CT_

Speaking for myself and maybe others, when I say IR I'm not talking about cameras that pick up transmitted black body radiation (eg FLIR [tm]), or image intensification "night vision". Rather I'm talking about images like @Randall from Texas shared above, where a ccd or cmos sensor that is sensitive to near IR (like the kind from a TV remote). Where it works like any other camera except your illumination source is IR LEDs that are not visible to people, or presumably, fish.

Some PLA is food safe. That's what those biodegradable straws and forks are made of. Same with petg. Some is "food safe" some isnt. It's more about process and additives than the polymer itself. I'm pretty sure I've said my whole speal in the above linked thread. Tldr: black and white are usually made with inert colorants. Clear sometimes actually takes extra additives over "natural"(undyed) colored polymer. And pla won't biodegradable without applying heat so don't worry about that. Petg is what I'm mostly comfortable putting in my tank.

To add to this I'd separate illumination from the camera so you don't get glare. Any cheap "night vision" camera should work. Just disable the built in lights and get a cheap ir led light from Amazon. That'll let you position things without glare on the glass

Props to them advertising it as a plant and shrimp tank instead of photoshoping an arrowana or something into it.

Adding a little aquarium salt should help a lot to. Nitrite competes for cl uptake so upping the cl concentration helps restore the ion flux rate. It doesn't take a lot. Like a tenth the "medical" aquarium salt dose. So it shouldn't hurt plants either. I can get exact numbers and references if you want once I'm back to my computer later today

ah well this was flowering when i got it. so hopefully i can keep it happier (though my track record isn't great).

My rule is thumb is you know it's good if it's comes with a liquid filled bottle instead of a cap. All ph meters need to be kept wet in a proper buffer solution to work reliably long term. These days the chemistry and electronics aren't expensive, but you can't get around haveing to treat them well. That said I did have 15$ pen that worked okay in the short run but it broke pretty fast.

I've heard that bucephalandra sp. likes to flower under water. How does that work? are they self pollinating? or are the plants just making a mistake? or can the pollen travel under water?

wellp. the new anubias I got for the tank rotted. I hear this happens. Fortunately, I scored that huge chunk of buce so I but about 10% of it to work. I'm loving how the buce placement worked out. if you look carefully you can see a tiny bit of a small leaf variety in the back too that I got from my local club. I still need to work out some kind of background too.

well, I just pulled a totally rotted anubias nana petite from the tank. It was 10 days old but it randomly started having leaves drift off after day 8. I just now noticed the rhizome was totally white and mush. I bet thats what the worms were eating :(. This tank is pretty much all anubias right now so I hope it doesn't spread.

it might be dangerous if one of the internet fish-purity police reads this and faints while clutching their pearls. 😛 jokes aside I don't think (most?) people join the internet fish-purity police out of projected racial animus, I hope. I think its for the reasons stated in previous posts and also out of a belief that its "unnatural" and we shouldn't be keeping"unnatural" things out of fish keeping (for whatever definition of unnatural). from my POV you do you and as long as you don't sell some hybrid off for 400$ as some new rare species or something (basically fraud) I see no problems.

Here's another egg 5-6 days pf. you can see blood circulation really well now (though the youtube recompression make it hard to see the blood cells move.

I'll hitchhike on this thread. here's the ones I just found.

^This. seems to me its 99.9% probably some disease they picked up in the wild and the stress of shipping weakened them.

My newish (~2months now) shrimp cube had what I thought were random extra fine threads floating in it. for a few days i thought maybe i just got a linty sock or something too close. but it never went away and the numbers went up so i took a closer look and they're alive. They're thinner than a human hair and 3-10mm long and they just float around in the water colum. I have the mini HOB that ACO sells. This tank has a decent number of plants, which is where I assume they came from, but I feed it so little. a minimal dusting of bacter AE and either a tiny bit of snow flake (part of one pellet) or a single pellet of xtreme shrimpee for about 12-20 neo's. Do these things hatch from eggs? Is that why there's all of a sudden so many? I don't really see them on the substrate, and in total there really hasn't been much food added to the tank. I realize they're "healthy" but it bugs me to see them swim around in the water column. I'm thinking of dropping in a couple medaka fry when they hatch out in a week. I'm trying to figure out if they'll be able to eat the floating worms but not baby shrimp which I expect to be hatching around the same time. Has anyone tried something like this?

the heat is probably going to soften the adhesive long term. If it were me I'd carefully drill a hole near the edge of the aluminum light enclosure. You can then either tap or use self taping screws to screw the lid into the top.

To add to what everyone above said. I think you can wait for the first generation to grow up enough to spot but after that they're not going to be breeding in sync and I think you have to either not clean or accept some losses inversely proportional to the amount of effort you spend to save them.

Yeah. IDK what you'd set retail on a 40$ wholesale fish either!

I was at the LFS today and absolutely floored by these fish. This photo doesn't even convey how red they were. Take the red from a really healthy cardinal tetra and paint a whole diamond tetra with that color. The lady at the store told me they're a new (to fish keeping) tetra. They're 40$ each wholesale and so they only brought them in for their display tank since they didn't think people would pay that (plus retail markup) for a schooling fish.

my last photos were done through a stereo inspection microscope with top illumination. This was done with a flashlight from the side-ish on a 20$ "microscope" I'm playing with better illumination right now to see what gives me the most detail for cheap. If I remember I'll bring an egg in to work and see what it looks like under a very very expensive microscope.

It's hard because every species reacts different and like you say ph makes a big difference. It would be nice to have studies on every common fish or even a few. Too much is anecdotal. But at least we know these products do work for high ammonia now.

Yeah. I've bought an expensive pot of buce and basically killed it once already. This seems like a serendipitous chance for redemption 🤞

I think @Karen B. nailed it for me. It's also easy to misinterpret good advice or technically true statements. As I've found out the hard way multiple times the "you can" do xyz advice is usually setting up a novice for failure or a harder time than than is necessary. I've learned to look for the "its easiest when" advice now.

I have one that's not in need of cleaning yet but it will be one day so thanks for this! Has anyone treated these like an airstone and just blasted them with compressed air under water? It works great with my conventional air stones but I'm not too sure about the finer pores in a co2 diffuser.

hmm yes. I think I'll probably bite the bullet and break up this glorious mat. How much growth do you have on that one right now (vs how much it started with)? Its a bit ironic though. I just bought a bunch of anubias petite to serve the same purpose. I love both plants though so its going to be more plant than rock soon. I should have bought cheaper rock 😛