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Daniel

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Everything posted by Daniel

  1. Daniel
    I wish my first attempts looked that good 😄
  2. Daniel
    I am leaning towards Excel because it is so versatile, but I am still thinking about the 'nudge' to write down what I am doing if there is a physical notebook in front of the aquarium.
  3. Daniel
    I am thinking about keeping records for my aquariums. I think I would like to track water parameters, foods fed, tank events. Maybe even miscellaneous stuff like water changes. I am leaning towards an old fashioned notebook, sort of a daily diary. But the techie in me is saying, no…not paper, go electronic like Word or Excel. I want some easy otherwise I am concerned I will not keep up with it in the long run.
  4. Daniel
    My vote also is no worries. I would mostly prefer not to have them. I have never seen them eat fry. The biggest problem for me is that they eat more than their fair share of the baby brine shrimp or daphnia that I put in the tank as fry food. The hydra get little orange bellies just like the fry! If I weren't biased against them I would see them as micro sea anemones and think they were the coolest thing ever.
  5. Daniel
    Oh yes! I love when my angelfish have fry. I could sit for hours and watch the babies feed off the parent's bodies. I am not sure what they are picking at but it looks just like what baby discus do.
  6. Daniel
    Sometimes I give them a piece of zucchini or squash, but honestly I can't really tell if they eat much because the blackworms themselves become fish food in short order. People who do feed them often use algae wafers or fishfood. I've thought about setting up a 10 gallon tank with a couple of sponge filters and stocking it with a 1/4 pound of worms and cultivating the worms. You've got me thinking about that again...
  7. Daniel
    How I take care of blackworms I order my blackworms from Craig Shaubach at Eastern Aquatics and I have always been happy with the quality of his product. I try to get the package of worms inside as soon as UPS delivers the blackworms. The longer they sit the more their quality can deteriorate I open the box at a sink and dump the entire shipment (in my case typically 1 lb.) into a very fine mesh aquarium net. I pour 1 gallon of pre-chilled water over the worms to rinse away any foul water and worm waste. I put some of the worms in a 100 sq. inch baking dish with just enough chilled water to cover them. After 36 years of marriage my relationship is strong enough so that my wife lets me store them in the refrigerator. If the refrigerator option is not available, put them in a low sided container with a lot of surface area and place them under a cold dripping faucet in a sink. Rinse the worms daily in the net with a gallon of cold water and they will live indefinitely, or at least until your fish eat all of them. I use both the sink and refrigerator methods because it is never smart to put all your worms in one basket!
  8. Daniel

    I love blackworms from Eastern Aquatics. It is already mid-80s here in North Carolina this morning so I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my 1 lb shipment this morning. Holy cow (sorry for the swearing) I see the UPS truck now. Gotta go!

  9. Daniel
    Gorgeous fish! Lovely tank! Discus and earth eaters together on sand, what an excellent combination. Wild type forms always look good to me. Do you breed discus?
  10. Daniel
    My 2 favorite kinds of fish to breed in a small tank are Corydoras catfish and Apistogramma dwarf cichlids. Both are smallish, readily available (you can get Corydoras and Bolivian Rams at PetSmart - note that Bolivian Rams aren't actually Apistogramma, but they are a dwarf cichlid). If you can a group of juveniles of either Corys or Apistos and raise them together on good quality food, typically they will find a way to breed. The more Corys the better, but with the Apistos, after they pair off you probably will want to remove the other Apistos who aren't a member of the pair. And there are bazillions of different species of both Corys and Apistos, so if it turns out the first species was fun then there are 100 more of each you can try next. I am working on Apistogramma Nijsseni currently in a 10 gallon tank.
  11. Daniel
    Here is my rack system, which isn't a rack system. Both are Walmart rolling tool chests. 36" inches in length which coincidentally is the exact of length of a Petco $1 gallon 40 breeder ☺️
  12. Daniel
    When I started the day I didn't have the intention of setting up another tank...but I needed a place move a pair of Apistogramma nijsseni to. I watched Cory's "Getting Started with Aquascaping" live stream where he mentioned learning from making mistakes and just trying a bunch of things. So I decided to move the apistos into a tank that I would aquascape with marsh plants growing in a soggy spot on the edge of my driveway. Sounds crazy, but I am happy with the results so far (tank has been set up for about 4 hours now). I dug up 2 chunks of boggy sod, added sand from my creek, and an old piece of wood that was last in an aquarium about 10 years ago (it has living abandoned in the woods for the last 10 years). It took about 15 minutes to get it setup. But it took another 5 hours to fill it because I trickle filled it with a piece of airline tubing with water from my big living room tank. We will see how it works out, but so far the apistos seem to like it.
  13. Daniel
    I have been feeding the daphnia (collected in a ditch in the front of my house) in this jar of green water for about a month and the population seems stable. But calling it a tank might be a stretch as my jar doesn't have any aquascaping other than duckweed. But I do feed it and change the water, and I sit and watch it. There are cyclops and planarians in there also. I made a short video of the cyclops.
  14. Daniel
    Wow! It is hard to beat the $40 Bill paid for his rack at Home Depot. Looks like Bill's rack is rated at just over 1000 lbs. If you need something to hold a little more, some of these racks rate up to 2500 3200 lbs. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/49867/dunnage-shelving.html They also cost more than $40 🙂
  15. Daniel
    Yes! I picked up a 40 gallon breeder for $40. I bet Petco paid much more than $40 for that tank. It was just what I needed for a school of baby discus.
  16. Daniel
    This is my scud pond. Water from my 500 gallon angelfish tank's overflow goes out the stand pipe, through my home's concrete foundation, then downhill through a pipe and finally empties into this pond. It is chock full of snails and amphipods (scuds). Currently it is also full of leaves, hornwort, and duckweed 🙂.
  17. Daniel
    My next door neighbor just asked me to help stock his water feature. I suggested guppies and hornwort. It would be cool to add lilies and Pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) in pots on the ledges. The main issue that vexes me is this is an 'infinity pool', that is the water overflows the edges of the pool and then returns via a pump. I hoping the hornwort clogging the infinity edges and general bigness of the pool will allow some of the guppy fry to grow up. This pool is located in the piedmont of central North Carolina near Raleigh. Cherry shrimp over-winter for me in my little tub here if that tells you something about how severe our winters are. I would be surprised if the guppies over-wintered though. I think this is roughly 7000 gallons. Any ideas or suggestions?
  18. Daniel
    Michael St.John. My wife wanted to build this house. The only thing I asked for was 'a really big fish tank'. In a way the house was built around the aquarium. Before the walls were filled in a forklift brought the tank inside because once the walls of the house were completed there wouldn't be an easy way to get a large tank into the house. All the plumbing for the big tank is embedded in the concrete slab the rest of the house sits on. Underneath the tank inside the aquarium stand is a heater and a pump. When I don't have discus in the tank I don't run the heater. So the only 2 moving parts on the big tank are lights and an inline heater.
  19. Daniel
    I just watched the Aquarium Co-op "Getting Started with Aquascaping [Live Stream]". It inspired me to see if I could create a planted tank with plants that grow in the soggy spot off of my driveway. I got a shovel and lifted out 2 pieces of boggy soil with plants. You can see the 2 bare spots inside the red circle where I dug. The sand is from my creek so the investment so far is just the fish tank, lights, and sponge filter. I've ID'd the plants and they all ought to grow fine underwater. The plants are Hydrocotyle sp. Eleocharis sp. Alternanthera polygonoides From start to adding water was about 15 minutes, so if this turns out not to work, I am not out much time or money. Can't wait to see what happens with this. Daniel
  20. Daniel
    Yes, the tank is custom. It is 8 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet. This best part about it is that doesn't have a filter. Water comes in from below and exits through a standpipe overflow then out to a little outdoor pond in the backyard. The whole tank changes over 1 or 2 times a week. When needed, typically about once a month I use a Mag-Float to clean the glass. That is all the maintenance required. My Angelfish are Pterophyllum leopoldi. They have been good fish, not picky about food and fabulous parents. The picture above was taken a couple of years ago. The fry in the above picture are the adults in the video. The white hose in the upper left is me siphoning water out of the big tank into another tank with baby discus. Turns out the 500 gallon tank is a excellent source of good quality aged water for my other tanks! AngelFish.mp4
  21. Daniel
    I keep Apistogramma, Discus, Corydoras, Pygmy Sunfish and Angelfish. My favorite tank is a 500 gallon community tank that has several pairs of Angelfish that breed often. The tank is large enough that the fry are able to grow to adults in the tank. The majority of fish in the tank were born in this aquarium and have never been out of the tank or even netted. My goal is to have a very stable tank that doesn't need me to do any maintenance. Daniel
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