Eric R

@MissBellatrix116 welcome! Lovely betta setups you have there, and I must say that Gal is a very handsome fish!

@Urbanwayfarer69 Welcome to the forum, and back to the hobby! If you've never tried collecting north american fish, there are plenty of interesting and attractive species available in your area. If you're not familiar with them, you should try looking up blue fin killifish, pygmy sunfish, darters, and least killifish. I have a tank with these natives that I got from someone in Georgia, and there are all terrific fish!

Great looking tank so far!

The blue acara (Andinoacara pulcher) is also a type of cichlid.

@H20CultureLabs has bred them I believe.

If you have a basement below where the tank will be placed, you likely can add reinforcing with lumber and screw jacks to support the weight of a larger tank. Make sure that whoever installs this support knows exactly what they are doing though.

FWIW, those types of screws have countersunk heads and the head is designed to sit flush with the top of the wood. You may want to try cabinet screws for the rest of what you're doing, something like this: https://www.lowes.com/pd/GRK-8-x-2-1-2-in-White-Polymer-Round-Washer-Interior-Cabinet-Mounting-Screws-80-Count/1000075987 Or if you want to use those screws and are concerned about the wood splitting, you can drill a countersink hole by using a larger drill bit the size of the screw head and drilling just deep enough that the screw head will fit in the larger hole. You also would be fine with two screws in those spots instead of three. In the end though, the glue bond will be a lot stronger than the screws. Nice work so far, especially making everything so flat and square!

I have some acrylic lids. They all seem to warp after a few weeks, so I wouldn't recommend them.

Well, a rainbow shiner tank with rainbow darters would be awesome. But so would a Tang community tank (I'm setting up a 55 with multies, paracyprichromis, and julies right now). Brichardi don't do well in a community tank, they tend to get real mean when they are breeding. Calvus, comps, or julie's work better in community tanks.

DIY made from double walled polycarbonate, the kind they use for greenhouses.

Looks like a type of java fern. AFAIK you should never plant a rhizome. I'd glue them or tie them to a rock or piece of driftwood.

@Fish Folk I imagine by 20L they mean 20 long, not 20 liters. I know, confusing nomenclature, and I made that mistake several times before figuring it out. Otherwise, great suggestions! A colorful lyretail dwarf cichlid that does well in groups and community tanks? How did I not know about this fish already! Sounds like a great fish for a 33 long. Here are two articles I found that may be useful @DanWri90, if you haven't read them yet: https://cichlidae.com/article.php?id=439 https://www.tfhmagazine.com/articles/freshwater/the-checkerboard-dwarf-cichlid-dicrossus-filamentosus

If you're considering corys as part of the "cleanup crew", I wouldn't do so. They are fish the same as other fish, and should be fed intentionally and not just be expected to cleanup after other fish. Shrimp and snails are more suited for a cleanup crew role. I think your cherry shrimp will just be a cichlid snack. I'd suggest a larger group of a single species of corys instead of two small groups of two species. You'll get more interesting and natural behavior that way. Hatchet fish will also do better in a group of 8-10. I don't know about water parameters for all of those species.

Nicrew provides light to grow plants, I've had a couple on different small tanks work well. No frills, and not sure the durability, but they're cheap. I like my fluval as well though, and think it was worth the money, especially if I start running co2. I imagine the nicrew can't keep up as well with high light in deeper tanks, the LEDs aren't good enough. Shallower tanks or low to medium light, and they work fine.

Welcome to the forum! Good looking hardscape, nice equipment list, and nice looking plants! I'm sure you'll do great. It's so neat seeing another person on the forum breed otos with relative ease! I hope this is the start of a new trend.

Welcome to the forum, and nice fish and aquascape! I too feel like my pictures never come out very good using my cheap cellphone. Healthy looking corydoras, and I see a hillstream loach in one of your pics, very cool!

Also, if you have an ACE hardware nearby, you can buy a 50 lbs bag of HTH Pool Filter Sand for like $13, and mix that with your aragonite to see if the dig more. Mine love moving their sand bed (they scoop up sand and spit it out) around to create pits for the shells they live in, and are constantly carrying MTS snails or bits of susswassertang out of their areas to the edges of the tank! You should post up some pictures of your tanks in the Journal section of the forum.

@SkaleyAquatics Welcome to the forum! I have a 10g tank of multies, with two breeding pairs. It took 6-9 months for them to settle in and really start breeding, now I have easily over 30 fry and I plan to move the colony to a 55g soon. I noticed they started breeding more prolifically when I started buffering my water with epsom salt and baking soda. My tap is 7.4 ph, 4 kh, 7gh, I add 1 tsp each of epsom salt and baking soda to a 5 gallon bucket when I do water changes to increase ph to 8.2, kh to 14, and gh to 18. I've also bumped the temp up from 75 to 78, and I feed Xtreme krill flakes 3 times per day, which they devour voraciously. It could have been the temp changes, the water parameter changes, or using better food, or none of those that helped get them breeding more. It would be cool to see a 40 breeder with one big multi colony! They are easily one of my favorite fish.

5 small fish in an 80 gallon is a pretty minimal bioload. I have more than 20 fish of similar size in a 55g, which still is only moderately stocked. Be sure to shake the absolute heck out of the nitrate testing fluids and do the full 30 seconds and 1 minute recommended on the testing instructions, if you don't it's easy to get false nitrate readings. If you still have zero readings for ammonia/nitrite/nitrate, you can add several more fish (though you should quarantine and treat with the med trio first if possible). Do you have your stocking for this tank decided on already?

Not the best picture, but looks like a male? See the Aq-coop article on guppies: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/guppy-care-guide

From looking at the instructions for these products, they both seem to be bacteria-based additives. I would follow the instructions for the first week or two of setting up your aquarium, and, if desired, continue to dose after each water change until you tank is fully cycled and stocked. You shouldn't need to continue using products like these if you have live plants, a cycled biological filter, substrate, and you do periodic partial water changes. These products are designed to help get your bacteria based biological filter established, and while they can continue be used indefinitely, they shouldn't need to be for a properly matured tank. They also shouldn't harm fish when dosed according to the instructions, so you don't need to worry about that. Just keep testing your ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels regularly, do 25-30% water changes once once a week, or more often if testing show elevated levels of ammonia or nitrate, and post here if you run into any issues.

I'd personally stay away from acid buffers, I think it will be hard to do it with your tap water parameters without ending up with large ph swings. I'd recommend either getting an RO unit or buying distilled water. You can use crushed coral and wonder shell to raise kh and gh to target levels, or buy a buffering mix, or you can try using baking soda and epsom salt to raise gh and kh to target levels. If you can get your tank to stable water parameters, and if it's well planted and you don't have it terribly overstocked, you can work on reducing the time between water changes while maintaining stable water parameters. If your kh starts to drop, you can top off with distilled/RO water that has buffer or kh added to it. You can also keep your tanks covered to reduce evaporation and top offs.

Looks like the C. wendtii 'brown'/'bronze' variety, though I think the co-op sells the 'red' variety, if that's where you ordered your plants from. All the red/brown varieties look pretty darn similar to me, except for the 'pink flamingo' variety, which if it looks as good in real life as it does in pictures would be pretty impressive. I wish that I could get mine to grow nice and compact like @Mmiller2001, they look great! Mine get tall and leggy and end up looking more like swords. I think it's because I use fairly moderate lighting with a long photo period. When I do my rescape, I may have to play with a higher, shorter lighting schedule, maybe with a siesta, to try to get some more compact growth.

Looking good! If I may, I might suggest gluing the anubias to the driftwood instead of planting it like that. Or if you want it in that spot, maybe gluing it to a small rock, then putting it back in.

I'll also agree that it's unnecessary. However, if you were going to do it, I'd actually cut a block of plywood to fit there if you have pieces of scrap the right size for it, instead of messing with small blocks of 2x4, which are prone to easily cracking.