H20CultureLabs

I had the opportunity to go home for President's Day and I am happy to report everything has been doing well while I have been gone. Here is a picture of the new Tucanos to demonstrate a "proof of life"! I love these fish, to me they look like a color-negative Cardinal Tetra. One of the things I love about these fish is how they are low-energy, mid-water swimmers but when food is offered they are voracious top-feeders. If you have any experience with "nano-fish" like I have, you will also understand the frustration of trying to find the "right" food for mid-water swimmers who also like to feed mid-water (looking at you CPDs). The Tucano does not have this finicky trait, but possesses all of the other great characteristics we love in our low to mid-water nano fishes.

After reviewing my last few posts it seemed to me that there was a lot of doom and gloom on this journal over the past year and a half or so with multiple fish losses and a slow start to the “new and improved aquarium rack” that has not even begun to come close to the productivity or health that the previous one had. And although this is true and our hobbies often take a back seat to major life events from which I've had several during this time frame, it all hasn't been bad. I have been on an extended work trip away from home living out of a hotel room which has allowed me to go and catch new Elassoma as well as continue to refine paramecium and seed shrimp cultures. I have actually been able to utilize the light from my hotel window to grow a thriving seed shrimp culture which is primarily fed lettuce. A huge you thanks to @modified lung for their journal documenting their own trials with seed shrimp type critters. I have actually been able to grow enough of these to sell to other hobbyists so that they can start their own cultures. I think these are fantastic and hearty small organisms which make for excellent fish food and tank cleaners. They're much easier to raise than daphnia and seem to tolerate a wide range of parameters and food. I do think that decaying vegetable matter is the best food to feed them but old slash very inexpensive fish food will also work well. I will be home in a few weeks and look forward to continuing my adventures with a new rack and look forward to keeping this forum updated all my results.

Nice looking fish! Enjoy them!

Over a month has gone by since my last post. Moved into another home, this move was not as much of a disaster as the other move but I still lost fish. I had a heater become cracked and when I plugged it in it shorted in a holding tub, electrocuting the fish in the tub before the breaker was thrown. Rotten luck, it killed off my colony of Tucano tetras (the profile pic fish). Be careful with your equipment and check it before you plug it in! Fortunately I was able to source another group of individuals and they are in quarantine. This extended trip away from home is making my heart grow fond for my aquarium rack and fish. Soon I'll be home and the projects and updates will flow once again!

Great journal and a nice idea to do this aquaponically. Following along!

Wow, am I excited! I am headed home after an extended trip away for work and I’ll have a little bit of time to play around with my aquarium rack when I come home. Here is something that I've been up to while I have been living in a hotel room for a few weeks. I have continued to culture Moina and sell them online on Aquabid. I love culturing microorganisms in these water dispenser containers as they make for a very efficient and easy to use receptacle for the raising and harvesting of microorganisms. Happy holidays to all and i hope you greatly enjoyed this time of year as I do.

If the flow is on the lower end a nice male betta would make for a nice centerpiece! Alternatively, threadfin rainbows or a pearl gourami would make a nice addition.

Exciting! Following along this great looking build!

I was going through my phone the other day and discovered that I have a whole trove of photos from the time that I was not posting in this forum that I intended to share. So the next several posts will be from these photos as well as some minor updates to the current state of my aquarium hobby. I have been on an extended trip away from home which has slowed things considerably but I fully intend to take back up the torch when I return home. One of the final posts before I went dark on this forum was a large, 150 gallon (600L) feed trough that I had posted as my new project. This was intended to be a super sized summer tub for my aquarium plant grow out project. The tub itself performed spectacularly but due to a myriad of difficulties I was not able to focus on moving the plants as well as I would have liked and ultimately lost all of the Cryptocoryne Pink Panthers that I was growing at the time. There is no question that moving takes a heavy toll on this hobby, but I will continue to come up with new ways to mitigate damage in the future. I am finally mentally ready to share this picture, this is what became of that 150 gallon tub. Every single plant that you see in this photo is a Pink Panther and they did spectacularly under the late spring and early summer sun. The way they are being grown is in plastic cups with earthworm castings as a base and black diamond sand as a cap. I am utilizing the exact same system in the rack currently and I am currently puzzled as to why my plant growth is so low when compared with what I had previously without any changes in substrate and still growing these plants in relatively hard water. I hope to one day achieve this level of plant growth in my hobby again period

This can be seen by previous posts I am a big fan of live food and enjoy the culturing of live food almost as much as the care and maintenance of aquaria. A food that I think is heavily underutilized in the hobby is the humble micro worm, Panagrellus redivivus, which is an excellent overall food source and is as simple to culture as they come. Like many of you I was hatching brine shrimp attempting to utilize various ways of making the labor for it as minimized from a time perspective as possible. There is no question that artemia nauplii are an incredible food source for all kinds of fish and anybody starting out as a new breeder should work to culture this amazing food to increase their success with fry rearing. However, as a busy professional I find the daily hatching of brine shrimp to be tedious and cleaning the culture vessels and disposing of the cysts to be time consuming. Ideally one should have a utility sink when culturing this organism but unfortunately I don't have one. Therefore I have focused my efforts on the micro worm which aquaculture studies have demonstrated to have a very good nutritional profile from a protein perspective and is nearly as successful as Brian shrimp in rearing larval food organisms. Although artemia has a survival advantage in most studies, micro worms can be “hot rodded” utilizing Omega 3 fatty acids and carotene pigments to increase their nutritional profile and make them a better food source for larval organisms. If you have any experience with microworms you know that the worst aspect of them is the horrific smell they produce. This occurs when the culture starts producing anaerobic bacteria secondary to toxic byproducts from worm metabolism. The way around this smell is to continually add the favorite food of the micro worm, yeast, to the mix. I add instant dry yeast to my containers once every three to four days but since I have been on an extended business trip I have been pouring in yeast and letting it sit for two weeks at a time. From what I can tell this has worked excellently. The grow media for the worms that seems to have the least amount of smell is plain steamed white rice that has been allowed to cool. This appears to provide a ample food source for the yeast which in turn provides a good food source for the worms. I personally feel that yeast is a heavily underutilized food and aquaria and we'll be posting more about it in the future as I think it is an essential component to running a breeding operation inexpensively. More to follow. As can be seen in the pictures I am posting these containers are quite large and contain a large amount of media but since I have been on an extended business trip and have not been able to access them daily these large cultures provide for a good buffer against anaerobic culture crashes. You can see that the amount of worms produced is tremendous, the glob on the spatula in the picture is a solid mass of worms. There is very little smell from the culture, despite being untended for two weeks. Although fish don't consume the worms as readily as they do brine shrimp, they do consume them all the same and I have found them to be a good food source for adult fish as well I will continue to document my use of micro worms in my breeding projects and will document my efforts to enrich them as that will be my next step it in my never ending quest for the ideal fry food.

Looking great! That moss in particular is looking fantastic. Nice job.

A nice checklist! Have you ever used breather bags? I have had really good success shipping with them by sealing them with an inexpensive heat sealer. Worth a short and saves the O2 step.

@nabokovfan87Thanks for the kind words, it is amazing to see so much water suspended above the ground by a couple of steel rails. The cabinet sliders installed can take the entire weight of a full 20 gallon long but when I have tested that condition there is some creaking involved from the shelving unit which I find disconcerting. Since each aquarium has a ball valve integrated for easy drainage it is much safer and easier to simply drain the aquarium down to a halfway level and then pull it out, especially since draining the aquarium down makes almost any aquarium task easier. My preferred soil mixture is to use is a combination that I learned about from watching Fish Tank Mike of AquaPros YouTube channel and substrates championed by the 2hr Aquarist; it is earthworm castings capped by a sand layer of Black Diamond blasting sand from Tractor Supply Company. I thought about lack of flow but there is plenty of flow for the size of the aquarium and I personally think that there were some unstable conditions when this rack was first set up to include temperature fluctuations as well as the fluctuations consistent with a new aquarium; the combination of these caused some issues when these crypts transitioned from tissue culture to submersed growth.

Very cool fish! There is nothing so special in this hobby as catching the fish yourself and then raising them up to eventually rear fry from them. These fish look amazing and remind me of the Sawbwa rasbora; I had no idea until just now that such a fish like that existed in the United states! I wish you both the best of luck with them and a nice documentation of your journeys thus far.

Now let's talk about something that's not quite as pleasant which are some of the setbacks we encounter in this hobby. Here is my first update of the aquarium rack since construction. You can see in the photo below that the 20 gallon long aquarium once it is drained approximately halfway is very easily supported by the long arm cabinet drawer slides without any issue. I love this design even though it is fairly difficult to construct as it allows for excellent access to the aquarium when I need to manipulate things inside. This update pertains to the crypt pink panthers that I've always been so proud of. You can see from previous pictures earlier in this blog that I had excellent success growing them in little dixie cups that had a soil mixture capped with sand. I have tried to replicate that here in hopes of creating a lush crypt garden for the baby fry to grow up in. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason they all seem to be small and stunted. I am not sure if it is a nutrient deficiency or a light deficiency but the plants in my opinion have ample amounts of both. I think unfortunately time will just tell to see if this will correct itself or if these plants will eventually whittle away and I need to figure out something else. It is important though to talk about these not so good updates when things are not going well because it makes us reflect about what is occurring in our systems and what we could do better for next time. Given my previous success with this system I am suspicious that the plants themselves did not have sufficient nutrients in the sand layer in order to build robust root systems or the water column did not have enough nutrients for them to do similarly.