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Daniel

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Everything posted by Daniel

  1. Daniel
    Definitely one of my all time favorite angelfish and I think they were hands down my wife's all time favorite fish because they were so low maintenance. I maintained a school of 50 of them in my big aquarium for several years.
  2. Daniel
    Azolla caroliniana is more common here in the Carolinas. 🙂 Azolla has an interesting history and is thought to be responsible for the massive oil and gas deposits underneath the North Pole. Azolla has the same requirements as duckweed, meaning it will grow with little effort your part. There are also 2 other floating plants besides the Azolla in the photo above.
  3. Daniel
    I would feel almost certain to get a pair out of 5 or 6 juvenile angelfish.
  4. Daniel
    @Paul I actually think it was Hwy 70 going East headed into New Bern. Do you know that long straight stretch that goes on for miles just before you get to Hwy 17 outside of New Bern? It was about midway down that stretch. I caught nice natives on both the eastbound and westbound sides. The pygmy sunfish that day were Elassoma zonatum.
  5. Daniel
    The way I read @MatthewZarb's post above was either angelfish or discus. I don't think there would any insurmountable technical problems keeping both in the same large aquarium but I haven't ever had the urge to do it as it would be gilding the lily. One or the other is good, but adding both together doesn't equal twice as good.
  6. Daniel
    @Dnogator you did attach a thumbnail, yay! But it is lot easier to tell what is going on with the fish when you insert a photo into the post. @Lizzie Block has a good post on how to do this:
  7. Daniel
    The chat part of the livestream just isn't my cup of tea. I mainly listen to the livestream while poking around on the forum. Like now.
  8. Daniel
    I love the irony of the shrimp eating the 'fish' food and the fish eating the 'shrimp' food. 🙂
  9. Daniel
    I think it depends on what you want to answer to be. Many aquarist successfully run sumps especially on the saltwater side of the world so sumps clearly serve a useful purpose. But an ever increasing increasing trend in reef aquarium keeping has been to use a macroalgae like Chaetomorpha in a refugium to remove nitrates. As freshwater aquarist we already do that as we have the luxury of growing our nitrate consuming macrophytes (otherwise known as plants) directly in our aquariums without the need to resort to a seperate aquarium (the refugium) to grow nitrate consuming plants. It would be redundant. There is also an element of liking gear. I have plenty of aquarium gear like my Neptune Apex system that I own just because I think it is cool. If running a sump increases your fishkeeping pleasure then sumps are a very good thing.
  10. Daniel
    I used to think of substrate as either/or mutually exclusive options like gravel and root tabs or soil with sand. But after conducting a currently on going trial comparing: gravel with root tabs soil with a dirt cap Eco-Complete I have come to the conclusion that none of these methods is vastly superior to the others and in fact may be complementary. The next time I set up a planted display tank, my plan is to put a sand or Eco-Complete cap over soil and then over time use a moderate amount root tabs to supplement heavy feeders like Sword plants or Val. Clearly this has the potential to explode into a pea soup green mess, but you never know until you try. Given the many thousands of beautiful plants tanks that exist without an under the gravel or sand heater I think it is safe to say it can be done without one.
  11. Daniel
    Yes, there is no external filtration whatsoever. In a way that is not that special. The fish we keep live in unfiltered swamps, creeks, ponds, lakes, and rivers. It likely that the size of these bodies of water plus the way these bodies of water are connected to the ecosystem that they are part of reduces the need for external filtration. As aquarist we often filter for cosmetic reasons or because the fear of doing something 'wrong' in a biological system who foundational principles are new or unfamiliar. Sometimes as aquarist we filter for the feeling of additional control, but the majority of biological filtration in a planted aquarium comes from the interactions of the plants and the commensal bacteria that live on them. It was definitely possible that the big aquarium I setup could have just gone done in flames if I had greatly miscalculated what would happen in a planted aquarium of its size. As it has turned out, the aquarium has been the most stable lowest maintenance aquarium I have ever had. That doesn't mean that my reasoning about filtration in this aquarium was correct because any success could also be due the luck. It does show that it is possible to run a densely planted, reasonably stocked community aquarium without any external filtration.
  12. Daniel
    I wrestled with some of these ideas a while back when thinking about how to design my large aquarium in my livingroom. Ultimately, instead of a separate sump, for all practical purposes like @gardenman suggests I put the sump/refugium inside the aquarium. That is given enough room in the aquarium, I just added more plants. In the end the planted interior of the aquarium is the filter and the only filter. I am not sure how small an aquarium can support this but after more than decade of living with this method of (non)filtration in a larger aquarium I can say I am happy with the results and would make the same choice if given a chance to do this over again.
  13. Daniel
    Did the mollies eat the hydra?
  14. Daniel
    For me it is discus. A small school of brothers and sisters grazing together.
  15. Daniel
    I would wait until it warms up. They are probably not that deep right now, but they are more abundant later and too you want to give them a chance to breed before harvesting them.
  16. Daniel
    This thread has a nice chart of weights for different aquarium sizes in a @MickS77 post about midway down.
  17. Daniel
    They way I have collected them is with a large aquarium net on a pole. I have always found them in shallow still waters in thick floating vegetation. I have found them in a ditch on the side of an Interstate Highway (I-40), underneath a railroad trestle, and at the edge of blackwater slough on the edge of a swamp. Sometimes they are abundant, but later at the same location there are none to be found. They have a similar lifecycle to killifish in that in they wild they are mostly annuals.
  18. Daniel
    Rams would not like a temperature that low. Ram prefer if possible to be in the mid 80s.
  19. Daniel
    Some sort of annelid worm. If it is smallish, maybe tubifex or blackworm. If is a little larger, then a small earthworm.
  20. Daniel
    I have a couple of beefy APC UPS backup units that supplied power during a recent power outage. The result was they didn't last very long. So I can only tell you what didn't work, or that they worked, but given the expense of each unit, they were definitely not the way to go.
  21. Daniel
    Yes, that that is what I have heard also that plants metabolize the ammonia more readily, but in the absence of ammonia, plants use nitrates.
  22. Daniel
    From what I understand it removes nitrates. In my aquariums I use plants to removes nitrates. I probably don't understand the biocenosis anoxic filtration well enough to see its advantages.
  23. Daniel
    Ultraviolet light typically doesn't outright kill the algae, but instead the damages the algal DNA inhibiting its reproduction. Overtime as free floating algae reproduction slows water clarity increases. So as @Tanked says a water change will greatly lessen the amount of algae in the water to begin with thereby by giving quicker results.
  24. Daniel
    Probably safer than standing on it to see if it collapses. 🙂
  25. Daniel
    Does it feel sturdy when you stand on top of it?
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