? Sure. Do I recommend it? No. I want stability under my tanks and to take as much stress off the glass and silicone as possible. It's already got a tough job, why make it harder than it needs to be?

A lot of breeders will only sell males to prevent others from breeding "their" fish. It's been done like that for decades. I don't really blame them as some strains take decades to develop, but if you sell pairs all that work is gone as everyone can buy them, breed them and sell them without the investment of time and energy to develop the strain. If you do the math sometime the number of fish that can be created from a single pair of Endlers is pretty impressive. A typical Endler female has 10-30 babies at a time and can reproduce every 23 days. The babies can mature and start reproducing within about three months or so. If you assume a 50/50 mix of males/females than you're looking at 5-15 new females every 23 days. In ninety days when that first batch is ready to start popping out babies of their own and 5-15 females each pop out another 5-15 females so there are then another 25-225 new females that in 90 days or so will be each producing more babies. If you're a breeder and you sell pairs, you're creating market competition. If you only sell males, and Endlers typically only live 2-3 years, then you know that if someone wants another one just like the one they had, they can only get it from you. If you sell pairs/trios then in two to three years there might be a hundred people (or more) offering them, Even the holding back of males doesn't ensure you won't have competition as other breeders will pair your male with a similar female and through careful selection they can pretty much duplicate your line over a few generations, but it's a bit more work for them than just selling them a pair.