FishyThoughts

Could run an air purifier as well. Some of those are pretty good.

It should be fine. Often the fish kind of get use to you messing around in the tank from cleaning/maintenance anyway. Some of my fish would swim right by my hand in the tank while doing maintenance, obviously waiting for me to feed them. So if your just doing to minor rearranging or planting it probably wouldn’t be too stressful for the fish overall. But if your clearing the tank and starting over, then I’d probably move them out while doing so. That also depends on the tank/fish as well, just try to leave places to hide while working on another.

It kind of depends on your preference. If you just quarantine for observation than the length of time will be however long you feel is needed. If you want to get them, do a med cycle and then add them to the tank. Then a week it about how long you need. If you want to get them, do a med cycle and observe them and possibly a second med cycle you’ll need a couple weeks. And I’m sure there’s many other ways people do their quarantining. It pretty much comes down to what your doing with the quarantine period, and what you feel comfortable with. For example. If your main take had $10 worth of fish, you might not even be concerned enough to quarantine. But if you had $1000 worth of fish, you might quarantine for month.

Agreed, would be best to finish off the space and heat it. But even with the room unfinished, it could possibly be better to get a large room space heater setup anyway. Looks like you have a lot of heaters that could be running most of the time. You’d have to look at power usage of all your heaters, compare with that of various space heaters and go from there. And heating the basement could help improve comfort/heating with floors above as well.

Double sided Velcro is another good option. They have those cable sleeves, clips, raceways and various other things. Most those are for the esthetics, so you’d have to decide if that’s what you’re looking for. The items not being used, totes are always a good option. Or sell what you don’t plan on using anymore.

That is a very good combo too! 😁 Mine pretty much eat anything. The frozen mysis shrimp, algae wafers, radpashy, carnivore pellets and just about anything else I feed and they can get to.

I Irene does some great videos. Fish I have: Santa Maria guppies, otocinclus, hillstream loaches, kuhli loaches, blue dream shrimp, and of course the typical hitchhikers... ramshorn and pond snails. Would definitely recommend more than 1 hillstream, it’s entertaining watching them interact when you have a group.

I dump them in a plastic container and float the container when they use breather bags. They do tend to get floated for longer periods when using a container. And I usually try to avoid adding anything unnecessary to the tanks, so then just net them out of the container.

I’d say #2, seems like the best viewing angle. And I’d probably get some blackout window tint to put on the side of the tank against the wall. Should really help make a white betta stand out.

Cool setup to play around with. Though I’d think you’d need a chiller after the canister to get the temp to drop 20 degrees.

How often do you have to trim the teeth? Seems like most of what I came across stated maybe 6 months to a year between trimmings. Depending on how how much grinding or shelled foods they eat. Do you raise your own snails to feed? And if so, have you tried increasing calcium in the snails tank to help them build strong shells?

Other than assassin snails. Don’t they only do that when one is already dead?

Here’s some additional information as well. Amazon Puffer | The Aquarium Guide WWW.THEAQUARIUMGUIDE.COM Today our topic is Amazon Puffer, as you can guess from its name it is native to Amazon River. If you are new in the fish... Colomesus asellus – Amazon Puffer (Cheilichthys asellus, Chelichthys asellus) — Seriously Fish WWW.SERIOUSLYFISH.COM I have been considering these myself and doing a bit of research. How many were you planning on getting? I was considering a 125g for them and getting like a group of 10 or so. But I’m not in a rush to get it all done either. It’s highly suggested to have the tank setup with a bunch of decor (rocks/caves/bog wood/plants) for them to explore, otherwise they get bored. They apparently like playing and swimming in higher flows as well. Tank mates are recommended to be non aggressive, fast swimming and have short fins. Foods are snails, muscles, invertebrates, worms and I’m sure that there’s a bunch of other more specific things I didn’t call out. The teeth on the Amazon puffer are supposed to be one of fastest growing out of puffers. And could require trimming even with them eating the shelled foods. For diseases I’d guess probably all of the same as other fish. Sorry, no first hand information. But doing a search will pull up tons of information to look through.

I think it’s more of them just trying to get to food in the substrate. I’ve had some ramshorn snails dig into the substrate a little bit, not fully buried though. I’ve had one or two ramshorn decide the aquatic life isn’t for them. Definitely not as common as those pond snails though.

No need to buy snail traps, just get a small dish put a long lasting food on it (maybe veg slice). If you do that at night by the next morning all snails will be covering it. Any shrimp on it will swim away when you grab and move the dish. And as mentioned snails coexist with shrimp very well together.

Otos will eat a wide variety of things as well. You can supplement their diet with blanched vegetables (zucchini is common), sinking wafers and some other foods. Mine would eat some of the shrimp pellets and algae wafers. They loved blanched zucchini, and often recommended to do organic and remove skin before blanching to reduce risk of pesticides.

The study I read stated that at lower temperatures the females will hold the fry longer. Which correlates to less breeding and more stress on the females as well. I’m not being that serious with their breeding. So haven’t monitored their gestation periods, with mine it was more just noticing that most seemed to be females. @Daniel thank you for that information.

My municipality uses chloramine and prime seemed to do fine for me when I was using it. I always added prime to the new water prime to adding to the tank. Basically just add prime, mix slightly (stick hand in bucket swirl once) and then add water to the tank. I switched to Fritz Guard recently since I’m trying a new setup on the tank and not wanting the detoxifying ammonia/nitrite/nitrate, but same process. We’re you mixing it in the water prior to adding the water to the tank? If adding as you described in your last post maybe it’s just the chloramine is reacting with everything in the aquarium prior to the prime having a chance to detoxify the new water.

The rili style look can occur from too much inbreeding, which is an indication of weakening genetics. Also can occur with breeding across different color strains or with wild shrimp. It’s good to add a few new shrimp to your colony on occasion to help keep strong genetics and desired looks. If you have multiple tanks that you plan to keep shrimp in you can maintain colonies that separate enough from each other to maintain healthy genetics without the need to purchase more. And the changes can happen quick. I ended up with a wild neo mixed in with my amano shrimp that were added in the tank with my blue dreams. And ended up with a couple shrimp similar to that. So I would definitely cull ones that are completely different from what you want. And here’s the picture of mine with that wild.

This is true of most products and why a brands reputation can be damaged much faster than built up. I have had a 10g aqueon start leaking. But that was due to the surface warping under it, so not really a fault of the manufacturer. And this could be the cause of some of those bad reviews as well. I don’t know that everyone really considers how heavy water is when you start dumping a lot of it in a box. I would buy another one if I was looking for another aquarium. And I agree with Maggie, the number of tanks sold probably makes the negative comments such a small percentage. Don’t know that there’s many fish forums that don’t discuss/comment when the next $1 per gallon sale is going to be happening. With that said, if your looking for an amazing show tank setup... Personally, I wouldn’t go with aqueon or most of the big box store tanks. Those tanks are functional and economical, but are not exactly what I’d consider show quality.

If you have a pressure washer you can use that to remove that soft/spongy wood. I’ve seen that on a few YouTube videos for preparing the wood. I’ve seen some use bleach to disinfect the wood as well, but the peroxide is to be the better option.

I don’t have any personal experience with MTS. But did some research on them awhile back since I considered getting them. And most of what I came across was that there wasn’t much that eats them. Though there was one forum that mentioned assassin snails can help. MTS isn’t a preferred food for assassin snails, they eat them when other options are limited. The more reliable option is probably as Kriskm mentioned, try not to over feed.

Part of the ammonia issue could be due to you removing the fake plants. While they didn’t use the nutrients they were still coated with beneficial bacteria. And while most plants do tend to have bacteria on them, I don’t know that I’d count on most of that bacteria to be thriving by the time it’s shipped to you. So could have could have added some dead bacteria and decaying leaves from any melting your experiencing. The bacteria is supposed to multiply quickly, so should turn around fairly quick for you. Until then keep an eye on your fish and ammonia/nitrite/nitrate levels and do water changes as needed.

I have some Cabomba growing in my tank, it was a bit stunted when I got it. But anyway... it’s been recovering and growing in slowly. I believe the water parameters: ph ~7.8, GH~12, kh~8 last time I checked. I can test when I get home if your interested in the more exact parameters. It might not be growing as well as softer water. But that could also be do to the fact I don’t really use fertilizers and planted in sand. It is not fully established yet, but at the moment they have some new growth and they’re not just wilting. So... hopefully they hold in there, but seem to be doing alright in hard water for me. I might check that one out if my Cabomba doesn’t work out. So, check water parameters this morning. Ph 7.8, GH 11, kh 8 And many of the steams are have some roots growing out along them now. Only the one stem being shaded by the Madagascar lace seems like it’s not doing too much.

As mentioned, guppies will work with pretty much any plant. So that’s more of deciding what you like and feel comfortable growing. I would suggest some fast grows to help with nitrates. Since they’ll reproduce whether you setup for it now or not, and can cause those nitrates to jump up. And I’m still kind of testing it myself. But there’s been some research showing that higher temp and ph will contribute to more male guppies and short gestation periods. I had a 20gal cube setup with guppies, ph around 7.8 but temp at 72 degrees. I wasn’t keeping exact counts, but there was more females to males. I’ve recently moved them to a 75gal and bumped the temp to 75 degrees. Hoping at that temp I start getting more males. That’s pretty much all the LFS wants, since customers tend to only want males. That study was going a good amount higher in temp and ph, but they were also getting into the parameters that were reducing their lifespan as well.