gardenman

Much of the time the scam seeds are hygrophila seeds of one species or another. Hygrophila seeds have some medical properties, so they're harvested commercially and then repackaged for aquarium use. They can make some decent looking aquarium plants. Just don't let them out into native waterways.

Territorial fish are interesting. Some are happy with smaller territories while others want more. Sometimes a lot more. There was a video from the Amazon a while back of a cichlid defending a ten-foot radius he'd claimed. He even chased off a large caiman that dared to enter his circle of death. He kept going after the cameraman until the cameraman got outside his circle of death. If you have a fish that claims a ten-foot territory, you're going to need a really big tank to keep it. They get a bit crazed. If you watch your current male apisto closely, you can figure out his current territorial boundaries. How much of the tank he's claimed and how much remains unclaimed largely determines whether you can add another male or not. If he's just laid claim to a tenth of the tank, you can probably add another male. There should be enough room left for the two to co-exist. (Bear in mind male number two may want the same turf as male number one, so there are no guarantees.) Crowding fish often lessens territorial issues. African cichlids tend to be better behaved when in a crowd. The same is true for many South American cichlids. But you don't know if that'll work for you unless or until you try and you can create chaos trying it when it doesn't work.

Canister filters are often called nitrate factories. There's a lot of debate within the hobby as to whether that's true or not. Some insist it's not and that if you maintain a canister filter it's fine. Anecdotal stuff can often be dismissed, but the nitrate factory thing has been around for a long, long time. I'd recommend a thorough cleaning of the canister filter including the hoses and see if that made any difference. It's one of those "can't hurt and might help" things to try out. You'd be amazed at the gunk that can pile up in a canister filter hose. Hose cleaning brushes are a great investment for a fish keeper. Other things to look at would be your substrate. Some leach nitrates. Especially substrates made for planted tanks. Plants need nitrates, so the substrate makers figure it won't hurt anything. You say it's "standard aquarium gravel" but there are all kinds of things sold as aquarium gravel. A buildup of debris under the UG filter grid could be an issue also. If the tank has a glass bottom and you've got it on an old-school angle iron stand, a peek up from the bottom can let you see what if anything is under the UG grid. If all else fails, you can try using a nitrate sponge type of plant like a water hyacinth to suck up the nitrates or add some of the Poly-Filter material to your filtration systems.

There are multiple videos on how to raise brine shrimp on YouTube. One of the "secrets" seems to be a powdered food called Selco. It's been around since the 1980s and seems to be commonly used on a commercial basis. You also have to remember it's also still a fish tank with all of the issues with a regular tank.

IBC totes have a drain at the bottom, and you can get adapters that connect to those drains to let you plumb multiple units together. If you do an online search for "IBC Tote Drain Adapter" you'll find lots of options. Many are for 3/4" garden hoses as IBC totes often get used as rain barrels, but you can also find some for 2" plumbing for larger flow rates. IBC Totes get used for all kinds of things and lots of adapters now exist for those uses.

You always get down to the question of, "How accurate do you need to be?" The pH in a tank will vary over the course of a day by more than the accuracy of most testers. In general, pH will drop in the overnight hours as CO2 accumulates and plants/algae aren't consuming it. The CO2 combines with the water to form carbonic acid which lowers the pH. Then as the day goes on the pH will rise as the CO2 gets absorbed by the plants and algae. Even the best buffered tanks will see some swing in pH values throughout the course of a day. In the real-world, a difference as large as 0.5 (or larger) won't affect most fish. Even in their native habitats things like a large rainfall can significantly alter their pH. Does knowing your pH at this minute is 6.5431 with an absurdly accurate tester change how you treat your fish over knowing the pH is somewhere between 6.3 or 6.7? No. It shouldn't. Ballpark numbers are typically fine for pH. You don't need pinpoint accuracy. You more want to know the trend in pH than the most accurate number at this moment.

I'd go with all 2X4s as the price difference between 2X4s and 2X2s is pretty small. Stronger is better in my opinion. Too strong is better than not strong enough. A lot of 2X2s are just ripped 2X stock and tend to be pretty unstable. Finding good, straight, unwarped, 2X2s is not the easiest task in the world. Finding good 2X4 stock isn't the easiest, but it's easier than finding good 2X2s in any quantity.

The "For Dummies" series has a "Koi for Dummies" book that's a pretty good intro. And there are a gazillion good YouTube channels/videos featuring Koi. Now there's a "koi pond" and a "real" koi pond. You'll see people calling a three-foot round hole with a plastic liner a koi pond. A "real" koi pond will be substantially larger and hold thousands of gallons of water. If it's a "real" koi pond by a koi fancier, it likely has a substantial standalone filtration system of some sort. These can be as simple as a pool filter or something more complicated like a rotary drum filter with a bakki shower. If it's a "real" koi pond, some online research into the filtration and finding manuals or operation guides for that type of filtration may be most helpful. If it's a "real" koi pond it was likely installed by a local koi specialist. There are quite a few littered around the country and giving the new homeowner their contact information might be the best option. They'll know the equipment and can advise the homeowner on the proper set-up and use of it. In the Delaware Valley/NY area Fitzfishponds.com is a big installer of koi ponds. I don't know where you're from, but pretty much every part of the country has a koi specialist retailer within reach. A quick Google should find a koi pond installer in your area who installed it if it's a "real" koi pond. Getting them in contact with a koi pro might be the best bet.

I would overbuild the stand. 2X4s would be my minimum. It's better to be too strong than not strong enough. As to the depth of gravel, anything from an inch or so would be fine. If you've already got the tanks or have a good source for them, then kudos. If not, there's a YouTuber called Serpa Designs who recently posted a video on making 28-gallon tanks using Ikea precut glass. Video below. The dimensions might be a bit different than yours, but I thought I'd post it here anyway, just in case.

There are all kinds of adapters that fit on the drain of IBC totes that would let you interconnect them. The easiest filter then is something like a simple box filled with biomaterial and some mechanical filtration above the totes. Pump water from one of the connected totes up into the filter box, through the filter material, then back down into the other tote. Water wants to seek its own level so as long as you kept the flow rate sane relative to the movement of water between the totes, you could filter a nearly infinite number of them using just one pump and filter box. Just have the pump at one end and the return at the other. Water comes out one end, lowering the water pressure/level in that tote which then draws water from the others and the water then gets returned at the far end. If you do an online search for "IBC Tote Outlet Adapters" you will find a wide variety of adapters to suit whatever need you have in terms of water movement. Two-inch adapters are out there letting you handle a large flow from tote to tote. The 3/4" ones for garden hoses are more common, but larger ones exist also. The big concern would be a leak developing down low and draining both totes and you'd also want/need a screen of some sort to prevent fish moving from tote to tote.

"You would think the company selling this tank would know better." Companies hire product designers and don't really give them much information other than a budget to hit and some general guidelines. The designers often have no clue about the creatures they're designing habitats for. They typically don't keep them as pets and just design something that "looks good" and is sellable. I had the opportunity to chat up one of the product designers who'd made Wardleys' "Sandman" filter quite a few years back. The fluidized bed sand part was brilliant. The pre-filter was horrible. It would clog within a day or two and then let unfiltered water bypass it. When talking to the designer he seemed very confused why I was feeding my fish as frequently as I was and insisted that he'd been told fish only get fed once or twice a week and that's how the pre-filter had been designed. It wasn't designed to handle daily feedings. Yeah. He admitted he'd never kept fish and seemed shocked that anyone would feed them more than once or twice a week. If you think it's bad on the fish side, talk to hamster enthusiasts and ask them which commercial hamster cage is best. They'll quickly tell you none and instruct you on which Ikea cabinet to buy and how to modify it into a good hamster cage. The same is true for most pet products. Bird cages often ignore the reality of birds needing to fly and stretch their wings. Dog houses are seldom well designed. Rabbit pens are often horribly made. Companies just make products to sell and if it sells, that's all they care about. Ethics take a back seat to sales.

I had one way back in the distant past. (Maybe forty years ago now?) I had an empty fifty-gallon tank and wasn't sure what to do with it. I was wandering around one of our bigger fish stores then in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania called World Wide Aquariums and talking with the manager and he suggested an Arowana as they were getting in some baby ones in a couple of weeks. I thought, "Why not?" I bought five hundred feeder guppies for the tank (which was heavily planted and fully cycled.) Then went back when the Arowanas arrived. I knew to get one with a yolk sac still attached and did so. (At that time, they were around $9.99 for babies.) He went in with the five hundred feeder guppies (which with fry were probably closer to five thousand at that time) and just swam around watching them until the yolk sac was absorbed. Then it became a feeding frenzy for him. Within a year he was over eighteen inches long. He'd plowed through the feeder guppies in a couple of months and then graduated to small feeder goldfish. He got moved to a bigger tank and was about 22 inches long when he jumped one night and crashed into the top of the tank and died. He was probably the meanest fish I've ever kept. I had to keep a net between him and my hand whenever I did anything in the tank. He'd attack your hand and even with the net he'd try to swim around it to get to you. Very neat looking fish though. Having kept one, I'm over it now. They aren't overly personable. They look impressive, but they're pretty much just an eating machine and don't show much personality. They're a good showpiece fish and fascinating to watch, but not much else. Oscars, Midas cichlids, and other cichlids are much more "fun" fish. At least to me.

Regarding the drain, in this video you can see how one fishkeeper did it at the 39 (or so) second mark of his video. He likely would have had a fairly minimal issue anyway as his air outlets are on the bottom of the air pipe, so any water that accumulated would go out with the air. Many fishkeepers go in more horizontally with their air outlets though and that lets the bottom half of the pipe accumulate moisture.

They didn't do one in August or September, so I think they've moved on. It was monthly and now it's not.

Mark's Aquatics on YouTube has a multi-part series on breeding Neons. (And pretty much anything else one can breed, including some marine fish.) Neon fry are very, very small and maybe even too small for daphnia initially.

Once frozen you can toss them in a blender or food chopper and create some fresh food for your fish (and even the other shrimp) from their remains. Protein is protein. No need to waste it.

African cichlids sound perfect for what you want. They've very colorful, very active, and pretty hardy. You can make a largely carefree tank using rocks for hardscape. Since you're having a sump, you can have a bog chamber in the sump where a few bog plants can be grown to help strip nitrates from the water. And speaking of water, you'll want your tap water to be pretty hard with a higher pH for African cichlids if you're using an auto-water change system. You can cheat on that a bit by using alkaline enhancing rocks, coral, and substrate, (even hiding some in the sump) but they tend to be slower acting and if your water is very soft and acidic out of the tap, larger water changes may not reach the desired levels. You'll need to spend quite a bit on rocks and fish as you like an African cichlid tank to be pretty crowded from the start. That tends to minimize bullying. But if you're custom building a 380-gallon in-wall tank with a large sump, money is probably not a huge concern. Do an online image search for African Cichlid tanks and check out some videos of African cichlid tanks on YouTube for inspiration.

In the aquaculture world, bioload is mostly determined by the weight of the fish. A six-inch-long goldfish will weigh more than a six-inch-long swordtail. There's a complicated series of schedules that revolve around the weight of the fish, the weight of the food, composition of the food, the water temperature, and more to determine the bioload, but in general, the bulkier a fish is, the bigger the bioload is. Those on the lunatic fringe of the koi world who want the largest possible koi will feed their koi nonstop using an auto-feeder with a trigger (typically a ball or lever) that the fish can hit whenever it wants food. And they want food a lot. They need insane filtration to keep up with the bioload of free-feeding fish.

Just understand that compressing air will force moisture from it and that moisture will accumulate in the PVC and get pulled downward by gravity. You want to install a drain and trap to keep it from becoming an issue for the air pump and the system.

A lot depends on whether the fish are wild caught or domestic-bred also. Fish that have been bred in captivity for generations tend to be hardier than their wild-caught brethren. I think part of it comes down to cost. If you're spending $50 and up for a single discus, you want it to live forever and if it doesn't, you blame it on the fish not being hardy. If you buy a $1 neon tetra and it dies, oh well, life goes on. It was just a dollar.

The tiny little bit of salt you would move with the brine shrimp (assuming you're netting them or using a strainer) is inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. Salt isn't deadly to freshwater fish. Not in anything close to a normal quantity anyway. The brine shrimp likely have a greater salt content inside them than on them, so you don't really need to rinse them. If you have chlorinated water, the rinse water could even be more harmful than the saltwater you bring over with unrinsed shrimp. If you have a small tank and you dump in a hatchery full of shrimp and saltwater daily, and never do water changes, that would be bad. For a single fish in a tank, using frozen food is smarter. If you buy the blocks of frozen food, you can just uncover one corner of it, wave it in the tank water for a few seconds for a few pieces to float off, then pull it back out and wrap it in plastic wrap and back into the freezer with the rest. You can get a lot of control over how much you're feeding in that manner.

There are a lot of variables in water temperature change in an aquarium. If the tank has lots of substrate, large rocks, etc. the temps will tend to stay more consistent as the rocks and substrate will radiate stored heat out when the water temp starts to drop. An acrylic tank will cool slower than a glass one. A squarer tank will have less exterior glass surface than a more rectangular tank so it'll cool slower. A nine foot long but one-foot-deep front to back tank will have nine sq feet of space but 20 feet of exposed glass (two nine-foot-long pieces and two one-foot-long pieces. A three-foot square tank will also have nine sq feet of space, but only twelve feet of exposed exterior glass (four 3-foot-long pieces.) The same thing applies to homes. Build a squarer home and you'll gain less heat in the summer and lose less in the winter. And also save on home construction as exterior walls, footings, foundations cost a lot of money. A covered tank will cool slower than an uncovered one. If you want a tank that's very quick to change temp in response to air temp changes then an all glass, uncovered, bare tank that's very rectangular and not so square is ideal. Having a fan blowing on the tank will also speed up the cooling process. The thing to remember with plecos in the wild is that temperature swings tend to come with heavy rain. Cold, heavy rain will stratify and the cold rain will sink to the bottom of the river, lake, or pond fairly quickly, which is typically where the plecos are. With large heavy rains comes an abundance of food as stuff washes into the rivers and whatnots. To recreate a heavy rainfall in an aquarium you typically want to do a large water change with cooler water and let that cooler water stratify in the tank to recreate a rainfall. Upping the feeding program so there's always some food available is wise also. In a perfect world, you'd add the fresh, cooler water lower in the tank to try and recreate the stratification the fish would find in the wild. If they got too chilly, they could swim up higher. Maintaining stratification in an aquarium is challenging though due to flow. We circulate the water a lot in aquariums and that water circulation kills stratification. A false bottom on a tank, say a large piece of slate elevated two inches from the real bottom of the tank with minimal waterflow in that submerged isolated area, might help to recreate a stratified layer in an aquarium, especially if you had an auto water change system feeding cooler water into that area on a constant drip basis.

No smell means he's probably still alive. Some don't like being disturbed and will sit in one spot for adays until they start to move again.

The big question is why do you want RO/DI water all through a house? Making RO/DI water produces a lot of wastewater that you have to get rid of. A "traditional" RO/DI system will produce 4 gallons of wastewater for every gallon of pure water. The newer high efficiency ones can get down to as low as one gallon of wastewater for every gallon of RO/DI water. But you've still got to get rid of the wastewater. Most fish need the RO/DI water to be remineralized in some manner to survive also. And plumbing an entire house with conventional piping isn't the cheapest thing in the world.

I was going to suggest bristlenose plecos also. Very easy to breed. The parents take care of the babies who eat the same thing the parents do. They're a very farmable fish. Plop them in a tank, feed them well (often the hardest part, they eat a lot) and they'll give you babies. And the fry are a snap to take care of.