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RovingGinger

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  1. RovingGinger
    It’ll depend on how territorial the two cichlids turn out to be and then various factors with your aquarium, like how often do you do water changes, do you have plants, what’s your filtration situation, etc. If you have tanks you can move things to, you can try stuff, see how your parameters change, and then slowly re-shuffle as needed. But that can require pre-existing MTS syndrome.
  2. RovingGinger
    - feed less if possible - install honey or sparkling gourami - can nuke with some types of dewormer - have never tried. For me they seem most unavoidable in single-occupant tanks where no one eats them. Only guppy fry? Hydra. Guppy fry and parents? No hydra. Betta tank? Hydra. Community tanks? No hydra. I have not yet seen them to be more than vaguely annoying and kind of interesting.
  3. RovingGinger
    Frogs from what I have experienced act like fish in that they will try to eat anything they can catch and put in their mouths. But they differ vastly in their abilities to do either. I wouldn’t put a fancy slow goldfish with an adult bullfrog for example. I probably would put a bullfrog tadpole in with a goldfish that was not big enough to eat it though (the tadpoles I was used to were about nickel sized in the body). It’s really just a matter of if either fits, they will not tear each other like piranhas.
  4. RovingGinger
    That’s crazy cool. It makes me wonder if they were spotted locally and kind of rumors (or grouped in with something else) that got confirmed or so rare that it was a once in a lifetime chance to spot one above ground without hunting them out.
  5. RovingGinger
    Maybe consider a 40 breeder as a nice interim. It’s large enough to feel like a significant upgrade, but still small enough that it’s not a gigantic burden to get all the gear. It can handle much larger fish than you’re used to, or a lot more fish of the same size. It’s a great shape. Me personally, I wouldn’t just bump the size up to 20-29, but I don’t know if I would’ve liked jumping right to my 75. It’s taken much longer to acquire the plants and scaping materials, it’s deeper so it’s harder to reach the bottom, stand was harder to source, more filtration needed, etc. I love it now but it was good to get the 40 going steadily first.
  6. RovingGinger
    I wouldn’t likely do clown loaches in a tank that size. They like large groups (like 6 or so) and they also get large - like over a foot. They look so adorable in the store tanks though... With my (blood) parrot cichlid (not sure if you mean the hybrid or the true cichlid), 40 g was enough room for him and about no one else. Your mileage may vary.
  7. RovingGinger
    Ahah! @akconklin - that gets my gears turning. I will call him Azula. Other pets in the house include Momo, Pabu, and Asami.... so it fits in great. Anyone who can name the references gets on my good list 😉
  8. RovingGinger
    thanks to this guy for being my BFF during looooonnnnng zoom meetings. I think he's earned himself a name. But I have no ideas for what fits him. He's flouncy, beautiful, angry... Cat?
  9. RovingGinger
    I haven't yet hatched brine shrimp but I've had a lot of guppy fry. I feel most confident with the co-op's fry food right now, largely because I don't separate the fry and the parents are quite greedy. The fry food is small enough I feel there's no way the parents and larger fry can get all of it before the baby fry have a chance. Plus it's hard to get more convenient than "squirt this in your tank a few times a day".
  10. RovingGinger
    My nitrates come out high, yours may also per @Kat_Rigel's notes above. Test the source and see what you're dealing with.
  11. RovingGinger
    I have seen rumors of them preventing baby shrimp (assumably through eating them) but I have scuds in my tank along with baby shrimp. No clue if they got some when the shrimp were smaller but at least a few so far have made it to scud-size and don’t seem to be in harms way at all. I could see them out-competing the shrimp potentially in a very scarce tank. Luckily this one is coated in hair algae.
  12. RovingGinger
    I think the official metric is “will it fit in another fish’s mouth”. Hard to give a timeline for that, kinda depends on growth speed. The other factor is how much you like the fry.
  13. RovingGinger
    This is the specific one I was wondering about. I'm thinking it's parrot feather, doesn't look like hornwort to me. But the structure when it's so vertical, at least in this shot, looks like an asparagus fern almost.
  14. RovingGinger
    Another thing I’d really like is a STT monitor/test kit. I’ve been using the DIY version, A Fine Layer of Mulm, and I just am not sure of the accuracy. Would be great to be able to test with a strip or maybe get a hang-on thing like the Ammonia Alert device but in clock form.
  15. RovingGinger
    COVID hit and my home office felt really empty and boring. There was nothing to look at. My dog doesn’t like sleeping in there, my cats are more distracting than need be during a Zoom call. I kept fish as a kid (along with a variety of reptiles, rodents, amphibians, cats, dogs, insects, etc) and liked them. I tried them again as an adult, failed because I had no clue about the nitrogen cycle and thought it was me. Then I went full tilt into houseplants for a few years and got good at those, did terrariums and water gardens and propagated a bunch of plants and killed a bunch of plants but eventually figured out what works for me, etc. When COVID hit I was thinking geckos and got fully into Clint’s Reptiles, but most of what I liked was either a) nocturnal, b) easily eaten or horrifically wounded by my cats, or c) both. Then I thought hey, I used to like fish. Guppies were fun and pretty and cheap. I wonder if there’s anyone on YouTube who covers fish like Clint covers reptiles. aaaaaannnnd here we are now.
  16. RovingGinger
    Ah, I love the look of the sunlight coming through! The plants and fish look gorgeous. Is the fern-like stuff the parrot feather (long spindly upwards growth with fern-like arms)?
  17. RovingGinger
    More hardscape.... at the same shipping cost 🤣 joking, but we are in fantasy world. Backgrounds. I have a blurry plant background in the back of my planted 75 and I think I prefer it to a black option especially as things grow on. 3d backgrounds of decent quality would be a lovely addition esp. if they incorporated plant holders. Also in fantasy world, more unique aquarium decor. Petco and petsmart carry the same 20 things, or you take a risk and put something not aquarium-purposed in. Let’s make aquascaping as fun as fairy gardens! 😛
  18. RovingGinger
    Holy crapoly, I thought my poor little Checkmark was misshapen but that’s just nuts. Can she swim decently or is she resting all the time? I’ve had a few with bent backs and I separate them out into a different species tank. Definitely no breeding allowed but hey if you have the will to live go for it little buddy.
  19. RovingGinger
    Yes, for guppies any combination of those three is fine. All three grow in a few of my tanks along with the aforementioned hair algae 😅 Other options you could look at include hornwort (can cause issues if it grows a ton and then dies back abruptly), and water sprite (available through the co-op frequently), subwassertang, Christmas moss, and Taiwan moss. All of these have the same heavy cover that lets baby fry hide.
  20. RovingGinger
    Try a half or 1/3 filled with water thing for the last one? Tiny tiny Walstad.
  21. RovingGinger
    I believe I have that in my guppy tanks (and others). Java moss is fine but much slower growing for me. Both java moss and guppy grass entangle themselves with hair algae to a worse extent than most other plants I have tried. For my guppy grass I was able to buy a clump either on Etsy or Ebay and it’s gone nuts from there, but from what I understand it doesn’t necessarily ship well. You may have luck with your local aquarium club too. I think I’ve seen some in stores but not frequently.
  22. RovingGinger
    Colorful platies and Mollys, trying to add more color to the live breeder 40g. Not-orange-but-not-dyed blood parrot or similar hybrids. Not a big fan of how Flowerhorns look but firmly in love with my orange blood parrot and polar convict parrot cross.
  23. RovingGinger
    The 75 gallon is slowly starting to take shape. I don’t have much in the way of hardscape for it, so my emphasis has been on getting as many plants as possible in there (just ordered some more from the co-op!) This is with the main light off. My parents just moved to this state so my mom got to see my aquariums for the first time yesterday. She was shocked at how clean everything was, which was a little funny since my tanks are not exceptionally well maintained, just plant-filled. Between live plants and LED lightings the home hobbyist has a lot more options available than we did last time my mom had to maintain a tank. Long story short she went from “I will never have fish again” to “I could do a small nano tank like this one!” (betta tank) in about 5 minutes. 😂
  24. RovingGinger
    From what I have heard from @Cory’s videos, brine shrimp will grow and give birth to live young when fed and kept. They lay eggs under stressful conditions. He had them in outdoor ponds. Not sure on diet but I assume nothing much different than what we feed fish? Brine shrimp are sea monkeys which you keep alive in basically a jar with salt and feed every once in a while and they just...live and do their thing. I just bought the ziss hatchery and am excited to try it out. My experiment with sea monkeys in college was very easy and they lived at the front desk until an RA accidentally knocked them over. RIP my tiny kingdom.
  25. RovingGinger
    I had filled our small office with most of my houseplants after moving to a house with low indoor lighting. The office had great windows and fluorescent lights everywhere. People liked the jungle and it gave me a nice brain break to go tend to plants. then covid... and in the name of survival, one coworker took everyone’s company plant home (we give everyone a neon pothos for their desk, so 20-some 4 inch pots), the spider plants got grouped into a Tupperware lid I filled with water whenever I stepped in (my cats would’ve eaten them), my boss took the lemon trees, and everything else went home with me. It was manageable when they were outdoors for summer, but now it’s time they start moving back to the office before it’s too cold to transport. Money plant, sanseveria, some succulents, Hoya, zz, and philodendron. philodendron, umbrella plant, sweet potato, ficus. Various succulents. There are more throughout the house but these are the main clusters. I found that my experience with houseplants lent itself to fish keeping and I’d be curious if others felt the same. It doesn’t pay to endlessly tweak things, getting to a stable environment is more critical, for most, than obsessing over small details. Observation is critical, it’s 10x easier to stop something when it’s just started to go wrong. Schedules are for humans, not for nature. It’s all about balance, not about binary good and bad factors. Office window of succulents and uh... experiments.
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