gardenman

Aquarium plants are finicky. Think of them as the housecats of the plant world. My cats will gulp down a food one day and then turn their noses up at it the next. I have four nearly identical tanks. Plants that thrive in one die in the others. And vice versa. Why? God only knows.

That small of a tank with that many plants actively growing, and having been established as long as it is, would make me think that something else is going on. Overfeeding would be one option. Shrimp don't produce a lot of waste. They're tiny little things. If the water going in isn't the issue, then my suspicion is that something else is going on. Maybe something died under one of the rocks and is decaying? Maybe uneaten food has accumulated. You have CO2 and actively growing plants. I'm guessing you're also fertilizing the plants. Maybe the fertilizer is adding ammonia? Ammonium nitrate is a very common fertilizer especially in the DIY plant tabs. If you've got ammonia in your water, you've got plant food there for the plants. They should strip the ammonia out pretty quickly. I wouldn't add any additional fertilizer for a bit and see if the problem doesn't resolve. It could be that ammonia is somehow leaching from the gravel or rocks in some manner. (More likely the gravel.) Shrimp require very little in the way of biofiltration to remove their wastes. You're not keeping koi or huge cichlids. Shrimp are tiny little things that don't produce a ton of waste. You shouldn't be seeing ammonia levels at all keeping shrimp in a planted tank that's been established for a while.

I would expect glass shortages to get worse too. Glass manufacturing is an energy intensive business and many US plants have closed. Two from my youth in a neighboring town (Anchor Hocking and Gaynor) are gone. Soth Jersey used to be a glass manufacturing hub with plants in Salem, Bridgeton, Glassboro, and Millville, but most are now gone. The energy costs and regulations have largely killed the domestic industry. Glass is heavy and fragile to ship long distances and with limited domestic production, the supply will likely be low for a while.

Just be forewarned, fish will often end up behind a Matten filter. Fry will squeeze through an impossibly small opening and adult fish may jump over and in. You often hear of people finding a missing fish or unexpected fry behind their Matten filters. Having one placed so you can easily inspect what's behind it is wise.

You can always go with the no-drill overflows as a safer alternative to drilling a tank. There are a number of commercial and DIY options out there.

When doing selective breeding you want an image in your mind of what your ideal fish will look like and how it will behave. Some cauliflower swordtails now have dorsal fins so high and heavy that the fish often have to sink to the bottom to rest as it takes a lot of effort to swim with all of that finnage. If your goal is to add even more finnage then you have to factor in the impact that might have on the fish's ability to swim. Guppy breeders got so intrigued by making larger and larger tails that they ended up with some fish who could barely swim. At ninety days you may find one or more of the females in your trio converting to being a male as they mature. Some swordtail males are very late developing. If you like the parent stock in general, I wouldn't fuss too much about the initial trio. You just want healthy fish as much as anything to start with. They'll have the genes you need to work with. Once they spawn and you have fry then you start selecting the ones you want to breed from there. You'll have a much larger selection to choose from. An initial spawn of a young female swordtail might only give you ten to twenty fry. Later spawns are more likely to give you 50-100 fry. You'll have a lot to choose from at that point. Whatever quality you're looking for will pop up at some point. You just have to identify it and continue to breed and cull to get more of that trait.

Large bulkheads, pipes, and fittings are often priced way higher than multiple smaller ones. It's not hard to spend $45-$50 on a three-inch bulkhead. You can buy a 1.5" bulkhead for around $8. And the pipes and fittings are also priced higher for the larger diameter. And bigger holes can lead to bigger problems. They're harder to drill and may be more prone to leaking. As a general rule, if price and reliability are important to you, you're probably better off with multiple smaller ones to get the flow you want rather than one large bulkhead.

I've used cuttlebone and they do work, just very, very slowly. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Slow changes to the water are often better than drastic ones. And the rate at which they melt away depends on your water. More acidic and they'll dissolve faster. Less acidic and they'll last longer. Mine did sink, but it takes them a day or two. Maybe longer. It's a cheap, easy way to add extra calcium.

Yours look fine to me.

Humidity is more important than water depth. Most aquarium plants grown commercially are grown emersed, out of water, but in very high humidity. There are YouTube videos of Tropica and other commercial production greenhouses where you can see this in action. If you have an empty fish bag or two lying around, you can just put an inch or so of water in the bag, plop in the plant or plants, breathe into it and seal it tight and the plants will live fine for days/weeks in there. Just watch for mold or fungal growth. All plants love CO2 and there's more CO2 in the air than water, so growing them emersed exposes them to more CO2. If you open the bag every day or two and breathe into it to inflate it, you're pumping in more CO2 also.

All salt is technically from evaporated sea water including table salt. The salt used in saltwater aquariums has a lot of other stuff added also. Bear in mind that any tank should be cycled, including one used to raise brine shrimp. They produce the same waste products as fish and suffer as much, or similarly if ammonia spikes. You'll probably have more success with a green water, cycled, marine type setup. As to food, many people use a product called Selcon to feed their brine shrimp. It improves their nutritional value for things that eats them while also feeding the brine shrimp. Kind of a win-win situation.

And large water changes can even be detrimental in that they can flush hormones from the water and some of those hormones can trigger breeding. Some exotic pleco breeders add guppies and other livebearers to their tanks as the hormones released by the guppies in spawning and giving birth seem to encourage the plecos to breed. If you change a lot of that water, you'd flush a lot of those hormones.

Heating a whole fish room with one of the split unit heat pumps is often cheaper than a lot of individual heaters. Lowes has 12,000 BTU unit made by a company called AUX for $730 that's good for up to 600 sq ft. Coop aquarium heaters start at $22 each so if you're heating 33 or more tanks, the split unit purchase costs balance out. A 600 sq ft fish room would be pretty nicely sized (20'X30'). And since most fish rooms are already inside a house in some manner, much of the heating/cooling is handled by the house, you just need to supplement it so you don't necessarily need a massive unit. Using a split unit also gives you backup should the house HVAC system fail. You'd still have one comfy room to move into. Back to filters again. For the monster fish/koi keepers, a rotary drum filter is nearly ideal for mechanical filtration. They're very economical to operate. You're likely to have a pump of some sort anyway, and they only use power when the drum is rotating, which only happens when the screen clogs. They're self-cleaning, very energy efficient, and pretty much foolproof. You need a bio filtration add-on of some sort, but there are lots of options there from K1 types to Bakki showers. I'm still having good luck with my undergravel Matten Filter combos where I replace the gravel with a piece of Matten filter foam. They've been very low cost and effective.

An Oscar is a good choice until you get to the "lets me keep the tank planted " part. They're very fond of redecorating their tanks. They're a very smart fish who gets bored and decides to rearrange things to ease the boredom. That may involve moving all of the substrate to the other side of the tank, uprooting plants, etc. Maybe a combo of something like a rope fish (largely bottom dwelling nocturnal predator) and an angelfish would do the job for you. A large angelfish kept on the peckish side can handle small/medium guppy fry and shrimp. The rope fish will prey on anything it can. I'm not sure about snails, but a smaller puffer might be added also.

I find val to be very finicky. It either thrives or dies for me. Any change in the tank tends to bother it. I had an absolute jungle of it once and added a Madagascar Lace plant and all of the val just melted within days. Many plants engage in chemical warfare with one another, and I suspect val is very susceptible to the allelopathic agents used by other plants. This chemical warfare is called allelopathy and occurs in both above and below water plants. Scientists have tried extracting an allelopathic compound from val to use as an algae inhibitor and found it works quite well. You can find an article on it at Pubmed.gov article #35278451. My suspicion is that val is very sensitive to an allelopathic compound put out by something else (algae, other submerged plants, etc.) that causes the issues with it. Maybe even other val plants inhibit their growth. It could even be a compound that's airborne from an aboveground/terrestrial plant that settles in the water that causes issues. A nutrient rich soil, lots of light, frequent large water changes to dilute any allelopathic compounds in the water, very limited plant competition, including algae, and you might have better luck getting val to grow. It's very much a boom or bust plant for me. It's booming in one tank for me now and a bust in every other one.

Given the opportunity, most fish will spawn like crazy. We don't always know it because fish eggs and fry are a great and highly sought after fish food. You managed to time it so you removed the parents before they could eat the eggs/fry and now you have a gazillion (give or take a few) fry. In perfect circumstances with 100% survival, we'd all be up to our eyeballs in fish. A big koi (20+ pounds) can lay over a million eggs at a time. Luckily, it's a fish-eat-fish world out there so the numbers stay under control. Well, it's an everything eats fish world out there and it's good that it is. The numbers can get scary when you think of what happens when every egg or fry survives. And coral spawns are staggering in the number of eggs released. Hundreds of millions are common on a moderately sized reef. Most get eaten by plankton eaters/filter feeders, but the numbers that get released are staggering.

In addition to consuming nitrates, it also provides more surface area for beneficial bacteria to inhabit. An algae covered glass wall has lots more surface area for beneficial bacteria than a clean glass wall.

Glass-surfing is perfectly normal. I have a suspicion it's related to migration in some manner. Mine always seem to glass surf towards the southern wall of the tank. It's like they're driven to swim south and run into an invisible wall that stops them. Some fish do migrate to spawn or for other reasons and I suspect that's what drives glass surfing. Every instinct they have says "Swim that way!" and they try to only to hit the glass wall and can't find a way around it.

The mesh ones are okay for some fish but for fry that lie on the mesh (plecos, corys, etc.) adults outside the mesh can pick them through the mesh and kill them. If you use a mesh fry box, I'd line the bottom with something if you're trying to raise plecos or corys in one. I love the Fluval/Marina boxes though. They're pretty nearly perfect.

A lot of rare pleco breeders keep lots of livebearers in the tanks with them. Live bearers tend to be sexually precocious and the hormones they release while spawning and during live birth are said to increase the likelihood of the plecos breeding. If you're going to do that you want to minimize water changes to let the hormones build to a higher level as long as the water quality doesn't suffer too much. There are a lot of articles out there on hormone use in the fish farming industry to motivate breeding. Synthetic hormones can be bought for aquaculture use. They're typically injected into the fish. Food in excess, so the parents know there will be food for the fry, is often helpful also.

Just be forewarned, if you watch Michael's Fish Room unboxing videos on YouTube, he's now importing and reselling imported guppies more than breeding his own. This is pretty common with many hobby breeders. They end up with too many customers and to meet demand they start importing fish rather than breeding fish. It makes sense for them as they can keep customers happy by always having fish in stock. It's not a bad thing as long as the fish you get are good fish, but they may not be "locally bred" even if bought from a local breeder.

From a design standpoint, the center bracing would make adding or removing the dividers complicated. It looks like you're making them removable, but a center brace would complicate that a lot. (You don't need the slots if you're not making the dividers removable.) You're already ahead of the game by knowing you need to use cast acrylic. It sounds like you'll be getting the pieces precut by someone else. The accuracy and quality of the cut will matter a lot. You can hand five people boards and tell them how big you want it and when you get all five back, they're apt to be slightly different lengths and not cut exactly how you want them cut. As you already seem to know, acrylic is chemically welded together rather than glued. The "glue" is a solvent that melts the acrylic and then allows it to reform into a single piece. If the edges you're welding together don't fit perfectly, life gets complicated. You'll need your pieces of acrylic to be perfectly sized with pristine edges. Not always the easiest thing to get when someone else is doing the cutting and edge prep. The actual construction is easy once you get the right sized pieces with good edges. You just tape everything in place, use the solvent applicator (typically a syringe with a hair-like needle) along the seams and then sit back and wait for the solvent to cure. It's the getting the right sized pieces with good edges that's the hard part. Once you've got that done, the rest is easy-peasy.

I just use the cheap black craft paint (typically around $0.97 a bottle at Walmart.) I apply it with a cheap disposable foam brush and use my hair dryer to speed up the paint drying time so I can apply multiple coats. The total cost for the brush and paint is less than $2. and it looks and works great. I can do three or four coats in a half hour by using the hairdryer to accelerate the paint drying process. Should I ever need to remove it, it scrapes off very easily using a Scotchbrite pad or scraper.

I use canned French-style green beans for my plecos, but the swordtails intercept some on the way down and munch on them also. Pretty much anything that's safe for humans is safe for fish. Whether they'll eat it or not is another story, but you only learn by trying. The swordtails are funny with the beans. One of the bigger ones will grab a bean on the way down and swim off with it, and five or six others will chase it picking away at the bean.

Bait fish and feeder fish are often raised in less than ideal conditions and handled roughly. "They're just going to get eaten anyway," is the philosophy of those raising/handling them. This is not an uncommon problem even in the pet fish industry. All anyone cares about is keeping them alive long enough to sell them. As lefty o said, if they're arriving in bad shape, it's not a problem on your end. You might want to check around and see if anyone has a minnow pond in your area that they'd let you set up minnow traps in to become your own supplier. Minnow traps are pretty cheap and easily harvested. If you could find a local pond owner and work out an arrangement with them, you might have more success. Lots of pond owners get the idea to create their own bass pond and stock them with minnows and food fish for the bass, then fish out the adult bass, find the bass eggs/fry became food for the feeder fish and end up with a pond full of minnows and no bass. Finding one such pond nearby would be ideal for you. Set the minnow trap each day and harvest them on your way to open your shop.