Daniel

Doh! I didn't think of glass. I do have some tubing or a least some narrow glass burettes and can put the tubing around the narrow end (I think).

I’d get the 48 inch light since the tank is 48 inches long.

From the 1934 movie 'Dragon Murder Case'. "Betta splendens they call them" Note the tank in which two Bettas are fighting has a course sand gravel, no heater, no visible lighting, but some sort of airstone. I may need help ID'ing the fish you see in the first tank. Definately discus and mollies. What else do you see? I like the quote: "There is one thing about fish, if they dislike one another, they fight until they kill."

Here is my suggestion for the female apisto sticker. It is one of my A. nijsseni females 🙂

I love the 'Follow Your Delivery on a Live Map' UPS feature! I wouldn't recommend it but I once tracked down my FEDEX guy and met him a parking lot just to get my package a little sooner. My UPS guy gave me his personal cell number (I don't abuse that). And once when I was at the UPS distribution center at 7:00 AM trying pickup live blackworms before they baked to death on a 96°F day, he saw me talking to the supervisor trying her to go look for my worms (they don't open the customers service center until 3:00 PM), and stepped in and found my blackworms. It is important to carefully cultivate your relationships with your delivery people.

Nice tank. The green frilly plant in the background I think is Water wisteria (Hydrophila difformis). On the left behind the thermometer it appears to be Vallisneria. I love your user name. Is there a story behind that?

The best time to pick up a tank is during the dollar per gallon sales that occur periodically at Petco and PetsMart. Often you can a get a tank a little or no cost from someone downsizing or leaving the hobby. This is possibly cheaper than a dollar per gallon sale, but not if you have to do a lot in the way of repairs. I had good luck with both. If I only needed one tank I would prefer it be new. If I needed 10 aquariums, I wouldn’t care if they were used if the price is right.

As someone who keeps discus and has an RO system (for the discus), I would advise to wait on the RO. No matter what the conventional wisdom is on water parameters, I think a lot of it depends on the fish keeper. You must be a pretty decent fish keeper as you are spawning angelfish. I wouldn't try and change anything about the water at first. If you have good quality water that is consistent, I would do frequent water changes. Make sure the discus like the water changes. If each water change is a mini-setback, maybe not much on the water changes. Tannins aren't a concern at this time. As always with discus you will want to see how their appetite is. Find the best frozen blood worms you can get (I think Hikari is the best). Find live blackworms if you can. If they are eating well and growing, that is most of what you need to know right now. They like to eat small meals frequently. You do have control over the temperature and I would keep it at minimum of 84 °F maybe bump it to 86 °F. Worry about eggs later. We can burn that bridge when we get to it. First spawn rarely take with discus anyway. And we don't know if we have a pair yet. Job 1 right now is to feed quality food and grow your discus. If the appetite or growth is anemic, then lets begin to look why they lack vigor (including re-examining water parameters). Congratulations, you are a discus person now!

I am thinking DH is? Darn Husband Degrees of Hardness Designated Hitter Maybe none of the above? So glad you are here!

It can start with just 1 dot and then become many dots over time.

There is always room for a few more blackworms!

To me ich always looked like grains of salt:

@Cory can so read your mind!

What if you didn't have to sanitize to make the ich go away? I had always heard that if the protozoan ich went a week without a host, it would die out. That sounded to good to be true. Maybe it was like Daphnia and made a cyst to survive until a later time when it could re-emerge and then find a new host. But then I found this paper from a reputable source (Southern Regional Aquaculture Center). The paper states that a pond can be disinfected by going a week without fish. Given the source this might actually be true. If it is true, this seems like a lower effort way to have an ich free tank without nuking away all the good bacteria that have built up to this point. https://aquaculture.ca.uky.edu/sites/aquaculture.ca.uky.edu/files/srac_476_ich_white_spot_disease.pdf

The cherry shrimp love them too!

Congratulations on spawning the Corydoras! Fish stores were magical back in the 60s!

I have heard the weather in San Diego is wonderful. Do you have to have the heaters? What do think the temperature profile in the Subaru tubs would be without heaters?

Ghost HaHa! I was out of reactions for today!

When I was 9 years old I read a children's book about a kid who had guppies and the guppies kept multiplying like bunnies (I am looking for that book if it rings a bell with anyone). So I got together some quart jars and took my 50 cents allowance to Grant City (sort like a 1969 version of Target) and bought several guppies. I learned what the word 'gravid' meant and I could see my guppies were 'with child'. I could even see the eyeballs of the soon to be born baby guppies through the body of the pregnant females. And when my guppies had babies some were gray, but some were golden! Those golden baby guppies are a treasured memory.

I was about to use a piece of rigid airline tubing to siphon away some guppy poop in the 1930s aquarium when I stopped and thought, I need to look up when PVC came in to general use. Turns it out it had been invented by the 1930s but they weren't making rigid airline tubing out of it. I am being to realize that the tough part of this project isn't the big box of water, it is all the little things like 'no plastic'. So plan B. 'Rubber tubing' tied to a stick:

I couldn't make out the titles. It looked at first like the 3rd rank was "Active Puffer". I have just squinted a little more and now I see it might be "Active Poster".

His level of excitement was over the top! Is it always like that with tetras?

If that is enjoying, I would love to see what 'going crazy for' looks like!

Discus out grazing for lunch

This is what I call 'Green Hair Algae': Grows all over everything when there is an excess of nutrients and light. Eventually the population crashes and it goes away. It is kinda slimey.