anewbie

You know I think you were right and the stuff on the substrate is bba.

Hard to answer this since it is unknown the size of your sevs and geo (which species of geo?); however the general rules is these fishes will eat anything that will fit in their mouth; so i'd wait till it is quite a bit larger than their mouth. If your sevs are like my festy they have huge mouths. lemon bn will initially grow slow so it might take 6 months till he is large enough. btw i have a hand full of lemon bn i'd love to give away.

Yea floor drain rocks. Have them in my basement room.

I do not have any sae; they were on my stocking list but didn't happen. panda gara is another fish that can eat bba but this tank isn't suitable for them - i mean it technically is in terms of water condition but they would be impossible to fish out afterwards. For that matter so would sae. I'm really not sure what to do here as something is lacking - here are updated pictures - also i measured the par this morning it was 15 so i incresae it to 50 but that might be too high - i'm thinking 30 might be better:

I wish you luck !

s. repens seems to grow well under the right condition:

I've been doing some searching and my current thought is too much green in the light spectrum so my next experiment is for the next 30 days to turn off the green channel in my light; tank doesn't look as nice but we will see if that helps.

Yea i guess i will agree (well not on c since no first hand experience); i was rather surprise by the sudden colour change (photo above) which I presume is two males discussing a female. Of course now they have all reverted to their bland colouring. The a are generally speaking more colourful - never as rich as d at their best but more so during every day behavior. They are also as i noted more aggressive eaters and less polite - not mean but eat with a gusto. t are a totally different fish and a larger fish - it is a good thing they are stockier because they are in the aquarium with the festy who have similar behavior esp at eating time. So far i've not seen much colour changing and their pattern/colour are totally different - only way i know they are in the same genus is someone labelled them as such. One of them is downright pretty but it is also the smallest so not sure if it is a male or female - it has a gold line around the body pattern - i should try to get a picture but they don't sit still and the 10x4 has pretty thick glass making photo more difficult. When not eating they are fairly calm and so far with little bickering but they are not quite mature (I have 6 of them - wc) one sunday (which is when i do water changes) I'll remember to take my phone upstairs and get some photo of the a - i'm really happy with them. They are with the keyholes and so far they get along pretty well. I suspect the a were tank raised as the wc ones i had a few years ago were more stand-offish.

Do mangrove grow like swamp trees - what i mean is the root structure massive in the bottom of the tank and will they eventually get too thick for a small aquarium (i mean the trunk) ?

The problem is for a given grain size not all substrates are the same; for some reason moonlight is my bane causing major head-aches if it is more than an 1/2 an inch deep; estes stoney river which is somewhere between crystal river and moonlight hasn't had any issues up to 2 inches deep - and i don't fully understand why - as to cleaning stuff will sink into moonlight but on the estes stoney river (black substrate) stuff stays on the surface and can be easily siphon off the top. I havent' had pool filter sand long enough to comment on it - it is also between crystal river and moonlight but i think it is suppose to be denser and have similar properties as the estes stuff. Folks in the dwarf cichild forum recommend play sand but no first hand experience there. As to your question when i had moon light i would lightly siphon into it (i use sponge filters exclusively so getting into pumps wasn't an issue); but mixed with soil i'm not sure i would do other than scoop the whole mess out and start over. I've used moonlight, crystal river and torpedo beach; the later two seem ok but most of the fishes i keep really prefer a very fine substrate and moonlight is not suitable for planted tanks given that it develops aeneroaboic pockets too easily.

Well getting cuvies right now will be difficult; i have t in one aquarium; a in another aquarium and i guess d in a third. To get c i'll have to setup another aquarium since i can't put them with the cupido or with t/a/d since they will cross breed. Darn wholesalers - actually i'm not sure i'm unhappy with the d's they are colouring up nicely and so far they have been quite polite without being pigs (the t and a are royal pigs; the a has bitten my fingers a few times when i feed them).

My stuff isn't brown (diatom?) or bba; definitely deep green. Also the tank is fairly new (3 1/2 months) with extremely light stocking. I did get the python into the open areas where there were no plants and other than fine dust from the substrate itself there wasn't much. I know what you are talking about because i've had simlar issue on several year old eco complete substrate in an aquarium with medium to heavy stocking. This is definitely something else but i'm not sure what - yet.

Fyi: Someone more knowledgeable than myself has indicated that while wetspot sold these as Cuvies they are actually dorsies.

This photo is for @Guppysnail: My l. cuvies finally showed a little colour as they face off to determine something or other 😉 (I have 4 total with the other two in the foreground):

I just told you the aquarium has wc c. hastatus and b. cupido; both prefer the soft water with the b. cupido pretty much requiring it. The nitrates are below 5 - probably around 2.

a) Around 4 1/2 months; better be fully cycled or my cupido and hastatus cory will die very fast (both are fairly fragile and wc) b) nitrate level around 0; gh around 2 1/2; ph who knows nothing measures ph reliable these days. c) around 50% ro water maybe 75% every week I do a 40 gallon water change (180 gallon aquarium) with ro water. d) 8 hours for the light. e) There is a mass (giant mass about 1/2 aquarium area) of hornworth floating.

@Seattle_Aquarist I seem to have develop a new algae issue. Unlike the algae on the surface which i removed with a bit of current (that aquarium has no algae on the substrate); this aquarium is getting algae on the substrate: It started happening when i was softening the water (using ro water on water changes) but I'm not sure if the two are related. I lowered the intensity of the light 15% but that seemed to make things worse so i increase it back up this weekend. Unfortunately these things work in months so i have to be patient to see if the change helps or hurt. I also added more root tabs. Three theories - the light is too strong; there is too much nutrient in the water (the ec is fairly low relative to well behaved aquarium; i think it is around 130 (tds 65); the plants are starving giving the algae a chance to grow. At first i thought it might be cyano and i just needed more current but now i'm thinking it is real algae. This past weekend i added more root tabs (only fertilizer i'm using given the aquarium size) and as noted above increase the light back up to 15%. However a bit of a hint on direction would help. The only thing unique about this aquarium is it got conntaminated with duck weed (next water change will move the power head used to kill algae on the 550) to this aquarium to see if that kills the duck weed. The aquarium dimension is 4feetx4feetx16 (height). The lights are on approx 55% so i could make it a lot brighter if i need to move in that direction. You can see the algae/cyano growing on the crypts but the red flame is doing really well. Most of the plants have been in there for 3 months. Just not sure what is going on. So the two pictured sword plants are doing fine (front right corner a collection of 3) and the red flame in the middle (ignore the outer leaves which are submersed form and dying); but the crypts of various species are all developing algae/cyano on them.

Well different brand of silicone are well different. I think the GE stuff is what folks recommend for aquarium as being fish safe. Customaquarium told me they will only use black silicon since the clear stuff doesn't last (not sure why but i suspect they are different formulae. Certainly the stuff that aqueon use on their smaller tanks doesn't last. I had a 29 fall apart on me after 4 years - i mean the silicon simply stop sticking to the glass.

I would not treat the fish; those look like scrape marks - do you have something sharp in your aquarium or perhaps your substrate is sharp (put some between your finger and squeze and move back and forth). Kuhli love to fit in tight spaces and dig in substrate and if there is anything sharp it will make marks like those. Also kuhli are very sensitive to meds (scale-less fish) and med will likely do more harm than good.

Yea to be honest i don't know - rimless makes everything more painful - i mean they look nice and normally i'd say just run the aquarium without a lid but then you run into problems if you have jumpers or a smart cat.

Some hardware stores will cut glass for you. What i was saying is you could go to the hardware store and order a piece of glass the size you want... or in this case two pieces and then insert a hinge.

My first attempt at discus - these are wild caught cameta in a 40b for qt purposes: This is my first attempt with discus so we shall see how it goes - in a month or so they will be moved into a 240: I also picked up these 2 strange critters (not for the discus aquarium):

I've had good luck buying angles on line; there is a seller on ebay i like a lot (something guppy - https://www.ebay.com/usr/whataguppy_7 - his black angels are a bit inbred and generally i've had better luck with his marbles and platinums - that is not to duce the black - all domestic angels are heavily inbred); what i do is buy 8 or 12 from him - grow them out - pick a couple i like the best and give the rest to the fish-store. I've also used aquahuna (they were fine nothing wrong with them nothing special) and got a fantastic marble from wetspot. The first picture is male from wetspot the 2nd is a female from whataguppy: In my opinion they look a lot nicer in person as the picture makes them look kind of flat; they have a lot details in their fins. Of course what you actually get is a random luck of the draw. That female the silver portion is almost metalic when she turns in the light. The three i got from aquahuna (also marbles) are pretty nice. For some reason i started buying more marbles since they are sort of like lottery you never know what pattern they will get until they grow up. One of these days i'll get a clown double black but not today. I have some from another place called finteresting aquatics. These are bred to have stronger pinoy gene (more blue shim). They aren't adults yet so verdict is still out but he breeds 3 of 4 lines with different finnage and black pattern (clown, 1/2 clown, ...). The clown gene is the one that control stripes so in theory a double black clown will have no stripes underneath.

Not sure but regardless i think heavy definitely describes it 😉

looks like customaquarium - which is the vendor i used for my tanks - what are the dimensions ?