Biotope Biologist

It greatly depends on the cichlids in question. I had a male convict raised him from a fry. He was a puppy. Just followed everyone around and liked being social. Very curious. He was in with gourami, sunfish, a goldfish, a BN pleco and a chinese algae eater. cichlids have a ton of personality so the best answer to their compatibility is that it depends. You have 2 tanks if they fight separate them. If they get along great!

Looks like a red-headed centipede they are pretty ubiquitous in the western United States. Great hunters when I kept them they were pretty prolific spider hunters. I believe they will also eat isopods or tiny crickets.

They do this when they are breeding or displaying for breeding. My WCMM have produced 3 batches of fry for me and I have 2 males. The two males will fight for territory but really they just flare their fins and posture. Then the school will split into two groups and about 3-4 weeks later there are baby WCMM swimming around. They do like current but you have to train them. When I had them in a 12g the current was too much for them so I bought a tiny hygger wavemaker and turned it all the way down. As they grew older and I grew more confident in their swimming ability I increased the speed. Now they are at max speed and they surf pretty much all day.

Emperors can hold their own in more rambunctious tanks including bigger tetra characins so the danio aren’t an issue at all just make sure everyone gets enough food Pretty much all danio are very food motivated so slower less aggressive fish can go hungry sometimes

Yeah archerfish need to have a group. There will be some infighting at first but the aggression should go away after awhile. Especially if you have had 1 and now have 3. I would add a few more roughly the same age and you need good sight breaks in the tank. They are incredibly intelligent fish and social like piranha they will need to establish order amongst the ranks. So to speak

My profile pic? Or are you asking about the rainbowfish that want their picture taken desperately in the foreground of @mynameisnobody’s shots?

My ramshorn snails wrap their bodies around a bunch and parachute down to the bottom of the tank to graze on it, it’s pretty cute! Also the astronauts probably:

I haven’t seen anything like that before kinda looks like that wood is coming back to life

Looks like it! We have that species in Washington fun and easy one to culture

It looks like a slice of mango that grew fins. I am mad and I will be writing a strongly worded letter to whomever is in charge of such dealings

I used great stuff black for my hollow island for my gobies. Great stuff pond and stone is a ripoff. It’s $4 more just because it’s marketed towards aquarists. Great stuff has been used to fill out zoo and aquarium scapes for decades it is non toxic and doesn’t break down in water. It’s hydrophobic as it cures as well. I made a ‘Z’ out of PVC black 3” dia pipe then layed 1 layer of foam over it and started setting the stones. Then once the great stuff cures I use a razor blade to carve it to match the rest of the stone. After a year it’s completely unrecognizable from other stone as algae has taken hold. The whole island weighs about 20# Before: After:

Edit: talking about the shimmery spots? Looks as if those scales are dulling with age? Doesn’t look like ich or any fungal infection.

They are rhabdocoela most likely. Harmless detritivores that eat waste. They usually come out of the soil at night but sometimes they will come out during the day. If you had fish theyd make a great snack but as is they are just a clean-up crew for your turtle

You can but I would get either a canister or a sump. Fluval FX series are good and readily available otherwise I like Eheim and Aquatop. I will always preach the word of the sump even if few listen. It really is so easy and customizable, not to mention cheap.

@Fish Folk has a tank with them or has in the past I am pretty sure

Larger gudgeons are pretty rare. I doubt you will have much luck finding someone with experience with them. The purple spot gudgeon appears to be the easiest fish to track down on online retailers and might be your best bet. The other two require more riverine style setups which I have if you want some ideas. I have a 50g lowboy with rhinogobies

Fish in brackish environments possess remarkable features in their gills that allows them to change their gill function sometimes as quickly as 30 minutes! So you shouldn’t shock them either way but if you have plants it’s best to add salt gradually. They don’t adapt as quickly as fish. As for marine salt 1.005 is not alot of salt by volume but also salt doesn’t expire so however much you want to buy at the time is the correct answer. There are some new scientific articles that suggest that quite a few species of brackish puffers can actually be found in full marine and that their gill structure seems to be able to change to look more like their reef inhabiting cousins. Although I believe the attempts to do this in captivity have been relatively unsuccessful. Unsure as to why that is. Fascinating stuff regardless.

I also have a bare bones sump. My cheap pump from amazon started pumping inconsistently so I upgraded to a Nyos Viper 2.0 I believe they are new to the market. Expensive for what it is, but my water level in my sump hasn’t moved at all yet. And it is so quiet. Nothing beats a sump. And they aren’t as complicated as the reefers make them out to be. Mine is refugium style and I have used it to grow out WCMM fry 3x now. It was going to be a shrimp grow out as a food source for my gobies but only one actively hunts them 😅

I had mine in a 55g long for a couple years. She reached about 9” pretty quick. It takes them awhile to hit their 1st growth spurts in my experience. Eventually you will need a 125+ but you can gradually work your way up to that as the fish grow They are messy but a canister filter is more than capable of keeping up. Just don’t keep any plants with them you like, because they are the cows of the underwater world. I lost a $100 anubias that was over 10 years old to her in a matter of months 🥹 along with duckweed they really like grazing on water lettuce and lily pads.

There isn’t much publications on how to accurately differentiate. There may be dorsal ray counts or some other but for right now we can use typical patterns. Your gobies have 3 lateral bars rather than 4. Which means you most likely have B. doriae or B. sabanus the most commonly traded bumblebee goby. Both of which are freshwater fish that can be found in low-end brackish waters in the mangrove swamps of the upper reaches of the tidal flats and river. I believe that the whole genus is capable of low end salt tolerance but some are only found in freshwater. Either way I remember reading that their salt tolerance is low at a maximum of 1.005. Good luck! Update us with pics of the puffers! Personally I have decided to wait to make an intertidal tank. I want to only have 1 display tank at a time to really appreciate and enjoy 1 biotope at a time.

You will still want to use marine salt. Marine salt contains a mixture of trace elements along with salt and there really is no substitute. It depends on what level of brackish water you intend to go. Bumblebee gobies are low level brackish at a maximum of 1.005 I believe which is a threshold that allows a couple plants such as java moss, sedge, and mangrove. This salinity is the minimum I would keep them at. Mollies are a maybe. They are quite good dither fish for fin nipping fish but may have to be separated if the puffer is a menace. I intended to keep my figure 8 mid-brackish. About 1.008-1.015 as this is the salinity you tend to encounter in river deltas and opens you to more intertidal species. Some soft corals, anemones, gobies, damselfish, and crustacean enjoy this environment. No plants in this environment except the mangrove so your greenery would be solely macroalgae. For low-end brackish id setup the tank more like a freshwater tank just add marine salt and be aware most plants will melt in these conditions. For mid to high brackish setup is more akin to a saltwater tank. Diet is a mix of crustacean preferably in the shell and worms.

Yeah morays can become fussy eaters at time. Just watch for weight loss or a sunken belly. I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless the above signs emerge. In the wild they can go months without consuming anything.

It’s most likely blood. When fish are in the embryonic stage they lack hemoglobin. It varies from fish to fish as to when they start developing hemoglobin Nice shots though!

I can’t think of any other bugs! If you can find wooly caterpillars they are fun to raise but they will eat you out of house and home.

3 month updates seem to be my regular now! 😅 My pump is malfunctioning in that it now pumps extremely inconsistent amounts of water. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Nyos Viper 2.0 pump. It is supposedly the quietest sump pump on the market at this size. It has large rubber feet instead of suction cups and a dial that controls the rotation of the impeller rather than gating the intake. Supposedly this means a far more accurate and consistent GPH for my fish friends. This also meant I had to upgrade the hosing to 5/8” from 1/2” so I should be able to run the pump closer to its maximum at 520gph. As long as it doesn’t effect the whiteclouds swimming ability. They enjoy current surfing so it shouldn’t be an issue. But I do have babies in the display to worry about. With the 5/8” drain I needed a new gate valve so I went with a marine grade plastic one. Thats it! I set it up this morning before work so I will update in the coming days and write up a review of this pump. Fish are all still doing great and once I get back from FL I will be adding 10 white cloud, some fancier neocardinias and a small school of hillstream loaches