Daniel

I am going to give you a 2 part answer. I bet it does, algae is always there. But, I certainly don't see any.

Water sprite is a fern, but you can trim off whatever you would like, the rest of the plant will not die back. To promote aerial growth, just let it float. Any new leaves will unfurl up into the air with no need to drape over anything. Here is one my floating ones (growing in a patch of duckweed 🙂). This is the narrow leaf variety, there is also a broad leaf variety.

Once I had just bare naked garden soil as a substrate with no cap. It took a couple weeks to clear. Eventually (like at 6 weeks) if you disturbed the soil it would cloud up for 1 hour and then go back to clear. So even without a cap and even with disturbance the tank will stay clear if you have patience. Most people choose a thin gravel or sand cap for that very reason, because it helps at first and helps a little bit in the long run. But in the longest run it doesn't make that much of a difference.

She can. I used have Alexa to do water changes. But just like the cup conveniently already placed under the faucet, my system was already automated and all I had to do to enable Alexa was put a smart switch on the main water pump. The best Alexa thing I have done so far other than lights was to follow @Bill Smith's advice and get an Alexa enabled iLonda automatic feeder for the discus tank. It is very hard to get to the top of the aquarium to drop in fish food by hand. But now I just ask Alexa to do it whenever I think about it.

I think if you combine @Streetwise's theory and practice with @TheDukeAnumber1's art and ignorance you pretty much sum up aquarium fish keeping.

I have never seen a female betta make a bubble nest, but I have seen them semi-tend a nest until the male chased them off. Betta eggs are a milky white and fairly large for egg layer eggs. Usually the eggs hatch in 2 - 3 days. Have any of them hatched? Typically when breeding bettas, you move the female post spawning so that the male can tend the nest. Also I am not totally sure I followed the timeline you laid out above. It is early morning and I haven't had my coffee yet.🙂

Although I bet there are some beneficial bacteria blowing in the wind at all times, I suspect the ones important in our nitrogen cycle like Nitraspina, Nitrospinacacae, and Nitrospria bacteria come into our aquariums, on the plants, fish, and fish water that we introduce to new aquariums. I bet they are on our hands as all humans are covered with a film of mostly helpful bacteria on the outside. They live in soil, water and almost any moist surface. They hibernate when dried so could possibly be a part of any dust particle blowing in the wind. And it only takes one and the growth is exponential. It is a bacterial world out there and we are just a minor part of it. In some ways the question should be, where don't they come from? They are pretty much everywhere all the time. When I 'cycle' an aquarium, I usually just throw in some hornwort at the time I introduce the fish. Beneficial bacteria prefer the leaves of plants (like hornwort) to any other surface because plants, unlike gravel or plastic, provide the oxygen and organic carbon the beneficial bacteria need to live an reproduce. I don't doubt that fishless cycling and no seeded media work, it is just a question of long does it take to get going.

Okay, I was showing off. And I only sound like I know what I am talking about. You should discount at least half of what I say. Just because something is said confidently doesn't make it true. And I can't even juggle one ball 🤪 I think I am like @RovingGinger. When I get into hobby, I go whole hog and then burn out. And then I pick up another hobby. I admire someone who can do something for a long time and get a deep knowledge that I miss because I keep switching around. After a while I come back to the original hobby and pick up where I left off. Sometimes I learn something from the other hobbies that bleeds over into the current one. The recent biology binge upped my chemistry game a bit which is helping me now with fish. I admire someone like @akconklin who can play music, contributes her time a church, and takes care of family including a special needs child. And she still has time for a nice aquarium with about bazillion guppies in it! I am not so good at the selfless giving part.

My wife, who is a saint, participates in my biology hobby of the day. Before fish it was synthetic biology. We created novel promoters and inserted them into the genes of E. coli to see which sequence worked the best in DNA synthesis. Sharp eyed readers will recognize these as same tool chests now holding 40 gallon breeders. I couldn't do it without her help. This experiment didn't yield what we wanted, so we just did it again. 🙂

@TheDukeAnumber1 Does that mean he is CITES red listed? We may have to put him in a conservation breeding program.

Lizzie Block had a good post explaining how to upload a video to the forum. Spoiler alert: upload the video to YouTube and then link it in your post.

In the dirted tank vs. EcoComplete vs. Normal aquarium gravel project I am using 3 small Aqueon heaters. Based on the recommendations of the heater packaging, presumably I would want 2, 100 watt heater for each aquarium. My central heating is setting to 69 °F and my room temperature (at least in the morning) is 69.8 °F The theory I am using is this: since the 10 cent bi-metal thermostat is the weakest link in my heater, the least number of times the heater has to go on and off will provide the least chance of the thermostat fusing and failing in the on position. I have no idea if this is true. I could have this completely backwards and if this is true, what @LadyoftheLake suggest above would be a better way to go. What I installed is an Aqueon 50 watt heater in each aquarium. Each heater is set to 80 °F. All the heaters are plugged into and controlled by a Neptune Apex controller that turns each heater on if the temperature falls below 77 °F and turns each heater off if the temperature rises above 78 °F. This is the result so far for the 3 tanks The temperatures have never fallen below 74 °F and never reached 78 °F. Because they are undersized, from the moment I plugged them in, they have never turned off even once. It takes everything thing they have trying to reach 78 °F. The tanks are coolest in the morning and warmest in the evening all within a comfortable acceptable range averaging about 76 °F. I don't know whether I am frying these heaters by making them run constantly or extending their lives by never using their thermostats.

I had a similar problem. Like your experience, my biggest piece just barely wanted to float. Necessity being of invention, I placed a couple of my biggest rocks over its 'roots' and it has been in place ever since. So the design isn't all art, sometimes the constraint is mechanical and you just have to accept it and design from there.

@Irene I think @Adsfm_joe actually successfully executed the super rare 'triple island' if you count the one in the right corner.😉 If that is a first effort, whatever is coming next will look really good.

I love the big rocks! They are way underutilized. But you asked for it, so here it comes. The big vertical is a perfect opportunity for 'rule of thirds' so move it just a bit to the left so it isn't so centered. Edit the big rocks some (remove some). What looks more natural is 1 or 2 big rocks together surrounded by 8 - 10 medium rocks, and those medium rocks are surrounded by 20 - 50 small rocks. Think about how a fractal works. Or think about this way, how many mediums until the weight is the same as the big one. How many smalls until their weight is as much as the big ones? You can have big rocks on both sides, just not so many, and they need to be balanced by ever increasing smaller sizes. The hardest part of any art is the removing. In video editing is called 'killing your babies'. You get so attached to something you like and worked hard on that it is difficult to leave it on the cutting room floor. But in the end, less is more.

Doh! I forgot about convenience! What is more valuable than our time? If I could invent an automatic feeder that would reliably deliver frozen fish food cubes and this feeder could go for a week or two without reloading...I could retire from beekeeping!

Mmm...I think I would be tempted to eat those!

I have kept male betta fraternities in the past when I was breeding a lot of bettas. In my experience, you can put 50 young male bettas in a 10 gallon aquarium and there will not be any serious fighting, just a few nipped fins. The reason a male betta fraternity works is that a territory or even any personal space is impossible and the signal for aggression is so overwhelming that the aggression response disappears. So something like this is probably what allows a female betta sorority to exist. But I bet the genetics or 'personality' of the females also matter. Even so having raised thousands of bettas, I would not be inclined to put a handful of mature female bettas in one tank unless I was willing to call off the experiment the moment serious aggression broke out. It would seem like a tricky thing to pull off (it is possible to get this to work as some people have success, but I bet this is a real crapshoot). Other than intense crowding, the most import factor is room for retreat and sufficient cover. If the picked on fish can run away, and then run away some more and become hidden from the aggressor then it might work.

Distance is not the most important concern when it comes to shipping fish. I live in North Carolina and I have purchased fish from Washington State and California and they have arrived in just as good shape as fish from sellers 1 state over from me. Washington State is 2700 hundreds miles away from if I took I-90. And if you are concerned about how long the fish will be in the shipping process, then overnight is overnight no matter where the seller is located. What is more important than the distance of the seller is the quality and experience of the seller.

Agreed, in my house the aquarium with the least gadgets is definitely the easiest to maintain and at least as much fun as any other aquarium.

Cute little freshwater anemones, right? 😉

One of the things I have learned from doing the 1930s Historically Accurate Planted aquarium is that a simple planted aquarium with no filters, heaters, airstones or lights works surprisingly well if you set it front of window in a warm house (and don't stock it too heavily). The items that you really need or would be nice to have in order of importance are: You really have to have a way to warm the tank in a cool house (unless you are keeping natives or goldfish or White Clouds or rice fish), and a modern aquarium heater is less expensive and more comfortable than living in a greenhouse. Note that if you have a bazillion aquariums though, it is better to heat the room. Once you have a heater, it is nice to have an airstone and a pump to circulate the water. It is also good for the plants and the beneficial bacteria that live on the surface of the plant's leaves to have the water circulating, but you could live without this, unlike a heater. Artificial lighting is nice to have because in the winter the days are short and if you want to look at the aquarium in the early morning or at night, you need artificial light. The plants grow just fine with sunlight only. But I want to look the aquarium when I want to, not just when the sun is up. On the other hand, I have an aquarium stocked with monitoring gadgets that cost more than the used 2012 Suzuki SX3 automobile I just bought (admittedly I did get a good deal on the car). So I guess it just depends on what you want. Everything beyond the basics either does the job a little better or is fun to own or both. A sponge filter pretty much does the job of a canister filter (but you cannot switch media in a sponge filter) but canister filters can do specialized tasks and potentially handle bigger jobs. Plants do the same biological filtration as sponge filter but without the mechanical filtration you get with a sponge filter. Tetra strips are way, way less expensive that electronic probes and such and the Tetra strip give results that pretty much/roughly agree with the presumably more accurate numbers from the probes. In fact the Tetra strips measure important parameters that like nitrate that are not usually measured by probes. But the probes and the data you can collect with them are their on sort of joy (and can even automatically implement corrective algorithms if something goes awry) And if you like that sort of stuff, it is easily worth the expense. I am sure some complications comes from not knowing what is really needed or why or maybe it just a personality type, but mostly I think we make the hobby as complicated as we desire or can afford.

I would leave them in the water especially if that is where the plant put them.

@Hobbit I too have no intention of buying anything, but I feel nervous...like I might buy something.

4 kinds of fish, 2 kinds of snail, 2 kinds of shrimp. I think it is the shrimp I am counting twice. There is the cherry shrimp and then some other kind of shrimp, right? My second shrimp might not be a shrimp. It is just barely above the lower left snail.