Torrey

Whelp, darn. At least I can add an extra hour of light and keep the algae growth sufficient.

ORFD 🤣🤣🤣

I'm out of reacts, so 💜🐡💜🐡💜🐡💜🐡💜 @GameCzar your 80's flashback was appreciated. I went to school with these guys (Steve was best man at my wedding) Which evolved out of these guys (kicking Phil out was the best thing they did. His sister Monica is cool, but Phil was just cruel in school) So of course I had to work as a rigger in the 80's😅 Blown ear drums kind of interfere with making music anyone wants to hear🤦‍♂️

Thank you! It's my autism. My spouse is thrilled that I finally have a place to talk to people who actually **want** to hear the information 😅

Plenty of research showing 12 step programs don't work. Remember that the opposite of addiction is relationship. So as long as you have a healthy relationship with your tanks and fish, it is not an addiction. 😬🤣

🤔 I need to get the spouse a similar type hobby/focus. Maybe then I could set up tanks in the bathroom and kitchen 🐡

My spouse just asked why I guffawed🤣 Are you always the master of understatement? Apparently yes, you are definitely the master of understatement. I grow my moss between the plastic craft canvas, and cut to size I need. A dab of superglue on the canvas makes it stick pretty much anywhere, without damaging the moss. Occasionally I will carefully remove the top canvas, but most of the time I don't bother, and it guarantees that the moss always has a foundation to grow back from, even if a new tenant (err, fish or turtle) eats it all the way down to the canvas.

Great idea! Will this also work with nerites? Mine like to destroy the tank, and also like to digest their food while attaching to the lid and the tank at the same time so I can't safely open with out risking injuring them 🤦‍♂️

Technically, Guppysnail didn't make the deal, someone else suggested it, you offered and assumed that was how the lunch would go, and Guppysnail set a boundary of Italian and sit down. You and Guppysnail never determined which one of you was buying, only that you were driving 🤔🤣

Yay!!! I had people losing their minds over how many guppies (well, the females look like guppies, every single male looks like an endler, and they have been breeding for over 18 months now) stock the turtle pond. Every couple of months I catch between 40 to 60 of the largest, and take to the LFS. As long as parameters are good, and I don't ever find floaters, I call it good.

Sad truth, there. Of course, it's an opportunity to learn that when people are inflexible in their dogma, it's merely a compensation tool for insecurity. When people say/ do 'mean' things, it's a reflection of their own trauma, and has absolutely nothing to do with the person they are criticizing. Best part of my 'job' now that I am disabled, is watching people's faces light up when they finally concretize the idea that another person's cruelty actually reflected more information about the other person than it did about their own competency. It takes more strength and resilience to be willing to be vulnerable, and admit that you don't know something, thank it takes to be rude to someone for asking a question.... Oof. Yeah, 4chan is brutal. Once upon a time, I had to lurk there for a while..... not somewhere I would spend large amounts of time, willingly. Of course, I wasn't in fish keeping forums, so maybe the people were kinder in other forums....🤔 That right there! Everything else is spot on, but sometimes I think we need this line tattooed on the inside of our eyelids

Never question Neptune, especially after the loss of a family member. Simply mix up a tumbler glass with ocean salt to proper salinity, and set the drink in front of the set up finished tank as an offering. Spouse said Neptune is obviously rewarding you for taking good care of your father, and giving the tank to the family for their child to enjoy. Simply thank the fish gods🐡 and set up the tank. (We lost my step mom's mom in January, and my mother-in-law in May. Deepest condolences.)

This morning, the spouse was cooking breakfast to Monsune and then Cassiano. Now we have progressed to Redbone

Maybe I need to offer a class on "How You, Too, Can Support Your MTS Hobby for Almost Free" 😅

My obsession with the hobby started as a young Bird (my nickname) when my mum and dad set up a tank with guppies and swordtail platys to help me understand my mum was going to have a baby. I was 4. If she handled the death that well, and with those questions, I would encourage adding a decent binocular microscope to your purchase. Allow her to stain slides of tank water, and I will try to find the book I had for my kids to learn how to perform necropsies on the fish. **FULL DISCLOSURE** Encouraging kids to fully explore their science side, especially facilitating their interests in research, may lead to their determination to go to med school or vet school. Start saving money, *now* 😅

You can see a little of the plastic craft canvas has been exposed by snails and fish excavating. This tank has been set up for over 6 months. Here, I filled a pond pump bag with lava rock, to increase surface area for beneficial bacteria, and to act as a barrier between the fine gravel on the left, and the river rock on the right. Under the river rock (and half the bag of lava rock) is a UG filter that only covers the right 1/3 of the tank. There's a pond pump with adjustable flow that pulls water through the UGF, and a 4' long 1/4" ID hose that sends the water down a waterfall on the other end of the tank. The nylon pump bag is functioning more like the nylon window screen mesh that I used to use in my tanks to separate a layer of lava rock that was under soil, back in the 80's and 90's. Since then, Diana Walstad introduced me to the idea of using food safe plastic trays, or glass pyrex, to put dirt in for dirted plants. Much easier to trade out plants if needed, makes rearranging the landscape easier, keeps fish from pulling out plants, and if you sew the canvas to create a planted "jack in the box" it saves plants from turtles, too. @Atitagain took my idea that Diana inspired, and made it better (unless you have turtles. Needs to be a little sturdier for turtles).

Do you have any plants in there? Any ornaments? Your gH & kH are low for livebearers, but they would generally develop a curved spine from low calcium levels before they perished. I suspect that it is stress, unless live bearers are the *only* fish you are losing. Fish will always have bacteria in their environment. Bacteria and virus exposure help strengthen immune systems, which is why fish bred outdoors in tubs are frequently hardier and more resilient than fish bred indoors in sterile aquariums. It's added, **extended** stress that will result in a sick fish.... and I have talked with folks at the NCSU vet school, and there is postulation that stressed fish can also die of heart attacks (or the fish equivalent). So, if your tank has zero live plants to be absorbing stress hormones in the water, and you have corydoras in there that are known to secrete a toxin when they are stressed, there might not be any virus, bacteria or anything else besides stress, killing the fish. Are you a member of the Aquarium Co-op YouTube channel? If yes, go watch the member's only video on corydora, and see if any of the information regarding corydora poisoning matches the behavior of your fish. If it does, maybe rehome/separate the corys until you have enough plants to break up line of site in the tank, and also allow the plants to absorb/clean stress hormones out of the water. If it doesn't look like corydora poisoning, I would still buy floating plants to help keep the water filtered and reduce fish stress. If bellys are not sunken in (or obscenely bloated) I don't think parasites are responsible. If you don't see any signs of infection, and testing the deceased fish didn't identify an infection or parasites, then the answer that is left, is stress. Reduce the stress with plants.

I 100% support CalmedByFish on this. If you can't pay your electric bill, or are having financial issues due to MTS... tag me. I have found the least expensive methods of supporting our habit.. I mean hobby. It's a hobby!

Bec, you are officially one of us. A fellow MTS apartment dweller here. When our kitchen exploded and we had to move into an apartment, we used mobility issues as justification for *having* to be on the ground floor with the concrete foundation. The MTS *officially* was a secondary reason.😇 In my bedroom is the fish rack, currently housing plants, the turtle environment (which includes 3 cubic feet of digging area/land, plus a 9.998 gallon pond), two 5 gallon drink dispensers converted into aquariums, a 10 gallon tank, and a 3 gallon drink dispenser converted into an amphopod tank and grow out for bacopa carolinia. My dresser has the Walstad tank, and my bedside table has the fry grow out tank. Our 55 gallon tank got a crack in the upper 3", so it was no longer fit for being filled with water. It's only sound to hold 30 gallons, so my spouse **very kindly** allowed me to set the 55 up in their room... which required a new stand (of course) and I needed to customize the stand (keep the spouse happy). We bought a brand new 4' tank for the dining room display tank for my birthday, and since it's going to be a display tank I want it to be set up right from the beginning, so OF COURSE I needed a grow out tank for plants😅 Which brings us to the living room: another 5 gallon conversion from drink dispenser to breeding aquarium (I supply local homeschooling co-ops with planaria for biology classes), an acrylic (I have decided that unless I am drilling a sump, I really prefer glass), and a Back2theRoots tank. I also have philodendron, pothos, and a dracaena on the table (a solid dining room table converted to fish and plants table). Under the aquarium table I store 70% of the fish keeping supplies. I would store everything there, except that I have 4 more tanks underneath waiting to be set up.🤣 I also just broke down the outside ponds (range from 7 gallon to a 60 gal) and they are stored between the wall and the craft cabinet. Luckily, they all stack like a set of Russian dolls. Why haven't I set up the last 4 tanks? Because I want to buy a proper display rack for the living room 🤣🤣🤣🤣 My spouse held a firm boundary on NO TANKS.... in the kitchen or bathroom. I also have over a dozen bottles growing infusoria, and a few bottles dedicated to green water, and I still have a container of black worms in the fridge. 🤷‍♂️ I take them out every 72 hours, rinse them, change their water, and feed them. All my tanks (except for the QT) have black worms in the substrate. " I have an Excel Spreadsheet with tabs for every tank to keep track of water testing, always looking for consistency and patterns for a better balance." I use a Google doc/google sheets on my phone 🤭 I already ran out of reactions for the day, hopefully I will have more tonight. 🤣🤣😅 If I remember correctly, you are only a state away.....🤔 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I mean, it's the truth though, right???? Is there really a problem in the world that another tank won't fix?

I ran out of reactions 🤣 Where are you located, how many tanks are waiting to be set up, and how many plants do you need? A nerm CAN NOT allow a fellow nerm to suffer with only one tank set up, it's against nerm code. 🐡🤣🐡🤣🐡🤣🐡🤣🐡🤣🐡

This is a common thing to see and in my experience indicates a couple of possibilities. If the betta spits anything he tries to eat out, and does not try to re-eat at all, I would suspect parasites. On the other hand, if he bites the food and then chases it to eat it after spitting it out, that sounds more like the food is too large.

It would be awesome if you could make a 'how to' video tutorial and upload to YouTube! Especially with so many invasive species infiltrating our waterways (zebra mussels most recently), this is something that every aquarist should be using to keep tank water out of our water ways.

I have a few different methods, from easiest to most difficult: 1. You already listed Google scholar 2. A VPN in another country that actually values science. Use boolean search methods *peer-reviewed (+ research)* ie: *peer-reviewed betta splendens tannins healing* and about 30 research articles come up from Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines in my DuckDuckGo browser VPN based out of the Netherlands [try in Google chrome, and 3 come up] 3. Go to the local university and request access to the research stacks. Some universities require that you take at least one class, other universities will allow alums to research.

I must be doing it right, then, because all the leaves are a gorgeous green with no wrinkles. I can see 3 of the "tubers" that are fat, healthy looking roots. There are springtails in the planting medium, and there are 2 dried, dead looking roots that appear to have been broken off the plant (or cut when they transplanted to ship to market?) I watch the exposed tubers/roots. They are a whitish green color, and as soon as they look like the plant is drawing nutrients/water from them I add an ounce (technically, an ounce sized scoops' worth) to the plant. So far, so good, except I don't see nodes on the [flower] stalk, to identify where to cut?

Have you performed that specific surgery before? The YouTube video makes it look fairly easy.... it's a little tricky. If you have performed it before, ignore my recommendation. If you have not, I would try to find an exotic pet vet that specializes in fish, who you could pay to perform the surgery, and ask if you can please watch because veterinary sciences fascinate you. If you can't find a local vet, I would try contacting a vet school, and ask if they could Zoom you through it if you sign a paper releasing them of all responsibility. They would explain how to properly dose the clove oil that way, as well. It's critical to have 2 "hospital rooms" in case the fish has an adverse reaction and needs to be resuscitated rapidly.