Jump to content
Watch our video on the rules of this forum.

James Croney

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    51

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Feedback

    0%

 Content Type 

Everything posted by James Croney

  1. James Croney
    Rarely I have come across a fish tank that gives a little tingly-electric feeling when I put my hands in. its especially noticeable on small cuts in the skin. Usually I just replace the heater, and it goes away. This lead me to believe that sometimes the heaters "go bad" and start to leak current into the water. Well, the current can find an easier route to ground thru my fingers than anything else in the glass tank. One has really been throwing me for a loop though. I had changed the heaters multiple times chasing the issue. No heaters, no finger tingling. Put brand new heaters in, I get finger tingles. I check the ground plugs, i check everything I can think to check. Turns out, the people who installed my electrical box put the grounding rod directly thru the sewer drain on the property! Like, they bullseyed it, so that the electrical ground was in current with the sewer water from the house. I imagine the ground rod passed current to the sewer water that then passed current onto the metal pipes that then came back into the tank. Again the 'best ground' to get to was my finger, since the house ground was 'shorted'. I do not know enough about electrical things to understand why that is the case, but its some data I wanted to share with the forum. As a last resort, check your electrical box grounding rods and if they come into contact with anything that comes into contact with the water! Now that its repaired, no current comes to my fingers, even when I have a few cuts on them. For context this is a aquaponics setup outside.
  2. James Croney
    I see the air-powered fish tank decorations all over the internet. And I have tried to google my idea here, but .... the terms overlap so badly i get an ocean of half-related stuff. Could anyone suggest some search terms for me, or mention a product they may have heard of before? I would like to find an air-line powered submersible propeller with a fish-safe cage. In my head, the air line that would normally be hooked up to an air stone feeds a small bubble-driven or slight-pressure-driven mechanism that turns a propeller shaft. The purpose would not be to get air into the water so much as increase flow. As a note, i already have air bubbles with a small gravel filter. So really just want some low-rpm version of a normal tank propeller. Thanks for any thoughts! Also, any other air-powered thing to suggest. I have an extra line in my airline due to some bad planning and need to fill it. LOL
  3. James Croney
    I'm not sure its near consumer technology yet, but I can't help but day dream about a fish tank that doesn't get algae buildup. Article below, but the high level is that they left a glass window underwater for a year and it had no significant buildup or 'gunk' on it. Pretty amazing considering we all know what glass+water+light equals 😄 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b02982 Speaking of, are there any other methods people have come up with besides the handy-dandy magfloat with scraper? Are there like "aquarium oils" that I could treat the glass with to reduce buildup? I haven't seen any that I could trust LOL
  4. James Croney
    https://www.ebay.com/itm/185181577315 So i was looking for some substrate for a small tank, and came across these things. They are twice as expensive as normal gravel substrate... and take forever to ship, but I think I am going to get some and do the vinegar test and stuff on them to see if they are safe for the fish. Maybe i can get some really sparkly ones for a few bucks more... Do does anyone have any suggestions as to what to try to prove their safety in the water long term? This obviously isn't practical for larger tanks, but a small 5-10 gallon tank might be neat.
  5. James Croney
    So it turns out months later that I have a fish tank placed next to my computer monitor. I often leave the monitor on overnight, as at the point I scrape myself away from the keyboard all I do is shuffle into bed. But, this brings me to this thread again... I have a Fluval Plant 3.0 LED Light on a daylight cycle for a 55 gallon with guppies. I began to notice one or two of the fish hover-swimming in the water vertically at night! It only happened when i left the computer monitor on at night, the Fluval light was off/low at night, and took many months before i noticed they were 'confused'. Being curious i messed with it a bit. When i turn off the computer monitor, they snap out of it and correct themselves to swim like normal fish. I didn't think much of it, but then one of the two that was doing it died. ... So i put on a dark screen saver. A few weeks later the other one died. No other guppies of the 20 others in the tank seemed to have felt this way about the weird lighting, just those two. They were part of a trio I got online, but the male never showed this. All the others are younger, born in the tank if that would make a difference. Ive been calling it 'moon confusion' in my head, but there is probably a real name out there somewhere. So it turns out that you can re-orient a fish's 'balance' by messing with the light sources. Seems like a learned behavior of fish who have never seen a light source be anything but "up". So... maybe don't do that to your fish.
  6. James Croney
  7. James Croney
    Tilapia can really kick that tail around when they get scared. Was looking at ways of moving/sexing/inspecting them with less stress. ... But sometimes I don't always end up where I expect on the internet, which brings me to this video. I ... it was one of those things I couldn't not share here.
  8. James Croney
  9. James Croney
  10. James Croney
  11. James Croney
  12. James Croney
    Ahh that's cool for a floating plant! Duckweed is my floating plant of choice. I suppose I could tie it to a coconut bridge or something. ... Can you convert a venus fly trap to fully submersed? I wonder...
  13. James Croney
    I'm looking into my first carpet plant... and I think this one might be the one for me! I heard it was a dense carpet plant, and was sold on the idea when i heard it eats the little Infusoria in the water as a carnivorous plant. I always thought venus fly traps were cool, but they don't grow under water. Ill get a few cultures and see how it goes. My water is also pretty hard (guppies and guppy grass with snails) so Ill see if they have what it takes to survive. 🙂
  14. James Croney
  15. James Croney
    I don't feed my daphnia anything, but they are 'in cycle' -- which means (at least to me) that there is tiny little bits of green algae being produced at about the rate the daphnia are eating it. Due to how they grow i get explosions and drops, but it overall follows the amount of food they can get. Right now its cold for me, so only a few scattered daphnia here and there can be seen. They do like to hide though. In times where my culture is thinner than I would like, I get a 5 gallon bucket and fill it most of the way with water. Add grass from your yard or any dead grassy-like matter. Ive used dried guppy grass to great success. Stir it up and crunch it up, just a handful of grassy stuff. Put it outside in the sun. Add as many daphnia as you want, ive grown them out from as little as 10 or so. They dont take more than a few weeks to have 1000s of babies. -- When you start to notice that there are more daphnia, pour some back into your culture tank, keeping some in the bucket. Top off the bucket with water from your main culture. Seems like a bunch of exta effort, but its free food. so... kinda balances out As far as gut loading, when i catch daphnia I often see little green stripes of what I assume is somewhere between daphnia food and daphnia poop. I think that gives some extra 'free nutrients' to the fish when hey eat them.
  16. James Croney
    Yup yup! Those little ziss airstones are great. Very clever no-clog mechanism. I run that and a USB Nano Air Pump on my little hexagon tank. There is a post somewhere in the forums about it. Its honestly the best airstone I have had. I do wonder where the air intake on the USB Nano Air Pump is though. I can't seem to find it. I suppose that is another topic though. 😄
  17. James Croney
    Spent the last while frustrated and thinking about why my new airstone was only putting out bubbles near the top. I wanted a pretty 'bubble curtain' thing like I see online. 😄 ... Err, but I also wanted to do it for like $4 so i got a long thin single-barb airstone from LFS. A bit of googling later, I found out I might need to soak it in my tank for a day, or as some other guy on the internet said "up to a week for it to be optimum". Soaking my airstone now. Seeing if this helps. Posting here, because I searched for thing like airstone soaking and airstone uneven bubbles etc and didn't find anything. Just adding data to the pile. "go soak your airstone" sounds like a pretty nermy diss. 😄
  18. James Croney
    I had a fun thought, and wanted to share it here. I feel like there could be negative sides to changing the environment so drastically. But I also wonder if anyone has tried. The general idea is to light a tank from the clear bottom, instead of the top. Light coming in from the bottom glass would be the brightest light. Duckweed or some other short rooted floating plant would work to give the illusion of a substrate, and I imagine would look complete with shrimp running across it upsidedown. Plants i think would naturally try to grow towards the light. There is a whole world of 'upside down gardening'. In my head, floated from a string attached to the real bottom. I have seen 'floating rock' setups like this, but these plants would grow on the real bottom of the floating rocks, where the light shines from underneath. For fish, not sure if this was about fish or not. LOL Upside down catfish and some kind of goofy loach maybe. What do we think?
  19. James Croney
    Oh boy, hazards of throwing things in the tank -- I introduced a dragon fly larva! These things love to munch on small fish, and imagine they could seriously injure an adult guppy. I have 4 bigger fry, and I noticed a few more tiny babies! Then... all the babies were gone. Then ... I saw it. It was perched on the side of the aquarium, fat and happy with a smile on its face. I did manage to throw him back into my outside tanks without killing him.
  20. James Croney
    Enough time has passed that I think the tank is doing well now. Well, at least well enough to post some pictures. You can see baby fry in this first picture, hard to focus but there are two in the upper third of the picture, on the edge of the brown background. (The brown thing is a floating betta log) This is the male, or at least a male of that line that contributed to the fry. He is really pretty, but the females are far more stunning, when compared to their own gender. The dwarf baby tears have started to grow out after some melt.I think it will continue to improve and grow. Airstone hanging high, but I've also experimented with it inside the floating beta log to reduce air disturbance for the duckweed. More pictures attached.
  21. James Croney
    Welp I got all the wonderful things for my little desk tank in the mail yesterday. The guppies have taken to it well. I did notice that as the last of the guppy grass was melting away that the fry were all gone. They likely finally ended up eating them I imagine. Not to worry, now both guppies are boxing off as i type this. Ive setup the tank with the plants, but want to wait another day or so before I do pictures to let the small particles settle.
  22. James Croney
    What weird little critters daphnia are! I had read that they have a lot of things that can "switch on" depending on environment like their mating style and egg hatching methods. I had assumed there was nothing that would prevent them from being eaten generally. Spikes may do it though! Hopefully the fish can determine if they are freshly molted somehow, because I imagine they would be soft even if they are spiky then. The source of the daphnia does not contain any fish, so hopefully if spikes are forming in the fish tank like you say it takes a generation (a few days in daphnia time! LOL)
  23. James Croney
    I've had a lot of time to day dream while looking at this tank, because its on my desk. Ive noticed some interesting behavior in the guppies. I see the guppies chase mosquito larva and daphnia and guppy fry, but they chase them differently. The mosquito larva seems to be 'their favorite'. Maybe something about the wriggling of the larva drives them nuts, but they chase them very quickly and accurately and gobble them up. I always try to keep some daphnia in the tank, at least a hundred or so. I don't think my guppies can eat a daphnia magna unless they are small or freshly molted adult. I notice that some daphnia they have started "testing" to see if they are edible I think. The guppy will nip a daphnia, and only sometimes come immediately back and eat it. At first they were sucking them in their mouths and blowing them back out, it seems like that is not the best way to check the tenderness of the daphnia. They have stopped that it seems. I notice that after a few days if I don't add daphnia they will almost all vanish and I don't see excess dead daphnia on the bottom so I imagine they are all being eaten. How they chase after the guppy fry is what surprised me. After seeing how they get the mosqito larva, and interact with the daphnia, I could almost call them lazy when chasing guppy fry. I have seen a big female eat a few few, but when she chased them it was quick like the mosquito larva. But the ones that are left (i have counted 3) are lazily chased. From the looks of it, there will soon be a lot more guppy fry. I'm curious to see if the behavior continues. It could be as simple as how hungry or predatory the guppy felt. Hoping quietly that the guppies are culling themselves, under the right conditions. Oh, i also threw in some "ghost shrimp" from not LFS and they are doing good. I noticed the bio buildup from dead duckweed and stuff was a light sprinke across the bottom and in the guppy grass. These guys should take care of what the guppies dont. I was debating getting some 'fancy shrimp' for my tank, but I'm not sure that I need shrimp. From what I understand, most shrimp are back to dull brown etc in a generation or two. If I could find a strain that was breeding true on color I would enjoy it I think -- But one thing at a time. I also discovered that neon tetras really really don't like high PH and hard water. This is something I should have checked, but getting them from the same place I assumed their water params were the same... I'm not sure its a good idea to keep them together. I thought that would be cool. The tetras didn't.
  24. James Croney
    I purchased these from the Aquarium Coop store online. Not sure I can include a link, but it was a genuine question with a genuine answer and not advertising... so I feel like I can safely answer. 😛 Not exactly sure what the lines on advertisement are around here, other than "don't". So... was waiting for an excuse to say it LOL (yeah, i know they also own the forum, but they aren't my rules...) The daphnia i got on ebay. I had issues getting them to populate the big out door tanks properly, so I put them in a 5 gallon bucket and dumped water from my tank into that bucket, so that some water overflowed from the bucket into the tank. The overflowing water carried some daphnia over and left most of them in the bucket. That over a few weeks and everything was really kicking with little daphnia everywhere. I harvested what could, but the first big die off always happens. Im on my third and i think final round now where the floating-alge-growth to daphnia-reproduction is leveling out so no more wild die offs of daphnia. These thing reproduce like crazy given enough space. The hydroton I got from a local aquaponics store for my outside tanks. That's where I also keep guppy grass and things like that to help purify the water and catch bad things and make them sink. Guppy grass was from a local fish meetup, actually. Tucson has good grass, for guppies. The guppies (living in the good water) are the red dragon trio from Twin City Guppies. The fish arrived and have only had daphnia as food since then. Took them about two days to learn how to eat them, but a little hunger is a great teacher. The duckweed I got from a friend, and have given it to many many friends since then. Duckweed is amazing, and fish eat it, and it comes in three sizes for almost any fish! 😄 Its where they got the idea for pellets Im sure (joke). I did not steal the waterlettuce from home depot, because they said it was not for sale.
  25. James Croney
    Well, after my tilapia nightmare a while back I have left my big tanks full of water and daphnia and some guppy grass to really get all that stuff balanced out. They are outside (tucson arizona), so it does save me a bill this winter for heating all that. From the water come the alge, from the alge come the daphnia, and from the daphnia come the guppies. Well, food chain wise. In plans for the spring i put a 3 something gallon tank on my office desk to breed out guppies and start the fish cycle over again. -- Today I saw little fry swimming around. While I have added guppies to water before and saw more appear, this is the first "up close" experience I have had with the tiniest of fry. I can see why grown guppies would see these fry guys as delicious marshmallows. Hopefully the fry that learn how to hide in some guppy grass will be the strong ones. Currently have a 3.something gallon tank on my desk. It has duckweed and waterlettuce of some variety on top. Guppy grass for low-mid covering, and hydroton (superheated clay pellets) as substrate. Mainly it was a "grab whats in the garden, add water and guppies, mix in daphnia daily" tank. So far the results are pretty good, with some screw ups along the way. Mainly the thing i overlooked coming into a smaller tank environment was that the ph 'style' changes. Outside I will get sometimes even as much as a 1.5 ph swing between dawn and sunset. But the PH in a smaller tank has a harder time 'swinging' back up (less acidic) I think. Some guppies started swimming funny, so I got the test strips out. I had gotten some neat $3 guppies from petsm--err, "not LFS" to make sure I wasn't going to add to potential tragedy by having paid shipping on them if they die. Well, they died. But they taught me that a good pinch of baking soda will help the tank in a few ways, and provide near instant relief for guppies getting "burnt" by people who let their PH get to 6 before they notice the guppies don't look right. I didn't want to just dump a clump of baking soda in there, as crazy ph swings are bad, but i did put in 2gsp (good sized pinches) of baking soda every 12-18 hours or so. This was actually probably more than i should have, but i noticed if i put it in slowly enough for the 'baking soda water' to form on one side, the fish all immediately swam toward it to be in it. So i think there is some truth to the idea of 'it helps'. I had to do this over the next few days, as the ph would come back up to 6 almost daily. Nothing else looked out of place on the test strip, only ph seemed to be stubborn. More daily doses of baking soda. the PH leveled out after about 5 days of this, stays at about 7.4 now, and has a "tiny swing" between morning and night. So, whew, water safety achieved. Id like it to be lower, around 8.2ish as this is better for a few reasons i have planned... I ordered from some place online Dwarf Baby Tears - to carpet the hydroton 2 Marimo Moss balls -- to be furniture on the carpet Wondershell -- because I believe in wonder Easy fry and small fish food, in a convenient squeeze bottle - just in case my fry are more hungry than I anticipate Easy green 'all in one' fertilizer - because I'm sure the plants will need a squirt or two, right now i detect no nitrates. 😕 I can at least go catch "the best" guppies and throw them in this tank to preserve their looks over time. The err, 'fancy breeder box' i guess it is. I put extra daphnia in the tank when i noticed fry. Just to minify their chances of getting eaten. I believe that the guppies do need to eat "some" of the fry as the natural process would allow, but I don't know enough about ethics from the perspective of a fish to know what I am talking about there really. Best I can do is say "they seem to do that" and allow it. I don't want them all to be gobbled up! With the carpeting plant and midrange plants and top floaters I hope that its a good combination for stability. Pictures attached of the tank as it is now. If its not a disaster I will upload it when it gets planted, and when it stabilizes.
×
×
  • Create New...