Biotope Biologist

February 1

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

January 30

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.

January 30

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

January 30

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

January 29

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.

January 29

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 😅

January 29

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.

January 29

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.

January 28

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.

January 27

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.

January 27

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!

January 27

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.

January 23

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

January 22

I like to grow emergent plants in shallow tanks to add depth. There are quite a few North American species if You’re interested. Pictured below is a 50g Lowboy with Water willow, White top Sedge, dwarf sheldon snake grass, and some yet unidentified violet and sorrel species that hitched a ride

January 22

I had a pair of scarlet badis when I was young. They lived in a 10g blackwater tank I believe I had them for a year and yup mine exclusively ate live daphnia and bloodworms

I don’t remember much about their behavior. That was a time where I hoarded fish tanks. They lived alone and were fairly shy but were fun to watch hunt.

January 20

Albinos cannot just pick up melanin from their diet and environment. I think the ‘palette’ theory talked about above holds the most water for why an albino picked up colors.

true albinos are devoid of pigment. And usually comes with a host of genetic disorders. Thus breeders typically avoid true albinos and attempt leucistic and other variations of albinism instead.

Those angels are beautiful btw!

January 19

Cory carries them at ACO every once in a while. I imagine he gets them from a local breeder.

As for the loaches and their confusing scientific history, I believe they are referred to as Petruicthys rosy most recently. They were once only associated with small localities in the late 1980’s like one town in south east China and one in Myanmar. At that point they were referred to as Yunnanilus as they were thought to only be from Yunnan. Later in the 2010’s to current day loaches and fishes as a whole were looked at again more intensely and they discovered what they were referring to as Yunnanilus was actually 6 species that branched into different genus. And that they actually inhabit the entire lower half of the Mekong and it’s tributaries. I don’t believe they can interbreed but they do look awfully similar.

I believe part of the issues for delayed research was the remoteness of some of these areas. There are actually old Chinese naturalist books that refer to all of southeast asia as having a thick miasma in the jungles and therefore could not be traversed.

January 18

Pruinosus ‘powder orange’ although I get some ‘orange cream’ from time to time. The culture is still 1000+ strong. I should probably start selling and trading to get some more crosses 😅

January 18

I had to scrap it! I sold the zoomed terrarium and the tall terrarium wouldn’t hold water no matter how much silicone I used so it will now be a humidity box for my partner’s orchids

I bought a 12g high aquatop tank and once the rest of the tropical plants show up I will make a post about it!

January 18

Pretty sure that’s a silver rasbora (Rasbora argyrotaenia). They have a habit of just showing up in random fish orders.

January 5

Shadow cats stay small around 1.5-3” and feed primarily on mixed worms and small crustaceans. They are also a shoaling species so 6+ is recommended

They are fairly rare so you may not get a reply back on personal experience.

According to some websites they prefer soft acidic water slow moving water with dense vegetation.

January 4

Pictus cats need a school and there are smaller knife fish that are becoming more readily available. But with an all nocturnal tank you may have issues of food aggression.

Otherwise thats a doable tank. If you want you could also do smaller species of catfish. Anchorcats stay small same with cories and many loaches. If you wanted smaller knife fish, caterpillars are becoming more common. Or centipede knifefish. They all need a school though

December 30, 2023

My water is pretty consistently sitting at 65-67 degrees in the winter I do water changes with unheated water, and the water comes out of the tap at 55 degrees. This is enough cold water in a 20% water change to get my temps down to 60-62 for a couple days but it snaps back to 65-67 pretty quick. I am still unsure if cold water triggers my fish seeing as the minnows breed constantly year round and the trout im not even sure of their sex let alone their breeding behavior.

I think @dasaltemelosguy suggestions might prove to be useful.

December 29, 2023

Appears to be a species of semi aquatic springtails. Despite their name they rarely truly submerge themselves and instead inhabit the tops of leaves on the waters surface.

hard to tell from the pics. Could also be an aphid

December 28, 2023

He still has quite a bit more growing to do, but in my experience bichirs are one of the most docile large fish you can have.

Even if you have a group as long as there are enough territories they will squabble amongst eachother but never maim or injure.

When yours gets older and bigger it may attempt at some of the smaller tetra. But I doubt it they are rather lazy predators.

An ornate bichir or two is still on my dream tank list at some point.

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