RockMongler

Yup, Malaysian Trumpet Snails. They are live bearers, which makes them very good at reproducing successfully. They will churn up your sand and substrate, and do help recycle nutrients in your tank. But, they also reproduce like mad if there's enough food available.

I would mostly be cautious reading about it online because people say all kinds of things when projects like this go good, but don't share the times where it goes horribly wrong. But, a particularly large tank (40+ gallons), that is heavily planted... I'd believe they could make it work. But, people like to put bettas into inhumanely small tanks, and are good at ignoring signs of stress or other problems until it's too late. I'd personally rather not take the risk with these animals and put them into a situation that might result in injury or death. It's the same reason I wouldn't bother with a cichlid community tank... It can work, but it's going to be something you have to really stay on top of to make sure that the social dynamics in the tank are managed well. If you try, good luck. And please share your results! The more people try, and the more accurate data people collect, the better we can understand the creatures we keep in our tanks.

Yeah, I don't think gravel is anymore of a 'cesspool' than sand. Mulm builds up no matter what substrate you have, and I think it's just oftenmore obvious sitting on top of sand, and sitting between gravel grains. And that 'cesspool' is still good fertilizer for plants, and junk for bacteria and substrate worms to eat and process. I do try to aim for as close to an ecosystem as I can get, but it's still a glass box of water inside my home that I have significant control over. Sure, I could probably go weeks without feeding my fish without any major impact on the vertebrates in my tank, but they would probably be less content. I generally overfeed, because anything the fish don't get, the shrimp will get, and what the shrimp don't get, the snails get. And what the snails don't get, the detritus worms get. All of that stuff getting got, turns into fertilizer for my plants. Most of my nutrients and dissolved stuff gets pulled out in the form of a weekly duckweed removal, and the monthly water changes can refresh certain ions in the water (i have rock hard water) and pull out some stuff that might be building up, unused by the plants. Our tanks are not nature. They are a very small microsystem. They don't have the advantage of direct sunlight or organisms from outside interacting with their water, bringing food and nutrients. We have to provide that food and those nutrients.

Based off observations in my own tank... I think a lot of people would be surprised how quickly something can go from dead to being completely disintegrated by the creatures in your tank. I've seen hillstream loaches go from alive (when I checked my tank right before going to bed, 9-10 pm), to not much left besides a backbone in less than 24 hours (the next afternoon when I returned from work, 3-4 pm). I have a lot of shrimp and malaysian trumpet snails. I ended up just leaving the spine of the fish (by that point, any ammonia spike was already going to happen as most of the biomass had been consumed by others), and by the end of the next day, I couldn't find any evidence of it. A healthy tank will "digest" dead material a lot faster than most of us expect. If I have a fish disappear with no trace, I assume nature took its course, and there's not much for me to find. I have a lot of inverts and a lot of plant matter so there likely won't be much for me to find, and the plants can likely very quickly take care of any ammonia spikes.

The chlorine can cause chemical burns to the fish's gills. It does the same thing as inhaling chlorine gas in air breathing animals. If you drain water, add dechlorinator, then add the water directly from the tap, the dechlorinator will work quickly to bind up the chlorine faster than it can hurt the organisms in your tank.

I haven't purchased any solar generators yet, but an example product from a big box store is something like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Jackery-200-Watt-Continuous-400-Watt-Peak-Push-Button-Start-Solar-Generator-290-with-1-Solar-Panel-100-Watt-for-Outdoors-SG290-100/317896031 It's sort of a particularly big power bank you might use for your phone, with plugs like you have on your wall, and with the hardware to be easily charged by moderately sized photo-voltaic solar panels. They can be small like this one, and you can even get ones big enough to power a small building. It's another option besides just fossil fuel powered generators or standard batteries to keep our systems running when the grid isn't functioning. I think they are going to be more expensive up front than gasoline generators of similar output, but are likely to need less long term maintenance (no need for fuel, no need to worry about things like oil changes). My use case for one is to charge with solar when I can, and charge with the gasoline generator when I can't, so I don't have to keep the gasoline generator running as much, and can store the energy it's creating for later.

From the big freeze Texas had 2 years back, I was able to get through that with no losses just using sleeping bags to wrap my tanks, and battery powered air pumps to keep the gas exchange going. I was only out for 3 days, and all my fish were cool-water at the time, however. For future power loss here in Texas, I got a 2350 watt inverter-generator that I can use to keep fish tanks running in the event of normal powerloss, alongside things like my fridge and being able to charge devices. I still keep my battery air pumps around as well for shorter power loss/giving the generator a break. My future plans, more for hurricane related power loss, is to go for solar generators. They are basically large batteries with build in power inverters that allow you to output energy like a regular gasoline generator, that are also designed to be charged by solar panels.

I prefer to make sure that... 1) Something is actually wrong 2)What is actually wrong My own tap water sometimes does contain very noticeable amounts of Nitrite, depending on what my local reservoir/farmers/etc are doing at the moment. I want to try to know what is actually wrong so I know what I am trying to do, and if I do take action, it has actually caused the parameters to change. If you go to change things without having an actual baseline on what it was like before you changed it, you don't necessarily see the full picture, and you might miss something, and continue to have problems. I've also had issues in the past of just doing a water change introducing more nitrite than my tank had, because I was monitoring just my tank water, and not my tap water. So, a scientific background plus having easily-fixed-by-properly-testing problem fixed by properly testing, I prefer to collect information before I move to do anything else.

The liquid tests are more difficult and annoying to use, but if you follow the instructions properly, they do often give more reliable, repeatable results. If you follow the instructions properly. Test strips are certainly easier, and I use them most of the time anymore as a quick check, but if I actually suspect something might be up, I will pull out the master test kit and make sure I follow the instructions carefully to get as good of a reading as I can.

From my understanding, a single bubble source like you use to power a sponge filter like that *should* bring your O2/CO2 levels to be on par with atmospheric levels pretty well, so an extra might help with circulation if placed in another part of the tank, one should do a good job of keeping the gas levels where they should be in your water.

Remember, Ammonia is NH3, Ammonium is NH4+. When you have an low pH/an excess of H+ floating around in solution, some of that H will bind up with the Ammonia to form Ammonium. Ammonium is less reactive/poisonous to aquatic life, but if your pH is higher, there is less excess H+ floating around, so less to bond with the Ammonia to form Ammonium. That's why if you do have high Ammonia readings, your fish might be perfectly fine, but if your pH swings upward for some reason, you can have rapid onset death of your livestock. And different ammonia tests you might be able to get (Coop test strips, other company test strips, liquid tests, etc) that use different chemicals to indicate the presence of ammonia/ammonium can give different readings depending on how the indicator they are using works. Actually testing the difference between the two is hard, because a lot of the indicator chemicals contain things that will change the pH, and therefor, change if you have Ammonia/Ammonium present and in what ratios. I suspect a lot of the dechlor/water treatment chemicals have some sort of buffer in the solution that will readily give up H+ to ammonia to let it turn into ammonium, but not drop your pH like crazy. All of the chemicals in the Nitrogen cycle we all look at in our aquariums are 'bad', but are varying degrees of bad. My understanding is something like Nitrite is worse than Ammonia is worse than Ammonium is worse than Nitrate, but all can be toxic to livestock in high enough concentrations. Nitrate is bad at high concentrations, but at lower concentrations its great as a nitrogen source for plants, and many of us dose nitrate specifically for our plants. See: http://www.aquaworldaquarium.com/Articles/TonyGriffitts/Ammonia.htm https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/cropnews/2008/04/surface-waters-ammonium-not-ammonia-–-part-1 The issue with discussing water chemistry, is it's seriously complex, and most people don't have all the tools necessary to determine *all* of their water paramenters. Even with people who are highly educated in various science fields, it's easy to not always grasp the complexity of water chemistry, and make mistakes. The Coop test strips give you the most common parameters, but even the relationships between simple things like pH, temp, and ammonia concentration is a fairly complex beast. This is why you will often find varying advice when it comes to upacking fish from shipping in a bag. If you mix different waters (From the bag, and from your system) to acclimate, you might risk pushing that super poopy fish water in the bag from a low pH, with low ammonia toxicity up into the more toxic range with a higher pH or different temperature. My advice is pick products that work for you. I use API Stress Coat to treat my tap water for my tanks, and once I got a cycle going, it's easy to start new tanks using seeded material from an existing tank. I could probably go order bulk Sodium Thiosulfate for a lot cheaper, and mix up my own dechlorination solution, but I use little enough, that I get a pre-made product with extra "Nice" stuff like aloe just in case. It hasn't seemed to hurt them, and I don't want to fix what ain't broken.

They are less "Fancy", but work great. A lot of companies started advertising things like HoBs and Canister filters over undergravel, because they could sell them for higher prices than they can sell an undergravel for. As a young aquarist in the 90s, I had undergravel, and always wanted to get the cooler, fancier, more interesting hang on back power filters because they looked cooler and more interesting. In hindsight, I think undergravel are up there with sponge filters as a "Less glamorous but super effective, reliable and cheap"

I have a lot of MTS, and I'm also pretty sure they are the reason I don't ever see much in the way of Whitecloud Mountain Minnow fry ever showing up in my tank. I see the spawning behavior a lot amongst my minnows, but after introducing MTS, they have basically taken out my bladder snail population (eating their eggs, and then outcompeting for other food), and I suspect they also go to town on any WCMM eggs that get scattered. My red cherry shrimp do just fine, as they directly care for their eggs, and the shrimplets are able to get away from the snails once the eggs hatch.

It's definitely not Malaysian Trumpet Snail eggs. They are live bearers, and don't lay eggs.

One big thing you can do is reduce the amount of hours a day you have your light running. I know we all like to have the light in our tank on when we are awake, but too much light, not enough nutrients/CO2 for your big plants, means that algae will likely outcompete your plants. Another option, depending on the settings your light has, could be to reduce the intensity of your light (I have a Nicrew from Amazon I've had for ~2 years now and I have a timer/dimmer). I run the light in m 20L for ~10 hours a day at 40% intensity. If I go much more, the algae starts to outcompete my plants, but after messing around with it for a while, I've gotten it fixed in well to not have all that much algae, but plenty of growth on my desired plants.