Chris

Hello all, Was working in the fishroom a bit and listening to some old Aquarium Co-Op live streams, and heard Cory talking about how important documenting his hobby has been. While I take some pictures here and there (and even have a DSLR!) lately I've been slacking on the documentation. In the past six months I've moved (although just down the street), gone through several jobs, gotten a couple new puppies, and have just in general been too busy to expand the fishroom, let alone document it much. I want that to change! This is just going to be a journal detailing what I've got going on in my fishroom and whatever maintenance/changes I might have made on a daily/weekly basis. Might be something as interesting as breeding fish and setting up tanks or something as boring as just light tank maintenance. Either way, I'd love for it to be documented. To start, here's what I did today: First, I decided to vacuum some of the poop and mulm off the bottom of my Flowerhorn tank. It's a 40B filtered by a single sponge filter, which takes care of the biological needs of the tank easily, but leaves a lot to be desired with mechanical filtration. I'll eventually add a canister or something to help keep some of this mulm sucked up, but for now, weekly siphonings are the way to go. Before: After: Here's a nice picture of my FH: I also scraped a little bit of algae in my 55 Green Spotted Puffer tank. Added in another 5 gallons of water to keep bubbles from the HOB down to a minimum. Before: After: The mission for this week is to move a 36 bowfront out of my fishroom and to build a cinderblock stand for a 37 XH and 20 tall for some guppies, mollies, and shrimp. The 36 is going to be an upgrade for my Eastern Musk Turtle, who currently lives in a 20 long. Until next time!

I've been there. Glad you got everything settled! Sometimes just thinking about stuff like that is enough to drive you crazy! Added a black background to my flowerhorn tank. Used black cloth and double-sided tape - $10 for enough to do a 55, a 40, and a handful of 20's and 10's. Not bad!

I actually have a teeny tuft of Caulerpa Mexicana in there, but we'll see if it makes it. May order a bit more. Palm Caulerpa is a personal favorite.

(mostly) finished setting up my 55 for my Green Spotted Puffer today. Tank has been wet for a few days with dry (dead) rock, and I've got .5 PPM ammonia. Added some cycled live rock today to start processing that, and will hope to move the puffer by this weekend. Scape is nowhere near done, although I feel as if I'm lacking any sort of rock that will be tall enough to fill in the top of the tank. Maybe some mangroves hanging down could help fill it in?

Any idea what SG you're targeting? That's the important bit of info here, IMO. (You posted right before I did, oops!) Jungle Val, certain Crypts, Java Fern, Java Moss, some Anubias, some Bacopa, Elodea, and a handful of other plants are all said to do well in very lightly-brackish water. 1.004 or less. In my experience with most of these, they all started to stagnate growth at 1.001-1.002, and most completely melted at 1.004. Now, some did survive at 1.004, but nothing really grew. My Jungle Val, my Crypt Wendtii, and if I remember correctly, my Anubias Nana all did "okay" for about a year before I moved the plants. None of them grew, asides from the Val shooting out a couple of puny sprouts. At higher SG's, I'd recommend growing some non-calcified macroalgae like Chaeto, Caulerpa, and maybe some species of Gracilaria and Sargassum. You'd probably need at least 1.010 or higher for all of those, though.

I'm in central KY and it frequently gets down into the lower 60's in every house I've ever lived in here. For small tanks like yours, I'd go buy a high-quality 100W heater for each tank and call it quits. Alternatively you can just heat the room with a space heater but it'll run up your power bill quite a bit more. If you're anything like me and you love the cooler weather, I'd hate to heat my fish room too much anyway!

I'd go for 20 talls. 20 longs make great displays, but the 6" of space you save with a tall tank compared to a long one can allow you to have a whole extra tank at the end of the row if you have a row of 4 tanks, if that makes sense. You might be able to cram more fish into a 20 long, but I don't think you could make up for a whole extra 20 tall doing it that way.

Angels grow palm-sized pretty quickly IME, but can take a while to get massive, and it'll depend on the variety, too. I think with those dimensions one would be alright, with the disclaimer that it'd likely need an upgrade in a couple years. Growing out a few tiny ones to that palm-size and selling them back before they begin to pair off would be a fine idea, too, as long as you're okay with it.

What're the dimensions on the tank? I can't find an answer online. I think that, assuming it's at least 24" from wall-to-opposite-wall, you'll be okay with the single angel. In a couple years, if that angel happens to get larger than most, it may get cramped, but I think it'd be okay for a long while at the very least. IMO, you could even throw in a few more Julii at the bottom, too 😉

Black Neons are easily my favorite tetra - they never look like much in a store, and they don't necessarily catch the average person's eye when they're looking at a tank. But, when you really get close and watch a big school of mature, healthy Black Neons, you get sucked into it - the tiny bit of light blue in their stripe, the bright orange eye, the slow gradation of color along their bodies, and (my favorite) - how chunky they get! They're small fish, but man, they can be like little sausages sometimes!

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing a picture or a video. Lots of questions: Is there any redness around the deteriorating fins? How about any fuzzy growth? Do the fins seem to just be getting ragged and disappearing? Is it just the back tailfin, or is it his pectoral and dorsal fins as well? How's his behavior, aside from visual symptoms? If it's just his tailfin and there's no fuzzy growth or anything, he could be tail-biting.

Could it have been a spawning event triggered by the water change/atmospheric pressure change from the nasty weather? Anemones and other invertebrates have been known to have clouded tanks during spawning events - I've had BTA's turn my tanks to milk before, only for them to seemingly clear up the next day. Usually you'd see a spike in nutrients, but with all the macros in your tank, perhaps they were absorbed quickly?

I've never seen or heard of biofilm being pushed down into the tank - can you post a picture? Biofilm is pretty easily broken up with surface agitation - so an airstone or trickle from a HOB filter will do the trick. You can also take a paper towel and lay it over the surface of the water, and it'll pick up the oils on the surface.

I agree with @Guppysnail- looks like a minor scratch. If you hold a light up to it and turn the tank a little, do you see any reflections inside the scratch? if so, it's got some depth to it, and it might be a little more structural.

Here's my pea puffer and his 5.5 gallon. Wish I could figure out where all those tiny roots are coming from!

I'm jealous of all the variety you can get! I can order in some cool plants online (I might be able to find some/most of the morphs you're showing if I searched around long enough, but I don't know), but locally I can't find much. I'm very limited in selection in the walk-in stores here.

Yes, marine salt will provide the proper minerals and salt content. Aquarium salt is something a little different. The Instant Ocean (purple bag, not reef crystals) is probably the cheapest option in the US. It's what I use now, although in the past I've used other salts. They're all pretty much the same in terms of usability when it comes to a brackish tank.

I've kept them in groups and had fights before. I'm glad groups work well for some people, but I'd really like to know whether the idea that they're a shoaling species actually came from - I'm not saying it's incorrect, but I've had more success with them solo. IMO, the biggest difference is the amount of time every day you'll spend caring for the fish. A betta can be taken care of with a pellet or two a day and a water change once the water is sufficiently "dirty" or soft. More care can be given, but that's essentially the minimum. For a pea puffer, you're likely going to be either feeding frozen foods or cultivating live foods - either breeding snails or hatching out baby brine shrimp. In my case, I do both. Not only does it take time to cultivate those foods (or thaw frozen stuff), it takes a bit more time to actually feed an appropriate amount as well. It's not a big difference, but it is there.

Lol, welcome to my world! I was thinking that it might be easier for a plant to get the water it needs from two sources (both brackish water through roots and humidity (freshwater) by absorption through leaves) than being completely submerged and only having access to brackish water. I'd guess that filtering out all that salt is probably inefficient, so maybe another process like absorbing freshwater from the air is able to supplement the plant enough to keep it from dehydrating. Usually, absorbing water through leaves would be an inefficient process, but maybe it's an efficient one compared to filtering out salt from brackish water? No evidence to back that up, just a thought.

Interesting. I did have better success in my 36 gallon (Figure 8 Puffer and Bumblebee Gobies) while I was slowly acclimating the entire tank up to 1.004, since they were all purchased in freshwater. But, most of those plants ended up going downhill over time. I'm fairly certain I had Java Fern Windelov in that tank, and it didn't seem to hold up well at all. If I remember correctly, my Anubias Nana and Coffeefolia didn't make it for long, but the Anubias Gold Coin I tried actually survived for a few months before I moved it to a freshwater tank. A piece of Golden Pothos survived for more than a year, but it eventually began to shrink and dry out. All of the plants I've simply dropped into the tank at 1.004 haven't made it - I still have one piece of Jungle Val that's technically alive, but it's rotting. Most plants have the ability to soak up some humidity through the air - I wonder if that'd play a role in Java Fern doing well emersed, It's an inefficient way of getting water, but living in brackish water seems to be a completely inefficient process for plants, anyway.

I'm glad it's worked well for you! That looks liked normal java fern to me, or maybe a narrow-leafed variety. Fiddlers are very cool! I kept some Red-Claw Crabs for a while - they were endlessly entertaining.

Good to know. Perhaps I've just been trying faulty Java Ferns in my low-end brackish tanks, lol. Perhaps I'll have to give it another try sometime.

In my experience, both my Java Fern and Anubias stagnated and slowly deteriorated over the course of 9-10 months or so. They didn't rot completely, but they probably would have, given a longer period of time. What exact species of Anubias do you have, if you don't mind me asking?

This thread always makes me want to find somewhere to put a guppy tank. But I know that one guppy tank would turn into 5 guppy tanks so, so fast...

I usually mix the water in buckets. I take a 5 gallon bucket, add my water, condition it, and then mix my salt in. You can manually stir it to mix the salt, but a cheap powerhead makes things much easier. You don't want to add salt directly to the tank most of the time, since it can burn fish and too much of a rapid shift in salinity can disrupt the nitrogen cycle. Something like this calculator makes it really easy: https://www.hamzasreef.com/Contents/Calculators/DirectSaltCalculator.php You'll want to check the level of salt in the water with a refractometer or hydrometer, though. Refractometers are more accurate, but cost around $20 and need to be calibrated. Hydrometers are less accurate but are closer to $10 (here, at least) and are calibrated from the factory. I have both, and use both frequently. What kind of salt are you planning on using? The Instant Ocean brand is readily available and cheap.