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Odd Duck

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Everything posted by Odd Duck

  1. Congratulations! Looks fantastic! Plus those bonus plants, yummy! 🤣 At least they’re the good ceramic base ones. 😂 Better for resale. 🤣 🤣 🤣 So funny they included that with such a high end tank package purchase. I wonder if they were chuckling to themselves when they plopped that in there. I can’t wait to see how things develop and what you do with this new venture!
  2. Just a heads up, I’ve had a few dozen pea puffers by now with the multiple attempts to integrate Bad Pea Daddy into a shoal and then raising a dozen or so babies (not from Bad Daddy). Not a single one was ever the slightest bit interested in Vibra Bites. I think you have to pretty much starve them to force them to eat anything other than live or frozen, meaty foods. Mine will eat all types of live foods off the bottom of the tank, but wouldn’t even take live fruit flies as they were floating or after they were sinking down and drowning. They truly need live foods and Vibra Bites are definitely not that.
  3. What about other species of dwarf cory like hastatus? Or exclamation point rasboras? They tend to hang out down very low in my 14 G cube compared to the chilis that are mostly up top. I haven’t had them in a species only tank or without the chili group, so I’m not certain if that behavior would carry over without the chilis there. I’ve been trying to find more to put in my 6 G cube and move over the 2 accidental strays I ended up with. But they seem to be a bit more robust and bolder than chilis.
  4. Thank you both. Much better now than I was. Still not 100% yet but getting there.
  5. If your pea puffers are that small, then you can add adult bladder and ramshorn snails to the tank now and they should be making young snails that are ready when the tiny murder beans are ready. It would be really nice if you could find scud cultures since they reproduce very fast and baby scuds were THE favorite meal of my baby pea puffers. Pic shows a freshly nabbed baby scud going down the hatch of the young pea puffer. I tried to make scud “refugiums” using plastic boxes filled with leaves and with plastic craft mesh inserts in the lids so the scuds had someplace to reproduce where pea puffers couldn’t get to them. The idea being they would serve as an ongoing, self-renewing source of live food. The boxes didn’t work. They might work if the entire box was made from craft mesh but the lid with a mesh insert didn’t work. The boxes might also have been too small or not a rich enough food source inside for the scuds to keep enough of the juveniles or adults inside to make the next generation, I’m not sure.
  6. You should start to see a difference soon. The spots will usually start disappearing in 5 to 7 days. Make sure you are doing everything to reduce stress, too. Since it’s primarily on one fish, that fish is stressed for some reason. Stress causes reduced immune system function. Try adding more hiding spots. Dimming the light is an excellent choice - good thinking there. I often forget to mention things like that. And see what spots look like on day 5 and 7. If still present, I would do exactly as planned, - water change, add back salt, and redose one or both of those days if spots are still there.
  7. If the breeding stock was dewormed thoroughly before breeding then the risk is lower for intestinal parasites but far from zero for species that mostly eat live prey. I would caution you that adult pea puffers aren’t reliable about eating baby brine. Honestly, they aren’t across the board reliable about eating any one prey item. Snails, especially bladder and ramshorns, are a favorite. So that with a reliable source for Daphnia and whiteworms and you’re likely OK. If you can also culture scuds, those are as consistently accepted as Daphnia, blackworms, and whiteworms. If you want to breed, you’ll want Grindals, too, for babies, plus at least one species of tiny worms - vinegar eels, microworms, banana worms, Walter worms. Babies will usually accept baby brine shrimp. Adults will eat Grindals, too, but prefer bigger worms. I’ve not tried earthworms with mine. Unless you want to try to pick out tiny, young earthworms, I don’t know if pea puffers will take them. I think adults earthworms will be too big, but I’ve seen pea puffers take bites out of the foot or antennae of adult mystery snails. 🤷🏻‍♀️ The risk would be if the pea puffer killed the earthworm without eating most of it. That would have to be closely supervised to remove uneaten bits.
  8. @Colu is exactly right on the treatments. Those look like raised spots that are somewhat irregular in size like Epistylus instead of nearly identical and flat like Ich. Don’t raise the temp as that favors the Epistylus.
  9. Sorry I’ve been absent from the forum for a bit. Got very sick with something stomach and just getting back to normal yesterday. ParaCleanse has both the Praziquantal and Metronidazole. It depends on what I’m trying to treat whether I recommend metronidazole or not. I follow the listing exactly how I have it above if I’m aiming at the most common intestinal parasites. Metronidazole certainly has uses as well and Paracleanse can be substituted in the regimen for straight Praziquantal of PraziPro if that’s what you can get.
  10. Yep, criss cross forks with the tines pointing down so they hang on to the plants better.
  11. You’ll want to have water circulating in there. If you do some lights, you’ll get a jump start on coralline algae. Fragging was barely heard of when hubs and I first started a reef tank. Keeping SPS was an almost mythical achievement back in the early 80’s when we set up our first reef. LED lights have MASSIVELY changed reefkeeping from way back then. It was all about LPS and macroalgae. Getting good coralline growth was a big deal! Now tons of people frag and SPS is a standard thing. Now the LPS is hard to get.
  12. Wow!!! That’s a gift and a curse and if you’ve had reef tanks previously I know you know exactly what I mean. 😆 You don’t need to get all new live rock. Even if there was fancy live rock that no longer has polyps, etc, you can still use it as base rock for your structure. Just keep it wet and let it cycle again. Then you only have to get whatever fancy rock and frags you want to add to it. Live rock is the biggest part of your biofiltration with the way reefs are set up now. It will save you a ton to just let that rock cycle again vs. buying all new. Fresh, new rock stinks sooooo bad anyway. Your cycled rock will be waaaaayyy less stinky and will cycle way faster. It’s like getting a jump on the cycle by using an already cycled filter.
  13. So many smart people around here! Excellent questions and topic. There is always risk of introducing new potential pathogens (whether they are bacterial, viral, fungal, or parasitic) when moving fish between tanks. Even more so moving them across the country or across the world. The most important thing is to do everything you can to maximize overall health since that will support their immune system. There’s some evidence that having beneficial bacteria around can stimulate the immune system to work better. Doing a gradual exposure is smart and may be helpful to act a bit like a vaccine / inoculation so the fish’s immune system can learn how to deal with the microlife in your tank(s). Wild caught fish would likely be well-served by getting a full round of deworming and certainly a solid quarantine time is the best way to spot if there are issues and allow for treatment time. I’m also a believer in making the quarantine tank as “homey” as possible giving the fish hiding places and plants as appropriate to minimize stress. If I have to discard or disinfect everything afterwards, I will. So do everything you can to keep the fish healthy and you are supporting their immune system.
  14. Sounds like some progress is being made. If she is looking good overall at the end of the treatment then a break is good.
  15. So sorry for your loss. I appreciate you trying so hard and doing everything you could for Spike.
  16. I tried some searches earlier and found nothing that even came close. Now when I put some of the lyrics in and search, it directs me to your post!
  17. @Guppysnail, you just need to put a tank in front of a west facing window. I had to hack off the tallest of my lucky bamboo a few weeks ago, it was all falling over. This pic is from a couple weeks farther back when it was only starting to fall over. It will get to just barely touch the ceiling before it falls. This is the second time I’ve had to cut them down. Ignore any ugly leaves and algae. 😆
  18. Yes, it could be a sign of infection but it sounds like it’s going the right way already.
  19. I would repeat every other day until convinced he has fully healed.
  20. I caught it! That’s why I thought the whole story was about the fish getting into things and prowling around! 😆 Placement for your bear bag is key! 🤣
  21. It was a funnier story when you said “fish”. 😆 Still funny with “cat” but what really cracked me up was the bear bag/bucket!
  22. So sorry! Sometimes there are underlying internal injuries that we can’t see.
  23. It does look like an injury. Since goldfish can act like they’re in an Aussie rules football scrum when going after food, they need to have decor that’s as smooth as possible. Goldfish like a bit of salt in the water, so I would add at least 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons all the time. Since you don’t have live plants, for now, do 1 tablespoon per 2 gallons until the wound(s) heal. Once healed, go back to 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons so you can grow some emerse plants like pothos or lucky bamboo. They will help your nitrate issue a lot, but you’ll have to protect their roots. I’ve gotten the tall lucky bamboo and planted the base in pots and you can support the top with various things. I’ve used kitchen sponge holders with holes drilled in the bottom. Others have used lighting egg crate grid. There are various 3-D printed gizmos you can find online, etc. You can put the base of the pothos into a sponge packed HOB filter so the goldfish can’t get to them at all, or use the sink sponge caddy. Check my signature link for my 75 G Jack Dempsey tank for a bit more info on emerse growing plants. There’s lots of other info on the forum on emerse growing a wide variety of plants. Someone (I can’t remember who) used a perforated, floating container to grow either frogbit or dwarf water lettuce that the fish would chase around and play with (probably trying to get to the plants/roots) but it still worked for removing nitrates from their water as they would harvest the plants when they got too dense in the container.
  24. Lots of solid advice here. I agree with finishing current round of meds, add aquarium salt, and maybe add some FritzZyme 7 again to boost your biofiltration while meds are in the water. You might want to do the FritzZyme again after your last water change when finished with this round of meds. That will help bring your biofiltration back up to par after the meds. Small tanks are notorious to keep balanced. My 3 G shrimp tank just got over run with hair algae since I’ve had several weeks in a row of extremely long, busy shifts and I end up too drained to keep up with appropriate water changes. It’s going to take me weeks to get this controlled and back on track, but it will be worth it in the long run. You’re still in the learning stages so give yourself some grace and just focus on absorbing knowledge.
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