CT_
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Posts posted by CT_
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8 hours ago, Lowells Fish Lab said:
Do you boil it? Even following the ratio on the bottle mine used to break up quickly and make a huge mess. Nowadays I think I mix mine even thicker than the recommended ratio but I really thoroughly boil (while stirring) and it holds together very well. Takes more than a full day to start breaking down and usually doesn't last that long.
I did worry about it not "cooking" long enough. I made a small quantity and preheated my bowl then mixed boiling water and the powder. probably didn't get enough time to really dissolve at high temp. I hear some people microwave it. I may try that to get a bit more heat into it
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2 hours ago, Dawn T said:
Sponge captures debris and keeps it out of the bio media, so the media doesn't get gunked up. Bio balls are a type of bio media, which are a breeding ground for all that lovely bacteria we want in our tanks to deal with ammonia and nitrite.
IMO sponge counts as biomedia too as long as its not clogged.
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IMO the only disposable filter media that are worth it is cut to size floss. And really that's my preference. I'll spend 50c on floss a month and be okay with it. Is my tank better because of it? I think so. But I'd say there's a good chance the floss just makes me feel better.
I'd also add the resin/absorbers in there too. but their time and place I think is very niche and probably only for short term use. You could easily go your whole life without needing them.
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Yeah those are photos are today and the monte carlo is 3-2 weeks old now. They are actually in the substrate pretty good. The "trick" I saw was from a Japanese video where the guy actually burred each bit of it down much further than I would have expected and at plunged them at a 45 degree angle.
I'm dosing easy green one pump a week. Once I get my floaters propagated out how I want and the val fills in my plan is to add a second pump/week.
My biggest concern is that I'm somehow killing the monte carlo, but it sounds like the best course of action is to wait and see how it looks in another few weeks/month. I love the monte carlo (assuming it does well) so I'm going to give it time then.
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The Japanese double sword tail (lyretail?) I think is the name. Mine photographs as a blur (I think it's part bigfoot). I'm not sure if I have a pure bread one or some mutt version but it looks pretty close to this I found on google and its staying smaller than the other guppies I have.
I try not to look too hard at other guppies though. I prefer it if I own the best one already 🙂 .
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WOW thanks for taking the time to write all that out!
Here's what I've got going at various levels of zoom. Don't mind the stressed tetras they're only an hour old to this tank in these photos. The monte carlo came from an ADA culture cup and I followed a youtube video instructions on how to break it up and spread it around. There's also co-op root tabs every 5ish inches under the monte carlo. This is also a day after I vacced over the monte carlo swirling the water and actually picked up a lot of poop and mulm but the substrate and monte carlo and still diatom brown. 😕
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So in my 3 week old 15g tank I planted half with monte carlo that I'm hoping will grow out into a carpet. Last week I started getting the typical-new-tank-diatom-bloom but my new otos took care of it right after introduction, all of it but my monte carlo which as of today is brown from diatoms. Its not as easy as I had hoped to "just wipe off" and I'm afraid if I just leave it be the monte carlo will just die. Also, frankly I hate how brown it looks and I can't properly vacuum that area either.
Does anyone have advice on how to clean it off? My shrimp pick at it but don't make a dent, the otos also pick at it a bit but i'm not sure they're actually eating it.
Alternative I could cut my losses, pull up the monte carlo and put down a broader leaf carpeter. Does anyone have a suggestion on a replacement. I don't want it to grow much taller than 1".
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I just made my first batch ever. The bottle said 3:1. For me it just sits there for about an hour then starts dissolving and settles into the substrate. It's at that point my otos decide they're interested and eat it. Still takes them about 12 hrs to eat as they come and go from it.
It's this how it's supposed to work? It seems to be all eaten so I guess that's good?
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It's always a compromise between surface area and maintenance. You can get a ton of area from fine sponge but you'll be cleaning out clogged sponge all the time.
clogged sponge isn't doing anything for you.
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Easily choice: "Helping" my mom dig our fish pond. I was 5 I think so I probably wasn't actually helping.
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1 hour ago, Anita said:
https://aquariumscience.org/ has quite a bit of information
I like that website a lot but I have reason to be skeptical of some of the things there so don't take it all as hard truth, or even science, take it as another resource.
I love his advice on using pot scrubbers as filter media though. I'd use them except I already have a lot of sponge that's good enough and will last forever
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4 hours ago, tk_yt said:
2. I see that the tidal filter has the skimmer intake, which I will not be able to add a sponge to like I can with the bottom intake. Would the slits be too big in the tidal 110 that a neon tetra could be sucked in? I have 10 neons in there right now and am worried about them getting sucked in
I have the 35 which is the same but missing the downward tube. If you pop the motor out (really easy) you can fill the void behind the "skimmer" section with sponge (I used the coop sponge) to prefilter and keep fish, fry, and shrimp out.
I've heard a lot of people say you can't prefilter this HOB but I think its because they lack imagination :). You just have to do it differently.
EDIT: Here's seachem's instructions for disassembly of the 75 and 110. after step 4 you should have access to the skimmer area where you can cram whatever you want in there to either close it off entirely or pre-filter it. Its the same but 1 step faster for the 35 and hopefully the same for the 55.
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I'd also add a couple check valves if you haven't already. last thing you want to do is accidentally siphon your whole tank into the brine hatchery
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So, I checked online prices, and the one place that i could find that had multiple grades you actually paid more per hatchling for the LOWER grades. weird. I guess the question is moot if its always better to buy the top grade ones, unless there's a reason to prefer low hatch rates.
Perhaps its just a matter of supply and demand and cheapskates are driving up the prices of the low grade stuff to irrational levels?
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26 minutes ago, Maggie said:
I guess the way to figure it out would be to do the math. Just to make it easy for comparison, say you get 100,000 hatched per gram and it costs $2 per gram with Brand A, the cost is $2 per 100,000 hatched. Say you get 75,000 hatched per gram at a cost of $1 per gram with Brand B - that is a cost of $1.33 per 100,000 hatched. But then add in your time and expense (salt, air, light) to hatch the additional 25,000 to make it a truly even comparison of cost per 100,000 hatched.
You raise a good point. In that scenario can i just add 33% more eggs from the 75,000 batch to make it a 100,000 batch with zero extra effort?
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1 hour ago, Maggie said:
I did an alum treatment on dwarf water lettuce and what a disaster! It all melted except a tiny piece I found at the bottom of the tank, which I now have in a separate container to try and salvage it.
I do not recommend alum treatment on dwarf water lettuce or cryptocoryne wendtii. It does fine on anubias and so far, on marimo moss balls, which surprised me since they're technically an algae and alum, I found out, is also used for algae control in large commercial pond operations.
Yeah I feel like there needs to be a special page where members can submit their alum dip experiences, maybe time, concentration, and species. I'm constantly scouring the internet for people's dip experiences and coming up with not much good info. Since co-op specializes in plants I feel like it would be doubly good for them to collect that info.
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Besides the obvious: more BBS, is there an advantage to having 90% hatch rate eggs vs 80% or 75%? Going from 75% to 90% you'd get 20% more hatches but is there a reason to pay more than 20% more for that? Are they more nutritious? Hatch faster? last longer? Secret option D that I can't think of?
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9 hours ago, Colu said:
It looks like some form of fungus my water lettuce gets it when they get water diping on the leaves of my lid and start to rot
yikes. Is this a big problem? I'm pretty careful during water changes but I still inadvertently submerge a floater that escapes here or there (especially when refilling). My thought was "it rains outdoors I'm fine", but then again there's warm sun, not just visible light and wind (i have a lid) outdoors.
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People don't commonly use the "Latin" names for things. I'm sure they've had names in every language of people that encountered them. Marimo just stuck in English given the time and place it got popular in the US.
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ah okay thanks! Most of whats pictured are the children of an alum dipped salvinia. 2 days of alum turns them brow and they slowly die but make last ditch baby plants that have been doing well. I bet the white ones are just the last parents that I hadn't removed.
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Anyone know whats going on with my salvia? Some of them turn white or maybe have white mold or something growing on them? To be safe I cut out the white leaves but I'm wondering if I should be concerned.
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2 hours ago, Hobbit said:
Walstad has a whole section on this in her book, Ecology of the Planted Aquarium. The basic premise is that plants have certain advantages over algae, while algae also have certain advantages over plants. Depending on the conditions of a tank, it will favor one over the other. Here’s the brief outline:
Thanks for that!! Looks like I've got some reading to do 🙂
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1 hour ago, FriendlyLoach said:
A balanced tank is where the lights, nutrients, and co2 are all at a level that optimizes plant growth, and makes it so algae cant grow
How does that work? Why can plants grow but algae can't?
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So really it sounds to me like you want to balance things so that your tank is nutrient limited so that nutrients are unavailable to algae, rather than in abundance. but also "balanced" in that there is not excess of one single nutrient that algae may favor more than plants?
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I presume that's to prevent bots from doing funky stuff. Seem innocuous but people find ways to exploit innocent features all the time.