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no. I kinda gave up. the photgraphed eggs all died 😞

It works! I knew my Oregon off road safety card was good for something! Some spots took a bit of scrubbing but it still took care of it. The stick part is a cheap stainless drinking straw.

I figure this is the right place for a random story. I was cleaning out my HOB today and found 4 shrimp in there trying to weave in and out of the coarse sponge. 2 of them were juviniles and I just dropped them back in the tank. the other two were tiny babies that i didn't notice until they fell into my sink. they were too small to scoop up in a spoon so I had to carefully give them something to hold onto and then tap them into a spoon. after a lot of trial and error I finally got the first one safely in my spoon and set it free in my tank! I watched it swim away only to get sucked up by a guppy 3 seconds later. 😲 I learned my lesson and released the second tiny baby shrimp into my floating plants. I feel like i went from a dozen shrimp that I never see to a carpet over run by shrimp in a few weeks. In any case, I have enough now so I'm not too sad but for whatever reason I was really not expecting that shrimp to get spotted and eaten so fast.

Well this gives me an idea. I'll update if its not a disaster.

^this. It makes me want to setup another oto tank and get O. vittatus for it.

do you use the scraper attachment? Do you think its necessary? I use a magic eraser right now, but the way I have things setup its kind of a pain to get my lid off and get in there and I always seem to miss a spot. I like to spend 15min or so in the evening with my nose to the glass just watching whats going on and I always notice a dirty spot then and I don't want to rile everyone up putting my hand in there either.

I've heard good things about the magfloat and the scraper addon. I'm wondering what the users of magfloat have to say about its effectiveness against green air algae with and w/o the scraper. Edit: oh, and if people have cheaper alternatives they like, because I'm cheap.

I've got my main tank, my quarantine tank, and I'm setting up a desktop tank. I could put the best quality that I don't personally like in the quarantine. Just bad I think are going to my friend's angel fish, and the pretty but not blue are going in the desktop cube. I actually don't plan on buying more fish any time soon (we'll see how that actually goes) and shrimp diseases and fish diseases aren't usually the same, so maybe the quarantine can be me "objectively" best shrimp tank, and the display tank can be what I actually like.

Thanks for the nightmare fuel. COVID was getting boring.

I've been grappling with this too. I actually like a lighter deep blue vs full dark blue almost black, but it seems like more dark the "higher grade". I think I'm going to cull to what I like and just sell to whoever wants them when I have too many. and if no one buys them so be it. At this point that's the cart way before the horse though.

Yeah they're growing shockingly fast and I'm noticing that either the ones on my floaters are all blue instead of black or the extra light up there makes it easier to see. ;) Do you people use flashlights?

I really wish people wouldn't jump on the smaller metric prefixes so fast. nano leaves so little space to go for other words. Across the internet I've seen 20g and less be called nano but I wish >5 to 20ish could be called mini or micro. And nano could be used for tank sizes that you "shouldn't" keep fish in. like a 2.5g. I've seen some amazing sub 5g tanks with a few very tiny fish that I just love but we don't have a commonly used word for those. I think about the 2.5g long tank in ACO too much. If there was a how-to video on that tank I'd buy everything in there and remake it at home, but right now they look too intimidating.

If you're worried do as others have suggested and run your water for a min before using it. Once scale forms in your pipes it won't even be touching the copper. FWIW the scale build up is why lead pipe is "okay" and why your city suddenly changing its water source and not properly treating it (I'm looking at you flint MI) is not okay.

From what I've heard on his live streams Cory is full of free time 😉

Yeah they'll hang out in a cull tank in my office for now. my fear with over culling is more centered around having too small of a breeding group in the main tank as not many babies look blue and a lot of the adults I started with are elderly because I didn't know what to look/ask for. So my thought was to keep more during my first round of culls. But genetically which are more "blue"( will have more blue babies) I'm guessing its blue>black>brown>red?

Where do you all set the line on culling? Now that I have my first babies from "blue dream" parents (they're growing really fast!) I have some obvious culls like red and brows, but I also have a lot of babies that are too dark to color. They just look black to me. I'm worried about culling too aggressively because I want my colony to be decent sized first. Should I just remove obvious off colors and leave the really dark ones alone for now?

I found airline tubing fits well over the luer end of a syringe Then just pull the plunger out of the syringe and you have a tiny gravel vac. If you don't like the little wings at the end you can cut the syringe down with a serrated knife

That could look cool. I hear the old school way is to use spray foam and carve out whatever shape/textrue you want and then paint and seal it.

Those uncovered UV bulbs are intended to go in your sump or in a canister. they emit a lot of UVC that probably gave your fish really bad radiation burns (sunburns). UVC does a lot of DNA damage in addition to damage to other parts of the cell.

Excellent! I'll follow your example 😉 This is a good point. I'll start without a heater and see how I do. If they do bad I'll add one. I'm starting with culls anyway.

So now that my shrimp (neos) are having babies I wanted to take some to work for fun. I'm thinking of a tiny cube, like ≤3gallons. My thinking was something minimal like a rock, on substrate with a slope back to front, 3 mariomo that I've had in a jar since January (not from petco) and maybe a poof of moss, some floaters like salvia and just enough light to keep the salvia and moss growing and taking nitrogen. With covid, I'm not at work every day so I'd probably aim for minimal water changes. I have RO to top off. I can add automatic feeding if needed. Does this sound like a reasonable plan? Are there other considerations I'm missing? What's a good tank to buy for this project? What about heater yes or no (office 68-72F)? Can I go filterless & airless?

I agree 100% but I do want to know 5 vs 50 nitrates and ph 6.5 vs 7.5. That's why I was so alarmed by seeing a test strip reading of 50 and a liquid test reading of 10. And similar with the pH. It looks like I had error that was just in opposite directions, and frankly that first strip test could have been contamination due to user error with the strip. I still don't know whats going on with the ph strips vs my liquid test. The API strips also read much lower for me. It must be something with my water or lighting or ??. I'm doing a lot of this testing with standards etc just to understand the error I should expect and to get error to acceptable level in my hands, hoping it helps others too.

That is super cute. I love it! Maybe she needs a break from breeding 🤣

Oh I forgot to add that what makes reading the color by eye even worse is that your references usually isn't another tube with the same chemicals and known quantities of analyte (like I had in the photo), but colors printed on paper. the printing process is usually done with some number of dyes (usually 4, I think some processes are more though) and the colors in between are made by stippling. Since each dye absorbs light differently and differently from your test sample their color can look different under different lighting conditions. Conversely two tubes with the same nitrate concentrations will always look the same when viewed under the same light.

For the nitrate I do. It's the one I use the most and its also the one that uses the most reagent per test. And getting a new set of bottles costs half the price of the master kit. I actually wish Cory would sell the nitrate kit too so I could just grab new bottles in my next order when i run out. It's true that scaling things linearly doesn't always work. For an assay like this you have to get two things right. 1) The stoicheometry: Are the relative abundance of reagents and sample correct. In this case it does scale linearly ie you can half everything 2) Assessing color: By eye is a pretty terrible way but gets you within a factor of 2. To do this accurately you need to make sure you have the light path correct and are observing the color against the right background (you're actually observing the light coming from the paper transmitted through the tube into your eye). Since you're observing through the side of the tube the height of the liquid doesn't matter (within reason). But if you used a wider tube it could look darker or a narrower tube it could look lighter. The best way is to measure assays like this is by measuring [light] absorbance with an instrument like a spectrometer, which can yield very accurate results.