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Daniel

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Everything posted by Daniel

  1. Daniel
    I live 3 hours away now near Chapel Hill, NC. Back in 1984 when I met my wife we lived very close to Brevard, NC at the research gardens for the Mother Earth News magazine where we both worked as gardeners. It is a very pretty area indeed!
  2. Daniel
    Keeping small fish like bettas or pygmy sunfish in small containers such as 1- 2 gallons containers works pretty well as both fish come from vegetation choked still waters. A small number of small fish doesn't even require a filter other than plants. Here is what @Mikey Walnuts is doing: It is a different story with goldfish as they are definitely not small fish. A small container is not a good idea with a goldfish.
  3. Daniel
    Oh what modern times we live in. Back in my day a mated pair was a mated pair and that was it. These days there just seems to be declining moral standards amongst discus with a 'my way or the highway' approach that makes a pair bond disposable. Next thing you know discus will be no better than seahorses and their notable wicked ways.
  4. Daniel
    Yes, the mollies will definitely view eggs and fry as particularly tasty snacks. Green water is either easy or hard, some people can't get rid of it and some people can't make it. What work for me is lots of light and lots of nitrogen. Fish poop seems to be one of the better sources of food for green water.
  5. Daniel
    @MickS77had a post on this earlier:
  6. Daniel
    I doubt it. If there turns out to be eggs and then subsequent fry, now is a good time to start thinking about what to feed. It has been a couple a decades since I bred paradise fish but my memory was they were too small to eat baby brine shrimp at first. Green, cloudy microbe filled water is a good first food.
  7. Daniel
    Despite what I said earlier, you can have too many plants when you have so many floating plants that the floating plants block light from reaching the lower down plants. Your tanks are shallow so the light doesn't have far to penetrate so you will always be walking a fine line between too much and too little light. It is probably time to add fish if you are ready, but be ready for increased nutrients and therefore possibly some increase in algae. Bettas would not only not have a hard time swimming around in your plant filled nano tanks, they would positively love it. Bettas are native to plant choked ditches and sloughs in the southeastern most part of Asia so your aquariums are perfect. I am starting to get some brown diatom algae in the 3 aquariums I just setup. I think I am going to dial back the light a little bit and see what happens. You tanks look great!
  8. Daniel
    Looks like a possible bubble nest to me. Do you see the male hanging out near the bubble nest?
  9. Daniel
    Posting pictures on the forum is straight forward, you just include them as an attachment in your post. @Lizzie Block block has an excellent tutorial here.
  10. Daniel
    I know it seems like I have heard that also. I think it is in regards to cut flowers, but I don't remember why that helps cut flowers. I know with grafting fruit trees you cut at an angle to maximize the surface area of the graft (and it also provides better support). Maybe surface area is also the explanation for cutting at angle with cut flowers. I think the best thing you can do when cutting a plant's leaf or stem is to cut with the sharpest, cleanest cutting tool possible. I would use an extremely sharp blade as scissors are rather blunt and crush as much as they cut. It is the same as your skin. Would you rather have a laceration that was a clean sharp cut, or a jagged torn wound with crushing?
  11. Daniel
    There have been some I couldn't get to spawn, notably for me Heckel discus, but I can't think of any I could not keep alive.
  12. Daniel
    I kept them about 10 years ago. They are really cool. My memory was that they were picky eaters but otherwise easy to keep. I don't remember breeding them. If I did I don't remember it. I think they would do very well in the type of aquariums you keep that is small, natural, plenty of cover.
  13. Daniel
    I liked your explanation better. It was short, direct and to the point.
  14. Daniel
    I would not be too concerned about the shrimp, but I would more concerned about him. If he feels bad I doubt he will eat any shrimp and at least he will have a chance to recover. If he feels well enough to chase shrimp, then good news! He is on the road to recovery. I would move him to the shrimp tank.
  15. Daniel
    I don't know the answer but I do have a background in Botany so this is only a guess but it is an educated guess. When you look at plant cells under a microscope the most prominent feature is a central vacuole. One of its main roles is to help maintain turgor pressure or water/gas balance. When we slice through a plant leaf, we tear apart hundreds or more of plant cell walls and central vacuoles. That sudden loss of pressure results in an escape of fluids and gases from the plant leaf. We don't see the fluids, but we see the gases. It is the same reason we bleed. We have a pressured plumbing system and if you cut it our internal fluids escape. And just like with bleeding, once the wound has had a little bit of time to repair itself, the escape of internal gases ceases.
  16. Daniel
    I just did a couple test for ammonia in one of my aquariums. Test 1 was the API ammonia test. This test measures total ammonia or NH3 + NH4. As you can see the result was 1 part per million total ammonia. pH about 7.5 I then repeated the test with a Seneye monitor that only measures NH3, the toxic form of ammonia. The result was 0.177 parts per million NH3 But just to be sure, I measured again with a completely different Seneye monitor. The reading on the Felix was 0.168 parts per million NH3 If all these test are accurate then there is 1.0 - 0.173 = 0.827 ppm non-toxic ammonia and 0.173 toxic ammonia. Checking the pH. I see the Felix pH's 7.37 and 7.4 and the the Apex pH is 7.61. So a comfortable mid 7 ish on the pH. The fish in the aquarium are bright and happy and have good appetites. If there were1 ppm toxic ammonia in the aquarium right now the fish likely would show at least some distress. 0.173 toxic ammonia isn't chicken feed either. I suspect this tank is 'cycling' or establishing colonies of beneficial bacteria as I type. The tank has been running for a week and fish were introduced as soon as it had water and plants in it.
  17. Daniel
    The API tests are decent quality. I think they test for total ammonia. With a pH of around 7.5 you could have a fair amount of ammonia but most of it would be non-toxic and only a little of it would be the toxic kind. The danger would be if your pH went up then the amount of bad ammonia would increase. Are the fish doing okay? I always think that how the fish are doing is the most sensitive and accurate test.
  18. Daniel
    Do you know your pH? If so what is your pH?
  19. Daniel
    I really should do something different. Sometimes I feel like I doing something different, but if I am honest with myself it turns out I am just breeding Cichlids (or pygmy sunfish, which are essentially cichlids, though not technically) again. However, I did try something new recently after someone, @RovingGinger maybe mentioned them on the forum and that was Sparkling Gouramis. They turned out to be perky, inquisitive, smart and fun and even if they breed, you have plenty of room as they are very compact and the adults and fry can coexist mostly (kind of like livebearers and their fry, many are eaten but some survive). I thought Borellis were easy to keep and you may not even need a heater with them. Whatever you, do something you haven't done before.
  20. Daniel
    Which test did you use? API?
  21. Daniel
    Wow! I'd say you can't go wrong with any of those. My first reaction is do the Apistos. Spawning Apistos is so much fun, as is raising the babies. On second thought, spawning Apistos is old hat. Take the road slightly less traveled and do the Corydoras instead. Still a lot of fun and just a tiny bit more of a challenge. But wait! I have never bred tetras (intentionally). Forget doing the same old same old. Break out of the box and try breeding tetras. If that turns out to be fun, there is a million of them. And personally I have never even kept any of the L numbers. That isn't the road less traveled, it is the road never traveled for me. But the Apistos would cool....
  22. Daniel
    The koi in my summer pond did a good job on eating dragonfly larva but a poor job on eating baby rice fish. The result was a population explosion of baby rice fish.
  23. Daniel
    You often see something like, "my fish are dying because of a fungal infection". I suspect it is the other way around. That is, "your fish are dying, and that is why they have a fungal infection. With the exception of a few diseases like ich which can spread rapidly when you see that most of the fish in an aquarium are sick, it is because of poor environmental conditions. It is useful to ask why many times. Something like: Why are my fish lethargic? Answer: My fish have a fungal infection. Why do my fish have a fungal infection? Answer: My fish's immune systems were compromised and this led to a fungal infection that normally would have been warded off. Why were my fish's immune systems compromised? Answer: Poor environmental conditions. Why do I have poor environmental conditions? Answer: Now there is the real mystery, because when the parameters were measured they were "all perfect". Hmm...everything is perfect and yet the fish are sick? I think it is all too easy sometimes to confuse the cause (environment) with the effect (sick fish).
  24. Daniel
    This underwater walking stick of the genus Ranatra is just too good not to revisit. As of now I am promoting him from 'Critter' to 'Favored Invertebrate'.
  25. Daniel
    You cannot be too rich, have too much memory in your computer, or have too many plants. 🙂
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