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Daniel

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Everything posted by Daniel

  1. Daniel
    For sure! One our biggest misconceptions in fishkeeping is 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc' ☺️.
  2. Daniel
    I was finishing up my water changes, when my wife yelled 'Swarm!'. My favorite hobby is fish, but my profession is beekeeper and duty had just called. The bees were 35 ft up a beech tree and somewhat inaccessible. But with the help of a 25 ft ladder and empty 5 gal. fish bucket on a fiberglass pole, I was able to get the mass of the swarm, including the queen down to the ground. Once the queen walked in to the hive, the rest of the bees began to follow. And it is not even lunch yet!
  3. Daniel
    If the plumbing system for your home is designed to give your fish the high quality water and the water for you and your family is 'meh' at best, you might be a fish nerd.
  4. Daniel
    Can't wait to see that! It amazes me the amount of thought that you have put into designing a Baltimore Oriole color scheme!
  5. Daniel
    I bet your water is fine as are your plants. Give it just a little time and my guess the wrinkled curliness won't be a problem on future new growth. The growing shoot on plants (called the apical meristem) is easily mechanically damaged and some weirdness can ensue. But given a little time and a little more new growth the plants will straighten everything out. Or not. And in that case ignore what I just said.
  6. Daniel
    Oh yeah, my first proper fish tank, a 10 gallon aquarium with a box filter and a heater was also a disaster! I stocked it with half a dozen neon tetras. Later when fishing with my dad, I netted a baby sunfish. I asked dad if I could take it home and put it in my new aquarium. He said he didn't think it was a good idea and predicted the little sunfish would eat my neon tetras. I wasn't deterred and blurted "Don't worry dad! Neon tetras are the fastest fish in the world!" He shrugged and we took the sunfish home and put it in my aquarium and all seemed well. The next morning when I turned on the lights the only fish I could find in the tank was that baby sunfish. The neons had all disappeared. At that point I realized where the neons might be and burst into tears. Dad helped me take the sunfish back to the lake, and after I had saved up my allowance again, I re-stocked the aquarium. My dad has been gone now for 14 years, but I choked up remembering this. I just wanted to talk to him and say, "hey dad, remember that time when I said 'Neon tetras are the fastest fish in the world'". We would have both laughed. I miss him.
  7. Daniel
    Wow! I am jealous! So professional looking.
  8. Daniel
    Today we picked out 4 nice koi with the help of owner Joe Granato at Star Ridge Aquatics in Carthage, NC . Two of the koi were long-finned, and two were the traditional Japanese type koi. The traditional koi were my favorites because the colors were more intense. Once released one of the koi just wouldn't swim with the other three fish, so we named him 'Derpy'. We also picked out a dozen edge plants including, pickerelweed, dwarf cattails, Sagittaria, Myriophyllum, various rushes, and hardy lilies. And notice the green water? I also added an additional batch of wild caught daphnia. I hope the exponential growth of the daphnia can catch up with the exponential growth of the green water. Finally, I added a few corys cats and guppies. I will add more later when I have had a chance to see how these initial introductions fare. The pH measured at 6.93 and the upper layer of the water in the pond read 84 °F although it was much cooler 4 feet below the surface. Not surprisingly the koi preferred to stay lower in the water column most of time.
  9. Daniel
    Good food is the A number one thing, I would use blackworms if they were available. The male likes to excavate a little depression in sand or gravel (sometimes all the way down to the glass), or the sometime a flat horizontal rock is chosen for the spawning site. If I remember, breeding temperatures were around 80 - 82 °F, but I don't think temperature or water parameters are all that critical. Planted 20H seems like a good start. They aren't as easy as Convicts to spawn, but they generally want to spawn if both sexes are present and they are well fed.
  10. Daniel
    Discus, because they are super social amongst themselves. Discus politics are byzantine, oh the double dealing, the back stabbing. I never get tired of watching the ever shifting pecking order of a group of a dozen discus.
  11. Daniel
    I have something like that. This was designed to put fertilizer tabs in the substrate. I like the name 'Bottom Release'. ☺️ You push the plunger and it pushed the pellet out the bottom.
  12. Daniel
    Hello Kate! I love bettas too.
  13. Daniel
    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. 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! And I started to learn about the wonderful different kinds of guppies there were and I was hooked!
  14. Daniel
    Keeping fish is like eating at a cafeteria. As I go down the cafeteria line for the first time maybe I want one of each item. As I try that meal I find I like some items more than others. Now on my second trip back to the cafeteria, I start passing over many choices, but I start loading up on the things I really liked. Then I find one thing I really like. And that's the thing for a while. Maybe the only thing. It's a very personal choice, what's good to me, maybe not so much for you. Personally I like cichlids (not to eat, I think @Cory says discus are 'bony') because they have such passionate and complex breeding behavior. Currently, I have 3 pair of Apistogramma nijsseni spawning. It's not that I want 3x A. nijsseni babies, it is that I can get a much better idea of the breath and scope of what this particular kind of fish does if I can see multiple versions of same thing. Back to food again, it like eating your favorite dish, but at several different restaurants. You begin to learn what the essence is.
  15. Daniel
    I am so jealous. You live in the tropical fish capital of North America! I lived in Tampa for a while in 1980s and kept pools in the backyard. My memory was that everything I put in those pools did well, started breeding, all in all very happy. Does the water temperature get to 85 °F? Usually the ground is nowhere near that warm and tends to keep the pool water cooler. But hey, it is South Florida and I could see a small pond getting pretty warm. I have never kept rice fish, but I think the majority of livebearers that would do well in your situation. Probably the question is what wouldn't do well? Any specific livebearers you want to keep?
  16. Daniel
    The fish I have ordered for the summer pond have started to arrive. First up are guppies from Twin Cities Guppies. Twin Cities had a few Endler's in stock (and by a few, I mean only 1 trio). They shipped on Monday and they arrived on Wednesday no worse the wear for having been shipped. These should go into the pond in the next few days (maybe today ☺️). Two Endler's may have worked on Noah's Ark, but I think I will need many more to get the guppy population kick started. I just wanted to see what these looked like. Arriving Saturday from Aqua Huna will be panda corys, Sterbai corys, and some cherry shrimp. I don't expect any of the fish to survive our Zone 7 winter, but I do expect the cherry shrimp to overwinter as they have overwintered for me for years in a much smaller pond. Probably should have ordered a few Paleatus corys also as these will tolerate it a little colder, but maybe I'll get them on the next order. Tomorrow, my neighbor Faisal and I will take a field trip to Star Ridge Aquatics in Carthage, NC to meet with Joe Granato and get a tour of his place. We hope to pick up some plants and ideas from Joe.
  17. Daniel
    If I buy 6 Apistogramma it would be surprising if within a week some died. But if I buy 6 neon tetras or 6 rummy nose tetras, it would be a surprise if they all lived (that's a little bit of hyperbole, but I trying to make a point here). I think tetras experience a lot of stress moving through the supply chain to get to us. That being said, once neons or rummy noses are well acclimated they are as solid as rock and transferring them won't cause a problem. But because they are often not well acclimated you have to be prepared for 'x' number to expire soon after purchase. For example, if I wanted to end up with 50 rummy nose tetras, my initial purchase would be for 75 or even 100. Once the initial mortality phase passed the remaining tetras would be robust and hardy for years. Its not you, not your water, not likely a specific 'disease'. Its just the stress of being moved from the distributor to the wholesaler to the retailer to you.
  18. Daniel
    I have had Rummy nose die en-masse after bringing them home from the store.
  19. Daniel
    It is definitely Hydrocotyle (Pennywort) for sure. All Hydrocotyle prefers wet, boggy edges. Not all Hydrocotyle will grow submerged. It is a noxious weed in my garden here in NC. I brought some back with a fern I brought from the coast and the Hydrocotyle that came back with the fern escaped and I have been unable to get rid of it. It is native though.
  20. Daniel
    I grow larger infusoria (metazoans), like seed shrimp in this tank. I feed it kitchen scraps, leaves and mulm. Those are seed shrimp eating a piece of squash below. For the true infusoria (protozoans) I grow green water in 5 gallon buckets outside (squirt of Easy Green and sunlight makes green water) and then feed the green water to these containers. You can also get instant infusoria by squeezing the grunge out of a sponge filter. And plants like java moss are covered with all kinds of microscopic critters.
  21. Daniel
    My first thought was that it would involve calculus, but I don't think I remember any☺️.
  22. Daniel
    You could measure something like nitrate and see how much water changed it takes for the nitrate to drop 50% and that would give you the amount of water to change. Or some other proxy variable.
  23. Daniel
    Yes, if you look closer you can see the cyclops ☺️
  24. Daniel
    Like this? I catch native fairy shrimp from time to time, but never get more than a few when I have tried to raise them. They are huge and so pretty.
  25. Daniel
    Pond water is pretty interesting too. I pulled some water out the little pond that receives my aquarium overflow, fed it a piece of squash and filmed the results this morning. It is its own little world with snails, scuds, seed shrimp and planaria. Aquarium water has about the same mix but I think the scuds wouldn't last long in most tanks as they are pretty tasty! The video is 7 minutes long and moves at a snails pace ☺️(there is some action, at about the 3 minute mark, a scud gets on the snail).
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