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Chris

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Everything posted by Chris

  1. Chris
    Maybe a medium-sized tetra would be good. Tank is a 20 long, so nothing too big. A group of Black Skirt Tetras, or something similar in size and temperament, maybe.
  2. Chris
    What would be a good dither to add to A) Draw the pair out into the open while not spawning and B) eat some of the fry to thin the herd, but not all of them AND not be a disturbance while breeding?
  3. Chris
    Thanks for the tips! Yeah, I'm not really necessarily wanting to raise fry for profit or anything at the moment. It's more that I've never bred any dwarf cichlid, and I feel like standard Kribs are a decent place to start. I don't think I'd purposefully raise a full spawn - although I will note that the stores in my area rarely, if ever, carry Kribs or Apistos, so I'd either sell colored up juveniles like crazy or not at all. Obviously, selling like crazy is ideal, but I'm really doing this for experiences and funsies.
  4. Chris
    Took a pic of the cabbage leather with the built-in moonlights last night. This morning, he had shriveled up overnight: And then an hour after lights on, he was back to normal: Pretty cool reminder that corals are animals, not plants - they move! Oh, and I spotted the Pom Pom crab this morning, too. I'll try to feed it tonight or tomorrow.
  5. Chris
    I don't see a problem. You're solving the biggest issue I've ever had with cinderblock stands - sagging in the middle. Tends to happen even on smaller tanks over time IME.
  6. Chris
    Good to know! Should I go to stores until I find a group and try my hand at sexing them in a store tank (I assume I'd just look for pointy fins and overall larger fish, right?), or should I buy 3-4 and wait until they pair off? I've heard females will kill eachother - will that happen even in a group while waiting for a pair?
  7. Chris
    Got some goodies for the little Pico "reef"! As the last pic showed, item #1 was a Pom-Pom crab. This little one has both anemones still on its claws, and looks nice and healthy. I also got two nerites to help out with the glass cleaning, and moved the last hermit crab in the tank to the puffer tank to avoid snail murder. And finally, I picked up a green cabbage leather. The green isn't super obvious with this light, but I'll see if I can't get a better picture. A cool soft coral, regardless. All said and done, I spent about $60. Not too terribly expensive - this particular store is pretty close to online pricing, really.
  8. Chris
    Made the mistake of stopping by a new LFS on lunch. Whoops.
  9. Chris
    Hello all, title really says it all. I have a single krib that I'd like to get a mate for, but I'm really not sure if it's male or female. From research, I think it's female because the fins are a bit rounded at the tips, but I'm not sure. If I wanted to buy a male (or female, if I'm wrong and this is a male), should I just have a store order a bunch and hope they're mature enough to show dimorphism? Or should I buy a small group, add them all to this tank (20 long with several caves), and let them pair off naturally?
  10. Chris
    Gorgonian looks WAY better today. Still not 100%, but getting there! Sorry for the zoomed in pic, but I'm really enjoying filling this Krib tank out. Ive been adding something every day. I threw a teeny crypt lucens in the left foreground, stuck some anubias gold coin in the rocks, and am considering some Val or something behind the rock work. I also need a plant in the center to block the heater and filter... Tiger lotus, maybe?
  11. Chris
    Added a handful of new shells for the hermit crabs to the puffer tank this morning. This guy was giving me a look like he really needed a new place. I guess the lease rules in his current shell are pretty strict.
  12. Chris
    First things first - lots of swordtail fry! Or, rather, about 7. I saw the adults fighting over a tiny corpse, which was disturbing. Happy thoughts, though, right? I snapped a couple pics of my orange Neos in the Ginga guppy tank And finally, the Pico saltwater tank. The palys are closed up, I think because that hermit crab to the left was disturbing them The gorgonian has better polyp extension today, but still not great. Maybe like 60% there? Finally, the Caulerpa is loving life. Note the new, white growth at the tips
  13. Chris
    I don't think there really is a light on the market that will be great for both a planted tank And a tradition reef tank. It's possible to use daylight Spectrum lighting for some corals, but you'll miss out on a lot of the fluorescent colors. Maybe a fully controllable kessil or a Chinese black box led would be able to do both, but I wouldn't expect them to excel at planted tanks if it's targeted at reefing, and vice versa.
  14. Chris
    I've found written DOA policies to almost always be harsher than how the companies handle the situation, at least for places I've ordered from. I think most people can usually tell when something is a genuine shipping issue and not "You left them on your front porch for two days after delivery." Sorry it happened! It's a bummer.
  15. Chris
    Saw some green poop in the 20 long - means the goldfish is cleaning house like want him to! I also just happened to see two fry out at once in the swordtail tank. I think one of them is newborn - a bit smaller and no color on that one. And here's the other, older one:
  16. Chris
    Are you sure the tank cloudiness is just particulates and not a small bacterial bloom? Usually mechanical filtration will pull most particulates out within a day or less.
  17. Chris
    There really isn't much of a difference, especially if you're just talking about fish. The same basic principles apply to both - good water quality, good food, and keep disease to a minimum. I mean there ARE differences - but there's nothing in the saltwater world that doesn't have a direct comparison in freshwater. Picking lighting for corals isn't all that different from complex planted tank lighting. You test for the same compounds in the nitrogen cycle, albeit you're typically shooting for much lower values with nitrate and phosphate. If you keep hard corals, you'll probably need to dose minerals to keep their skeletons growing, much like some plans require extra iron, potassium, etc. Treating disease is a different ballgame. QT tanks are almost a 100% must. You can't treat most diseases in a tank with inverts, because most medicines that treat marine parasites and such will also kill coral and other inverts. But, really, it's not harder, and it's not usually all that much more expensive.
  18. Chris
    Did a couple of small things in the fish room today. Added a heater to the Ginga guppy tank - I'm realizing that without the heat on (it's getting too warm to run it), this particular tank gets down into the low 60's. Brrrr! No wonder I'm not seeing any shrimplets. I also switched out the light with an LED bar I salvaged from a Top Fin kit years ago. It's an ugly spectrum, but it works! Much brighter, too. Trying to breathe life back into the hornwort I've got left. I've also taken over the tank my girlfriend wanted for our kitchen, a little 1.5 gallon Deep Blue tank. She had an emerald crab and some hermit crabs in there, but the emerald crab died during a molt, so she was pretty much done with the tank. I did a 100% water change (common with pico reef tanks, no biggie), cleaned up some of the algae, and added a heater. I added a photosynthetic gorgonian and a couple ugly, cheap palys, too. Pretty much just going for something "good enough" to play with some cheap corals. I don't really have the time or funds to set up a bonafide reef tank like I want right now, so maybe this will scratch the itch till we move and I can splurge on a 20 high reef tank or something. I still need to take care of the algae on the back and sides, but that'll have to wait till the next water change. This tank has no mechanical filtration, so it'll turn to soup if I stir the algae up without removing water! There's some polyp extension on the gorgonian, but not much - they can be cranky after a move. Palys look decently happy, actually. They have a really dark green that's actually kinda nice, in a way.
  19. Chris
    I really think the only safe solution would be to remove anything living, even if it's just a chemical treatment. You can never be 100% sure chemicals won't find a way into the tank, even when they're wrapped in plastic and "protected". A heat treatment would be essentially impossible to protect against - even with a chiller, I think. At 122, that's pretty much 40 degrees before a tropical tank becomes comfortable. Most chillers are designed to drop temps by 10/20 or maybe 30 degrees, as far as what I've seen.
  20. Chris
    I didn't even know it existed! I think I may have seen it while scrolling through Netflix, but I didn't realize what it was. I'll have to check it out! Travelers was definitely one of my favorite shows that I watched in the past couple years - I was disappointed by the ending, but the meat of the show was pretty great. I ended up reading through the thread, and so happy to see they're alive! The only Neos I have ATM are some low-grade orange shrimp, and I'm having trouble getting them to put the moves on eachother... I cranked up the heat last week, hoping that room temp was just too low, but no luck so far.
  21. Chris
    I'd imagine it'd be fine as long as there are no additives. Let us know how it goes - may be interesting to use down the road!
  22. Chris
    Haven't read through the thread yet, but I second the Netflix recommendation! Other than the very end... Felt a little rushed for what was otherwise such a good story. I wanted more detail, but it felt to me like they ran out of money and just had to have it all narrated instead of filmed.
  23. Chris
    Oscars are really fun - I'd recommend a Flowerhorn, if you want a wet pet but maybe want something a bit different. A 75 will be comfortable for life (for most strains) and they tend to be incredibly interactive, IME. Here's mine:
  24. Chris
    I essentially reset the 20 long today. As mentioned previously, the Purple Emperor Tetras went into the Musk Turtle tank for now,(which is kind of becoming a "catch-all"), and I actually considered rehoming the Krib and tearing the tank down for now. But decided it really isn't too much work to keep the tank going until I'm 100 percent positive I do or don't want to purse breeding Kribs, so I scaped the tank specifically for the krib (each rock structure has a cave underneath), manually removed a bunch of GHA, and moved in a comet goldfish from one of my other tanks to finish the algae off. I took this pic pre-filling, but I figured I'd snap it while I could see both fish.
  25. Chris
    Pulled out my camera and managed to get a slightly better picture of the swordtail fry. Unfortunately the tank is dimly lit, and he's tiny - so even with editing and such, this was as good as I could get. Oh well!
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