CT_

I hope this isn't a repost (I haven't been following this thread) but I feel compelled to post this one here.

I think the first step is to put a shrine up in the corner with Cory's photo. Make sure to use medium sponge filters instead of candles. Also a daily offering of live baby brine is a good idea. If he hears your prayers you'll get a box in the mail.

You could ask candy to input your order for you. I think they save your payment info. Browsing the current selection maybe you could look at Internet archive captures though the inventory would be off. It would be hacky but would work if you're eager to order

0/0/0 nitrogens could mean you're starving out your plants too. IME regular water changes regardless of measurable parameters, and ferts on a schedule is the easiest way. With shrimplets I wouldn't gravel vac and with fry you do have to be careful but one thing people do is put coarse sponge, cheese cloth, or nylon stockings to keep fry out of a siphon.

Well water is usually pretty hard I'd double check if there's any doubt. also if you're dosing minerals weekly without water change you hardness will keep climbing.

You can also mix a full dose in a cup of water and then dose 1/5th of that mixture. It's a bit wasteful but it'll get you by.

I assume the KH too.

If I had to guess, I'd say that its not in the dipping itself because the pads are fairly isolated and there's not enough time in the take for diffusion to matter. My guess is the ph buffer dust would then mess with other stuff while in the can.

yeah 🙂 one in the same.

To expand on this. I think every aquarium article is referring to the 4 atom inorganic molecule nitrate (NO3-). The class of organic molecules containing nitrate residues called "nitrates" is practically infinite and not too common in nature AFAIK. Without being specific about which molecule I don't think you can make too many generalizations about them, at least not in an aquarium context.

oof. as an ivory tower academic I feel compelled to defend my self a little. Fraud happens, and we'll never know the exact ratios, but I suspect its the minority of the "reproducibility epidemic". The big article recently (5-10 years ago?) about this was cancer research but in general it is an issue throughout many of the sciences and in bio-related fields especially. Its also important to remember that headlines like "40% of science can't be reproduced" is probably more accurately "20 out of 50 papers, in one area, chosen by one group, couldn't be reproduced by that group in time to write the paper about how there's a problem with writing papers" I'd say the majority of irreproducible results come from a few places: 1) False positives and positive results publishing bias. If you require 95% confidence in a result then 1/20 of your results are false positives. add to that the fact the negative results are less commonly published a you are, maybe counter intuitively, going to see a high rate of false positives (>5%). 2) Bad methods communication. Often the methods section of a paper just says we did common protocol XYZ with kit A from company B. But something that possibly the researches didn't even know was critical wasn't communicated, like how something was handled after centrifugation, or the way something was washed, etc. 3) Mistakes in data analysis. This is getting better and more and more people are sharing code and data with papers, but you can still find a lot of papers that don't make it easy to get the data or the code. 4) Questionable practices. It happens. Like I said above IDK how often, but it does happen. I do believe its the least common. BONUS 5) Press. This isn't really about reproducibility but I think the press distorting findings, misunderstanding, and reporting on reports written by other reporters causes a lot of wrong stuff to be said for the sake of headlines that eventually leads to distrust, especially when that thing the press hyped as true that the scientists never said was true turns out not to be true. In Computer science there was a classic "randomly generated paper" that got accepted years ago. Its been repeated with success many times since. This is less a problem with scientists and more a problem with predatory journals that publish anything in exchange for a few dollars. (it costs between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars to publish a scientific paper)

OMG this is hilarious and sad at the same time. Thanks Cory!

Careful what you wish for though. Grammarly is genius IMO. They, scan everything you write and get to use that human language to train AIs. The AIs are getting pretty good at writing like high school senior's essays*. I think @drewzero1's screen shot exemplifies that. * I kind of assume that's the biggest grammarly user, since I totally would have used it for high school English had it existed. But, now that I'm an adult I break the rules, for better or worse, when I need to. I also get English wrong all the time because I still never learned better 😬

When did you buy your CO op strips? Mine are from the first batch and consistently read below 7 for pretty much everything. I've made a whole thread with my tests and they can't be repeated at the lab so I assume a small part of the first run had a problem

I've been reading a lot of care articles, especially for plants recently trying to figure out what can go best in which tank and I've come across quite a few weird articles. They all are topical and convey information but many have very similar phrasing and often the same odd mistakes. Like one article I was reading recommended letting the roots of a submersed plant "dry" between waterings. Others have more subtle mistakes but are repeated between different websites. They also almost never have by lines which most authors would want unless all the content on the site is by one person. Are we living in an age now where aquarium articles are just generated by computers and filled with affiliate links to make passive money?

You could also add a humidifier so they fight each other until it's hot enough.

there's no free lunch from thermodynamics, but the good news is heaters are 100% efficient since you're maximizing entropy 😉 An oil filled heater with a fan blowing to circulate air is probably a good option. More air circulation will make evaporation happen faster though. Another good option is a dehumidifier. they make a good amount of heat, and if you need that heat then the dehumidification is "free". You can get above unity efficacy with a heat pump if you want to get fancy.

I got my first shrimp colony (neos) about a year ago. first few sets of babies threw a TON of off color but dark culs. some full reds, some almost black, and some that after enough time turned into a spotted rusty red. I put about 30 in my QT/ricefish mating tank and more or less forgot about them. I didn't do enough water changes and when i did they were large. 30 dwindled to about 2-3 and I assumed the rice fish ate them because I never actually saw bodies. The two or three grandma shrimp left are now huge and all female. A few days ago I cleaned all the algae and crud off of one of the sides of this tank and went on my way. Last night I peeked in and saw a bunch of 1cm long juvenile shrimp! they must have been in there for a couple months at least to have grown that big and the glass was so dirty I never noticed them before. Its just crazy to me that after all that poor treatment a few managed to hold on, including a male I never saw once, and are now repopulating that tank! I'm getting some more dark blues out of it too so I'm going to un-cull some and cross them back into my newer but lower grade colony (colony 1.0 has mostly died due to my cardinals deciding that shrimp taste good). Anyway I thought I'd share since its a fun surprise. 😉

an update: one hatched out Tuesday night (odd just one) and then another 4 this afternoon. so strange it took them this long but I'm happy to see they eventually did hatch.

I think I have a hot take on this so let me preface this with three things: 1) It probably doesn't really matter in the end. 2) It probably only makes a difference if the there isn't already sufficient flow over the heater. 3) the rightest answer (IMO), is to put in under lots of flow and use an external temperature controller. My hot take is this: Vertical will lead to a more stable water temperature throughout most of the aquarium, at least with a bimetal type thermostat. The reason is that the bimetal thermostats have a lot of hysteresis (ie they tend to have a large temp swing around their set point. One of my first forum posts here was about that). If the flow is low near the heater the heat will rise and warm the thermostat first causing it to shut off earlier than it would otherwise. You still get the same temperature swing near the thermostat, but since its switching on/off faster the average temp in the rest of the aquarium will be more even. If you mount horizontal that heat has to spread across the aquarium before toggling the thermostat making the same swing global to the aquarium.

Timing wise do you think that month was enough time?

*sigh*.... yeah At this point I think I'm willing to write off all the anubias in this tank. but I want to replace it. I haven't found much in the way of how long to wait before its safe to add anubias back.

I bought an anubias last month and a week later it ended up with anubias rot. then I noticed recently my other anubias was starting to yellow and last night i noticed a leaf was loose. Turns out the rot spread to this one too. (and no I didn't bury the rhizome. they're all on rock or wood) Does anyone know how to stop the spread? I found one post while googling that suggested pulling all anubias plants and quarantining them for a month in individual containers and discarding any that show signs of rot. Does anyone else have experience doing this? is a month enough time to be sure it won't come back?

Well I found the problem. It was actually anubias rot. It spread from the nana petite I bought about a month ago to this one. I'm pretty heart broken because this is the centerpiece plant in the tank and It looked so good. 😞

This update really excited me :) It's great the the last 5 made it this far! Cool to see that you can tentatively sex them to. Sending good vibes for happy healthy otos