Kirsten

My friend, if you think snails are neat, just wait til you find out about mystery snails and rabbit snails. Big, goofy snail-y goodness right there. I'm sometimes tempted to have a shrimp and snail-only tank, but I have so many livebearers that'll probably never happen lol.

Perfect! Snails would be a great match for you and your tank 🙂 I wouldn't worry about overpopulation just yet. You may get an initial rush of small snails as they clean up the algae, but they'll naturally die back as the algae recedes and the plants take over. Pea puffers are super cute and fun, but they are voracious! I found myself overfeeding some of my livebearer tanks almost deliberately in order to breed more snails for my puffer.

Keep! Totally. Free clean-up crew and algae eaters. And I think they're fun to watch, too. Some fish keepers try to stay snail-free if they're trying to, like, breed angelfish or something (snails can sometimes eat eggs or non-swimming fry). But outside of that, snails are always welcome in my tanks. A word of caution, though, that those snails will reproduce in proportion to the amount of food they find, not necessarily to what the tank can handle. So if you feed heavy, have a lot of algae or dead plant matter and the snails pig out, they're going to make a ton of babies in response and you might end up with way more snails than your biofilter can handle. Remember that snails poop, too, and sometimes quite a bit! So have a light hand at feeding time and keep an eye on water parameters, doing a water change if your nitrates get above 40ppm.

Good on you for wanting to do right by your new fish pets! Rule of thumb is that if one fish in a tank has ich, they probably all have it (and anything used in their tank is probably contaminated as well), so I'd treat for ich as well as fin rot if you think the fish is strong enough to handle both treatments at once. If you can only do one treatment at a time, try to increase the temperature, gradually, in both tanks to 82 deg F to help speed up the course of the disease and have a better chance of eliminating it. You should also consider adding aquarium salt to help boost gill function and help repair their slime coat. The co-op has an excellent blog post and video about how to treat ich: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/how-to-treat-ich-on-freshwater-fish. Many of these treatments will probably also help with the fin rot (at least, the salt and the daily water changes certainly will). You may not have to worry too much about cycling the tank since you shouldn't be feeding much during treatment, and you'll be doing daily water changes as well as part of the ich treatment. So, I think as long as you're using a seasoned sponge filter, you should probably be okay. If you think there's room for the angel in with the other fish in the hospital tank, that'll probably make the treatment process easier on you. But if you think the other fish are nipping the angel's fins or otherwise stressing it out, probably best to keep them separated.

In low levels, they should be okay. If she's improving, I wouldn't break out the salt just yet. Glad to hear she's moving around more! Maybe the R&R is helping.

Has she always been like this or is it a recent thing? And what are your water parameters? Seems like weakness, exhaustion or lethargy to me. Usually, if I see a livebearer habitually resting on the ground, it's a sign that it might be the beginning of the end for her (seems to mostly happen in females. Giving live birth is very taxing on the body). You did good in moving her to a quiet and gentle quarantine tank. Give her lots of R&R, feed her very sparingly, but with good high protein food when you do, maybe add 1 tbs aquarium salt to the water if you don't have too many sensitive plants in there and keep an eye on her to see if you can spot any other symptoms of illness. At the very least, you've made her last days more comfortable.

How exciting! I've been interested in starting a mangrove paludarium for awhile, so I can't wait to see how this works out. I don't know if nerite snails could survive a figure 8 puffer, but I'd be tempted to at least put some in the refugium to try to breed them. Pet stores never seem to be able to keep them in stock! Otherwise, as far as fish go, most sources I buy from tend to focus more on freshwater fish, but I've had good experiences with Aqua Huna and Aquatic Arts to name a few.

Thanks! Yup, I got the algae and the brackish-adapted moss ball and they both seem to be doing well.

Sure! Not much to look at yet, especially since the bio load and nutrients are so low, it'll take awhile for the algae to grow. Right now I think it kind of looks like the surface of the moon, so I call the shrimp my mooninites 😄 Little 1.5 gallon tank from some big box store.

Just gotta say I'm so sorry this happened to you. This is so heartbreaking and one of the many stories that will probably keep me from ever trying co2 injection. I'll just keep breathing heavily near my air pumps!

Nice! I'm watching my opae ula right now, up here in an attic office that I didn't want to have to lug buckets up for water changes. About 6 weeks in and they're doing great with some brackish-specific macro algae, crushed coral and some rocks. No filter, no airstone, just distilled water and the initial bit of marine salt. They're super tiny, but active! I love watching them swim upside down on the water surface. I'm only feeding them once a month, 1 betta pellet on the full moon 🙂 Best of luck on your shrimp adventure!

Nice! I'd see how the cories and cpds work before adding a loach. I think you'll be close to full with those. For shrimp, you might want to test it with a few ghost shrimp first, which are very inexpensive. Between the betta and the pygmy cories, mine didn't last long! But you might have better luck!

Sure! If you can find just one or two of each 😄 They're so plentiful folks usually sell 5-10 at a time. But both can reproduce asexually, so if they have enough food, you'll soon have a colony.

I don't think you're maxed out, though, like you said, I wouldn't put any more larger fish in there. I'm leery of adding more otos unless you have algae issues, but I think more neons would fit fine.

Yeah, mystery snails are super cool, but not as interested in algae as other snails. Nerites eat algae pretty much exclusively, and can't reproduce in freshwater (though they'll still lay eggs!) but the larger ones are mostly interested in hard surfaces and glass. Smaller snails like ramshorns, bladder snails and malaysian trumpet snails will reproduce rapidly with an abundance of food, but will quickly take care of any brown algae. I haven't kept pleco myself, but I know they're very popular for tank clean-up. I've heard that a bristlenose, even though it stays pretty small, still needs a minimum of 30 gallons, but that might be conservative. I also don't know if it'll eat small shrimp—most things do!

Hello! Brown algae diatom bloom is a natural phenomenon in almost every new tank. Ultimately, it's a good thing. The microscopic life is consuming the ammonia and other fish by-products and helping to sustain life in your tank. But it's unsightly and can choke out your plants if left unchecked. It usually occurs when there's an imbalance of light and nutrients. Too much of one, not enough of the other, brown algae is there. One of the first things to do is make sure your light is on an automatic timer and try cutting it back to 8 hours a day. Also, try feeding your fish a bit less, maybe going down to 1 feeding a day or even fasting them for a day to help reduce the nutrients in the tank. With enough time and precision, dialing in on the light and nutrient needs of your tank, the brown algae will naturally recede. But to help speed up the process, and give your plants a chance to grow, there are many critters that enjoy eating algae. Shrimp and smaller snails are my personal favorites, as they're cheap, plentiful, fun to watch, and at home in just about any tropical fish tank with a pH above 7.0. Another option would be a small livebearer fish like endlers who are hardy, colorful, and can get into the nooks and crannies of plants to eat algae. And unlike some algae specialists, they're omnivores who also eat fish food, so you can keep them alive and happy even after the algae's gone. If you don't have room for babies, just get a handful of males.

I'm trapped under a very comfy cat right now, so I can't grab a close-up pic, but I have some platy fry that I think are only a few weeks old and I can already get a sense for who their parents are. Some are bright orange, some are very pale, and some are speckled, but plenty of others are gray and I can't tell if they're platy or endler. So exciting! I'm guessing they'll also be red wags but they could be something else dark like rainbows.

Some fish, typically pond fish like koi or some native cold weather species like sticklebacks and minnows can hibernate under the ice in winter. But you'll need a pretty deep pond (sounds like 3 to 5 feet deep) to give them space below the ice. Here's an article for how to prepare koi for winter in cold climates, in case that helps give you an idea what they'll need: https://www.kodamakoifarm.com/winter-koi-pond-preparation-survival/

It's okay 🙂 I'm sure almost everyone here has at least one species of wild-caught fish, whether we know it or not. Some even go out and find native fish and plants themselves! This video about Gary Lange's fish room, full of rare rainbow fish, some of which he caught himself in Papua New Guinea and which he's helping to catalog, preserve and breed out for the aquarium hobby, gave me a new respect for wild fish-gathering:

If you're renting, you might want to check with your landlord (maybe you can just say you have a "very heavy piece of furniture" and are a considerate tenant, so you wanted to clear it with them first). If your lease has any language like "no large bookshelves or waterbeds," that might be an indication that the floors don't have a lot of support. I'm not sure where you are, but if the tank is spread out over a wide area, and it sounds like it is, you might be okay if you set it up against an exterior wall where the support's probably more firm. Here's an article on heavy bookshelves (the heaviest other piece of furniture I could think of) that seems to be pretty optimistic about it: https://homesteady.com/info-12043297-heavy-bookcases-make-floor-sag.html

Yeah @Fish Folkhas some excellent, detailed advice for these particular fish. You're in very good hands with them. I don't have any advice other than the psychological kind, to not get hung up on being a perfect fish keeper or having perfect fish that behave exactly as the guides say. As you've already observed, going down that path can rob you of the simple pleasure of watching and keeping fish. You can rehome the fish, but you can't rehome perfectionism 🙂 But I get it, it can be frustrating to observe chronic issues that don't go away no matter how hard you work on them. From what I've read, glass surfing sounds like a stereotypic behavior, typically caused from boredom or stress, like animals pacing in a zoo or an office worker who constantly clicks their pen. If they were wild-caught, I'd think the stress in being confined at all could be enough, especially for an animal as smart as a puffer. But, just like a dog who chases its tail or chews on the furniture, sometimes they just be like that, no matter how happy and enriched a life they lead. I agree that, if you're on the fence, you should give yourself a solid timeline for doing your utmost, after which point, you can rehome them with no regrets, knowing you did your best. But I also wouldn't let it stop you from experimenting with other fish that you're really excited to try. If your budget allows, get yourself a nice new, not too huge livebearer tank while you're working on the puffers. Give yourself a win and a fun new project to help see you through the frustrating times. And if you decide to rehome the puffers, hey, whole empty tank to play with!

Hah, wow, since I'm not seeing it myself on Hagen's Canadian or US site, I'm guessing it's a prank. One of my many jobs is dealing with corporate press releases, and all I can say is whoever did this knows their way around and should probably be applying for PR or corporate comms jobs. But it is kind of a tell to have Cory talking about the forum on a Hagen press release. Hagen would probably have more to say about themselves and their business. That said, uh, this is close enough to looking like an official press release speaking of official (and international!) business deals that whoever made it might be in hot water, legally speaking, especially if either party IS in negotiations with anyone else, or if it costs them business, or if either of them get flooded with customer questions about it. Just sayin, whoever did it, might want to have a kill switch at the ready. All the same, LOL, you got me there for a minute.

I think as long as there's a lot of snails and a lot of places to hide and explore, a 5g is great, but I'm sure a 10g is even better. I often lose my pea puffer in my 5g portrait tank, and he seems happy and well-fed.

I say heavily planted shrimp nano tank. Lower bioload means lower maintenance, and I think you might even be able to get away with no filter, which would be awesome when space is at a premium in a small tank like this.

Sorry to hear you're having trouble! What are your water parameters? Planted aquariums are like any garden where some plants will thrive and others not so much depending on too many factors to control for. Like any plants, sometimes a couple leaves will die from time to time, but that doesn't mean the whole plant is dying. It's hard to tell from your picture, but I think that's the case here. If you want to have the best chance of success with a planted aquarium as a whole, I'd recommend getting a bunch of different, low-care, inexpensive plants like java ferns, anubias or hornwort so that you have a good chance of some of them surviving even if they don't all make it. I love the co-op's plants, especially for special, individual plants, but they're not the only game in town. You may be able to find some of those easy plants with buy 2, get 1 free sales on ebay or etsy. Having a bunch of plants will also make it easier to take a step back and look at how the plants are doing as a whole, even if there are a couple holes here or a melting leaf there.