Ben_RF

Cory! You are the man!

Since my water is not to far off from yours, here are some fun suggestions: 1. Mystery Snails!!! Snails in general often do great. Snails tend to do exceptionally well in hard water. 2. African Dwarf Frogs - Supposedly the water needs to be softer, however, I have kept them for years and bred them many times. 3. Live bearers!!! Most live bearers do exceptionally well in hard water. 4. Celestial Pearl Danios? This may be to early for me to recommended, but so far they are doing really well in my water. 5. Ghost shrimp? There are so many types of ghost shrimp out there, and many come from brackish or hard water areas.

My water is 7.5~ with 10-11 gh and 21 kh. Have grown plants in my water for years and have kept a wide assortment of fish in it since the 1980s. You definitely do have options.

You guys are amazing. Some great ideas here. Thank you!

Hey you wonderful folks, If you were going to scape a 5g aquarium for a betta and were to pick plants from Aquarium Co Op. What plants would you choose? I am working on setting up a new tank for a dear friend to have her first fish buddy. I do have about 8.8 lbs of fluval shrimp stratum on hand I was thinking of using. Not only because our water tends to be hard here, but because I just want to get rid of it as it has been under my bed for about two years. The color is brown. I also have quiet a bit of dragon stone available to be used also, mostly brown in color. So that should make up the hardscape. I will be getting her a co op sponge filter. So with all that being said how would you imagine an aquarium with fluval stratum and dragon stone? What plants would you go with for a complete noob that are available on the Co Op website 🙂 I know its not the biggest selection but I like spending my money with them. I am hoping to keep plant cost under $150. Plants that I have readily on hand that I am overflowing with and can use include: water lettuce, red floaters, frog bit, dwarf sagitteria, and pogo. oct. And I am sort of leaning towards crypts to be perfectly honest too. Just fyi.

And honestly I think the key to make it work is making sure there are tons of shrimp hides. In these tanks I have made sure to do rock piles and underneath the rock piles I had chollo wood for them to tunnel through.

I have had luck in the past with pygmy cories. I am experimenting with Celestial Pearl Danios at the moment and things seem to be going well.

I am so sorry to hear that @Jodi, liquid carbon ( glutaraldehyde ) is often absorbed quickly by ADF. Even small amounts of it will often lead to organ failure for ADF.

Thinking about the matter, you are cutting off the air when you are harvesting? Yes? No? And providing time for the eggs to settle from the artemi? At least like 5 minutes? With a light source near the bottom to draw their attention?

So how do you raise your aquarium lights? I am looking for some better ideas than taking old fish food containers (I have been using xtreme) to lift them higher to provide a better light spread. Are there mounts you can buy for rimmed tanks that allow you to raise them?

One thing you may wish to consider is using a catalytic carbon block. They run about $20 - $35 for one that fits a garden hose or rv inlet.

Jeez folks they only get as big as their tanks.... (queue incredible evil laughter) #FishKeepingMyths But in all seriousness, I would not mind many of these fish just disappearing out of most pet stores and become specialty fish you have to try to find.

I would encourage you just not to disturb that area, at all, you put it in for at least four to six months as to avoid disrupting and letting a pellet float up. Even after that time osmocote pellets may still float up but will be primarily depleted. I don't know if they still might be deadly or toxic at that point if swallowed by a fish.

If you are lazy like me, I just squeeze the root tabs to get the air out. They look crinkled, but it seems to work.

With all that being said, I would highly recommend using the Aquarium Co Op root tabs. They are comparable to many of the best that are out there; exceeding in some areas and lacking in others. They are a little hard to stay down, but this can be easily resolved with either squeezing them to get all the air out or poking a hole into capsule. Sometimes they will work there way back up, but the good news is the dirt/minerals has caused no fish or shrimp fatalities for me yet. And there might be a little bit of cloudiness around the spot if the stuff comes loose, but the good news it quickly settles to the top of the substrate. Save yourself money and buy it in bulk too. Root tabs in most cases last a really long time. There are somethings like Amazon swords that will devour them; but for most I only add a root tab once a month or once every other month per area it is serving (2" to 3" radius). So yeah, for me, the Co Op root tabs were the way to go after years of trying to work out a good DIY root tab.

Like many of us, I tried for a number of years to use DIY Root Tabs. I didn't mind taking the time out to make them. Thing is, most of the DIY root tabs I made over the years all had major issues. While many of the root tabs that I did make did ok, the ones that I had the most nightmarish problems with were the ones made with osmocote. Let me list the issues that I had using DIY osmocote. 1. They are buoyant and once the gel capsule dissolves will begin to work itself up through most types of substrates. I found this particularly problematic with regular aquarium gravel, flourite, and eco-complete. I found I had the problem the least with sand IF it was pushed atleast 2" or more down. 2. If a single pellet of osmocote comes loose, like say you are pressing a new root tab down 1 to 2 months latter, it may become fish food. This has happened to me and has killed more than one fish. 3. Ammonia is a big part of osmocote. If your substrate is not very compact and/or gets flow, then you will often see ammonia in your water supply. I battled for over a year in one of my aquariums with ammonia. Ultimately, I had to rip out all the substrate and replace it to get it to go away. It was linked to the osmocote. I tried again in some other tanks and found I had issues battling ammonia as linked to the 4. Plants seem to respond better to a lot of other DIY and store bought root tabs better. 5.The DIY root tabs are hard to keep down in your substrate inititally when in gel capsule form. Unlike other gel capsules, if you try to squeeze these or somehow poke a hole in them to help them sink, the osmocote pellets tend to come out which can kill your fish through poisoning. 6. I am thinking it is because of the ammonia, but both times I used these with shrimp they completely wiped out the colony.

@Cory , by itself yes the coop was the most expensive; however, when considering you often get two or three wendtii crypts from your pots, the actual cost comes into being about the same as the other vendors I used or less. And for sure the quality you offered far surpassed the competition.

If this is a violation of the community guidelines, please remove this post. Typically, I buy most my plants from Aquarium Co Op online because of the quality and customer support. However, with the recent edition of my 90 gallon aquarium, I thought I would check out other places. So all together I bought wendtii crypts from 6 stores from youtube, 5 stores from TikTok, and 6 stores from ebay. Man, y'all, I got to tell you something. Aquarium Co-Op has it going on. The quality and size you get from the Co Op for their wendtii crypts dominates hard everybody that I compared them too. The only ones that came close were those who had TikTok channels selling the crypts out of their own tanks. Most wendtii crypts I have bought from the Co Op also tend to be more than just one, and usually have one to two babies coming off the main The baby plants were on average the size of most of the wendtii crypts that I received from everyone. Also I think it is worth mentioning that nearly all of the youtube stores and all of the ebay stores sent fully uncoverted wendtii crypts. Where as the hobbist from TikTok sold converted wendtii crypts. Something else that made me a bit puzzled with this whole thing is that a lot of these stores from youtube and ebay sent wendtii crypts that looked near identicial in every which way, including the little bags they were packed in. I almost wonder if they didn't buy it from one place and immediately repackage it for sell. Something else that I have been a bit surprised about is how little melt I get from the wendtii crypts from the Co Op in comparison to everyone else that I bought from. I can't really explain this one as I have fairly hard water. Anyhow, I just wanted to write this post to brag on Aquarium Co Op for a bit. So yes, I did spend a bit of money to satisify my curiosity in wanting to know how is the Co Op in comparison to others. And I am happy to say the Co Op is amazing and I regret that I didn't buy all my crypts from them. I would have been much better served if I did. Plus I could have added to my sticker collection 🙂 Anyhow this little mini experiment has for sure helped to solidify my trust in the Co Op. So y'all if you are thinking of getting crypts, get them from the Co Op. Based on my experience they dominate the competition.

@Cory, even if its not for the anniversary, doing a question/answer coming primarily out of the forum could be a great way to drive traffic here 🙂 Fresh faces/avatars are always a great thing 🙂 .

What type of floating plants and how did you acquire them? Also did they remain fully under light? Often floating plants require a bit of light.

🙂 I would be down for celebrating 🙂 as it will also be the day of my 40th birthday too 🙂

1. 100% Natural Aquarium Store [Tour[ 2. You Never Seen This Before [Tour] - Goliad Farms Tour? 3. China Aquarium Fish Market [Tour] 4. Don't Miss These Signs in Your Tank 5. Planted Aquarium Lighting

Oh my goodness. @Cory is buying Fluval ==>NOW<== I guess @Cory be trippin

One Saturday afternoon, I decided to take a nap. At that time (and well pretty much always) I kept a hexagon tank next to my bed. I go to sleep only to wakeup to water splashing on my face. As I opened my eyes, low and behold a gourami was laying on my pillow. He apparently had decided to jump out of the tank. And yes, he made it out fine as I was able to put him back into the tank. Still don't know why he jumped, for the rest of his life he would never jump again.

While doing my quarterly gravel vac on my planted 35g tank, I found over a dozen juvenile panda corydoras under a set of rock piles. Absolutely excited in one hand but now not sure what I am going to do with all these panda cories as I have no LFS/LPS that will even take them for free once grown (maybe they are grown enough now they are about 1/2 the size of an adult).