dublicious

I used a google spreadsheet for a few months... I'm bad at sticking with practices like documentation though. 😬

Enriched substrates can leech ammonia, and shrimp are generally more sensitive to it than fish. It could still be leeching ammonia. I'd watch those params like a hawk for a bit until you know it's being handled by your BB or plants. As Cory mentioned, shrimp do well in established tanks. This is because they graze on the microorganisms living on surfaces. How old is the tank? You may need to supplement in the meantime. I've heard Bacter AE works well, but I have no experience with it. Mine seem to like soilent green repashy. I also struggled to keep blue velvet shrimp in a tank that was too immature. I thought they were all dead eventually, but all of a sudden one day there were babies! Now they outcompete my bladder snails and the colony is very strong. You'll get there. Good luck!

I see. Thanks!

I recently got a gladiator rack too. I think the boards are particle though, which is kinda spooky around all that water. We'll see how it holds up!

Sweet! One of my lfs took some. The other won't take any fish. Now that things are opening up again I need to see if they'll take any more!

It looks like you've got the "corrective" suggestion, but you need a balanced approach. If you're not already, you need to make sure you keep your kitten stimulated as well. You should show him the ways you want to play (string toys, tossing little mouse toys). Have multiple daily play sessions. If he isn't getting the playtime he wants, he's going to go out and find it by chasing people around or knocking things off tables, etc. Show him he can bite and claw the toys all he wants. When he bites or claws you (or any human), playtime is over. You get up and walk away. Make sure you provide hiding places and things he's allowed to climb and scratch. When he scratches something he shouldn't, pick him up and take him to a scratching post he's allowed to scratch. When my cats were younger I would scratch the posts myself with my nails and put their front paws on the scratching post so they got the idea. They still occasionally scratch things they shouldn't, but a stern "hey" as a reminder and they remember their manners and stop, but they use their designated scratching posts like 90% of the time. Good luck!

Pretty happy to see this thread! I plan on setting up a 55 gal Tanganyika tank. I haven't kept african cichlids before, so I'm kinda aiming for something easy to find and common enough that I can find a lot of people with experience keeping them. My thought is set up a rock wall (probably on one end) for transcriptus and an open area on the sand for multies. Kinda curious if that would leave room for something to inhabit the open water areas higher up (and what would be a good candidate) or if I should stick to these two for now. I'm also curious how much these guys would breed. A predicament I'm in currently is I have a ton of guppies in the middle of covid. Once the local club starts meetings again I'm hoping I can offload a bunch during auctions. Would these be easier to manage? Can I expect the mix of species to manage each others' populations?

I'm from SE PA. I kept some fish when I was younger (early 20s) but when I moved out it didn't make sense to me to take them from apartment to apartment. Now that I own my own place I'm keeping fish again. Started with guppies in a 29 gal and they exploded faster than I was prepared for! An early lesson was how prolific livebearers are! So now I keep a 29 with a bunch of female gups, a bristlenose pleco, and a booming colony of blue velvet neos. I also have two bachelor guppy tanks while I find a home for all of them! I'm currently fantasizing about what I'll keep once I move them out, as trying to constantly find homes for guppies wasn't really part of the plan. 🙃