gardenman

If I was betting I'd say it was food related. There was a video from a discus breeder a few years back who raised his baby discus in a 125 gallon tank, but kept them all pinned into one small corner of the tank to get optimal growth. It was his belief that the baby fish would waste too much energy and burn too many calories searching for food in the whole tank if he let them roam free, so he kept them confined to a very small portion of the tank, but the tank still had a large water volume to dilute wastes. It was kind of weird seeing this big, long fish tank with about twenty baby discus all clumped together in one little corner of the tank. He was very successful though as a discus breeder and had huge discus on display. If your fish are roaming the whole 75 gallon tank looking for food nonstop they're probably not getting enough food to trigger optimal growth. The other fish may be out-competing them for the food also. Put it in human terms, if you had to walk ten miles each day before you got a meal, and then when you got there only a small amount of food was available and there were faster people than you racing for the food, you'd be pretty skinny. That could be the situation for your angelfish and parrot fish.

I'm using some 2 ft long Barrina 6500 K T-5 LED fixtures on my 20 high and they're really bright and good. They also make them in a four and eight foot length. You can daisy-chain them together. I'm using four on my 20 high and they light it great. The four foot long ones (ideal for a 55 gallon tank) cost under $50 at Amazon for eight of them (less than $7 each) and you can add or remove them as your light needs increase or decrease. All eight at once (they're reportedly 2,200 lumens for each fixture) would likely be too bright but you'd have that option. You'd want to build a hood for them to hide them and help direct the light, but they're a cheap and so far anyway, reliable option. I use a smart plug to turn them off and on.

Chew is kind of an iffy verb for fish. Oscars will mouth food, and create a mess as they process it, but I'm not sure I'd really call it chewing. Plecos kind of chew with their sucker mouths, but is it more chewing or scraping? Fish, even those with teeth, don't typically grind food with their teeth which is what we typically think of as chewing.

I bought six baby Super Red Bristlenose Plecos over a year ago from Catfishtown on eBay and he sent seven all of which lived. I put six caves (3 of 1" PVC with end caps and 3 of 1.5" PVC with end caps) and they've bred three times so far. and I've now got over thirty of them in my tank. Here's a photo of about twelve or so nibbling away on the tubifex worms pressed against the glass. They eat like crazy. Mine love meaty food (shrimp pellets and tubifex worms) and green beans. I put in about thirty or so shrimp pellets every morning and then three or four cubes of worms in the afternoons. Every other day they get some green beans and they go through a full can of beans in a week. They'd probably eat more if I put more in. They're really nice little fish.

I lost a big 22" Arowana and also an Oscar once to jumping where they jumped up, hit a solid glass cover and killed themselves. Conventional tank covers give fish next to no jumping room and if they're prone to jumping they will hit the glass, possibly injure themselves badly and even die. To prevent that I've started making my own tank covers out of the 3/4" PVC trim boards that are nine plus inches wide. Here are a few photos of the one on my 30 high. The PVC will never rot or decay and the fish get about 8" of jumping room before they hit anything too solid above them. I just use a sheet of clear acrylic atop the trim that I caulk in place. You lose a bit of light transmission by the lights being higher, but you save the fish. It's especially good if you're trying to keep butterfly fish, hatchet fish, archer fish, or the like. The PVC can be pricey but it works like wood, never rots, The surface of it is white which makes it a nice reflective surface on the inside and is paintable on the outside. Construction is super simple. You just cut the boards to the size you need, glue them together at the corners, add some trim PVC (I used PVC quarter round molding) to hold the acrylic and you've got a tank cover that's safer for the fish, easy to work in, looks good, and does everything you need a cover to do. And you can make it whatever size you need. I just use a saber saw to cut out the door to whatever size I want, add a pair of cheap small hinges from Walmart, use some scrap, leftover PVC to back up the door to block excess light leaking out around it, add a knob for the door, and it's done. The fish have room to jump and are less likely to hurt themselves jumping. They cost me around $50 to make depending on the price of the PVC at the time. I've got that type of cover on my 30 high, 20 high, 50 gallon, and 10 gallon quarantine tanks. I wouldn't use anything else these days. Holes for things like heaters or HOBs are easy to cut out using a saber/jig saw.

The type of Repashy largely depends on what type of pleco you're getting. Some plecos are largely carnivorous. Give them an algae based Repashy and they'll ignore it. My Super Red Bristlenose plecos are a combination of carnivore (they adore freeze-dried tubifex worms pressed against the glass) and herbivore in that they'll devour canned green beans. They pretty much ignore the algae in the tank though and leave that for me to scrape off. Some are more wood eaters and will ignore anything not wood based. A pleco isn't a pleco. Their diets vary from all plant to all meat to anything in between. Once you decide on which type of pleco you're getting then you can focus on the right type of Repashy for that pleco.

Parasites and pests are less of an issue when going from saltwater to fresh. There's not a lot that would transfer over. I would probably test them in fresh water for a few days. Fill a largish container with fresh water, check the ph before, plop the rocks in and then recheck the ph a few days later. If the rocks will affect your ph you should see a difference in a few days. I wouldn't worry a lot about salt leaching from the rocks as most freshwater fish have some tolerance for salt and may even find low levels beneficial. Depending on how large your large is, if you opt to boil them then a barbecue and a large metal trash can can be your best bet. As long as they don't affect your ph though you should be okay.

I have four planted tanks with water sprite in them. It thrives in two of them dies in one, and barely hangs on in another. All four tanks test nearly identically and have similar lighting. They even have the same fish and substrate. Aquatic plants just do what they do. Anubias and java fern are tank agnostic. They grow well in every tank. Water sprite is iffier in some. Jungle val is even iffier. Even duckweed grows differently in different tanks for me. Java Fern, Java moss and anubias are the most reliable plants that grow anywhere for me. Red root floaters thrive in my 50 gallon tank, barely survive in my 20 and die elsewhere. This is life with aquatic plants. All get the same water, have similar if not identical substrates, the water tests similarly, similar lighting, but vastly different results. If a plant doesn't do well for you try something else or move it to a different tank. Aquatic plants are a bit weird.

There truly is no one best filter. I tend to use multiple filters with at least one sponge filter in every tank. Multiple filters give you backup should something go wrong. One large, powerful filter that dies at the wrong time can turn your tank into a mess. By using at least one sponge filter, in an emergency (no power) I can use a battery powered air pump to keep things going until the power comes back on. If a filter should die without my realizing it, and it happens, then there's a second filter still chugging away. I tend to avoid filters that use a proprietary filter pad as the long term costs are absurd. For hang on back filters the Aquaclears are hard to beat. Their sponges can be reused for years. My canister filters are Penn Plax Cascades. I use quilt batting as a mechanical filter medium in them along with sponges. The big issue with most filters is they don't remove the waste completely from the water, they just hide it. Fish poop, dead plant matter, uneaten food, etc. remains in the water decaying away, it's just out of sight. Theiling with their Rollermat filter tried to solve that problem but their design made it easy for stuff to fall off the fleece and into the bottom of the filter where it would still decay. The newer filter designs by Clarisea with their SK-3000 and possibly Klir with their DI-4 and DI-7 (though I'm not as sure about the latter two as I haven't seen them in person) seem to help eliminate waste completely from an aquarium by physically removing it on a rolling sheet of fleece. This is a similar concept to the revolving drum filters used in expensive koi ponds. Get the bad stuff completely out of the water. I played with a homemade version of the Theiling for my 50 gallon aquarium using quilt batting instead of fleece and the concept was pretty good. I'd just manually advance the batting each time I fed the tank removing the solid waste from the water completely. My home made version was absurdly simple. (I can post a photo later if you're interested.) Just a plastic box with a roller on each end. Water got pumped into the box from the tank. It then drained through the bottom after passing through the quilt batting. I had a piece of PVC pipe serving as a roller on each end of the box. One end had the unused quilt batting while the other end had the used stuff. Both ends were kept out of the water. I had an overflow cut into the side of the box in case the batting got clogged, water would simply bypass it and go back into the tank. At each feeding (I was using this on my goldfish tank at the time) I would just roll up the somewhat soiled batting out of the water and fresh batting would take its place. The quilt batting just wasn't a perfect filter medium for me. It would be too thin in some places. It would occasionally tear. I looked into other commercial products to use as a filter material, but the purchase quantities were absurdly large. Buying a twenty foot wide roll that's 500' long is kind of excessive. I played around with some paper filters (paper gets too fragile when wet though), Cloth, okay but pricy and would often stay saturated. I think a filter like that where you essentially advance a very inexpensive roll of filter material either manually or automatically each time it gets slightly clogged to physically remove debris from the water is ideal in terms of a filter. Instead of just hiding bad stuff in the filter, you're getting rid of it completely. Finding the right filter material at an affordable cost is the big issue I faced. It would be easy to build into most hang on back filters as a prefilter but no one does it.

I grew some a few years back and they did well, but are not a carpeting aquatic plant. They grew quite tall. The ad said they were glossostigma, but they didn't look like or grow like glossostigma. They did grow well though. I started mine in a small Sterilite plastic container with some Flourite in it and the water just kissing the surface of the soil. As the seeds germinated and grew I added more and more water. I started them under the plant lights I use for my normal seed starting for my garden plants. They filled the Sterilite container and transplanted to some of my tanks very well. My water sprite, java fern and assorted other plants eventually crowded them out but I got a lot of growth for less than a dollar of seeds. By starting them outside of the tanks in a separate container it gave me the chance to see what they were before I dumped a bunch of seeds into the tank. If I needed a lot of plants and didn't have much money to invest, I'd do it again. As it is now I'm weeding out excess plants all of the time. If nothing else, it's a fun, cheap experiment.

Val is a quirky plant for me. I had a jungle of it in my 30 high then I added a big Madagascar lace plant and it all melted away to nothing. Not one val plant survived. I've got some more now and it's doing okay. Not great, not melting, just hanging around getting established. It's not one of my more reliable plants.

I love the sailfin mollies. Many, many years ago I stumbled upon a retired breeding pair of black sailfin mollies in a pet shop that were the most gorgeous fish I've ever seen. The female was about eight inches long and the mail was over six inches long. They'd been raised in a pond in Florida. The breeder was moving on to something else and included them in his final shipment to the wholesaler. The pet shop owner saw them at the wholesaler, fell in love and bought them. He then put them on sale in his shop, but put an absurdly high price on them so no one would buy them. I think it was $89.99 for the pair and this was like forty years ago. You could pretty much buy the most exotic fish in the world then for less than that. The male didn't know he was a retired breeder and he was flashing and displaying for the female with that enormous sail with the red edging. Sailfin mollies are on my bucket list of fish to keep. I want several pairs in a big enough tank for them to reach their full potential. That pet shop owner confided that he'd paid far, far less for the pair than he was asking for them, but he didn't want to part with them, so he priced them absurdly high so no one would buy them. You only see the very small, young sailfin mollies in pet shops, when you see them at all, but once you've seen a fully adult pair of sailfin mollies at their peak, they will blow you away.

I feed my baby fish homemade fish food that I grind up in a spice/coffee grinder. I can alter the makeup of the food that way for whichever baby fish I'm feeding. I start with a basic Tetramin flake food for vitamins and overall nutrition. If I'm feeding baby mollies or other herbivores, a few algae wafers will go in. If I'm feeding more carnivorous fish freeze-dried brine shrimp, tubifex worms, krill, etc. gets added. The spice grinder lets me get it to a very fine powder that all but the smallest fish can eat. As they grow I just grind it a bit less to get more bigger pieces until they're eventually able to handle it unground. Can you overfeed them? It's possible, but underfeeding is more likely going to be an issue for you. Some fry will just be better at getting food and will snatch it up before others if you don't feed enough and those that don't get enough food will suffer. I've never had a problem overfeeding. My baby Super Red Bristlenose Plecos have food available nonstop (canned green beans, algae wafers, freeze-dried tubifex worms, etc.) and do fine. My baby Neon Swordtails have never had an issue with overfeeding. If I was going to err on one side or the other, I'd err on overfeeding rather than underfeeding.

I find water sprite nearly impossible to kill in tanks where it grows well. I have four planted tanks and in two of them (50 gal and 20 high) it thrives and in two it barely survives. In the tanks where it thrives it nearly chokes out everything else and grows like mad. I just pinched off about a foot of growth in my twenty high and it'll be back in a matter of days. I find that plants in the same water (as much as I can test it anyway) similar lighting (6500 K LED of comparable intensity) and identical fish (mostly neon swordtails and Super Red Bristlenose plecos) and the same substrate (Flourite) behave vastly different. Water sprite grows like a weed in two of them and fades badly in the other two. I just got some red root floaters a few weeks ago and they're carpeting the surface of my 50 gallon tank, I just tossed a bowl of them yesterday, they're doing okay in my 20 high, and dying in my 30 high and 10 gal quarantine tank. I put two small bowls of them in water under my plant lights I use for seed starting in the winter and one bowl is thriving while the other one died. Java fern and Anubias grows everywhere for me. Java moss grows best in the 10 gal quarantine tank. Duckweed does best in the 50 and 20 high. All of my water comes from my well and every tank tests as nearly identically as possible, yet some plants thrive in one tank and disappear in another. Growing aquatic plants is very hit and miss. When you get a plant that grows well for you you'll wonder why others have issues. Then you'll find an "easy to grow" plant that you can't keep alive. I try to buy multiples of any new plant and spread some to each of the four tanks. Something will thrive in one tank, survive in another and disappear in another.