Torrey

I think his log may be too rough for his fins, tbh. I built floating moss tubes for my bettas, and they could still tear up their fins if they weren't eating enough (primarily live foods), were too stressed, or had just gone through the stress of raising fry. You can see the blue canvas mesh tube at the bottom of the bachelor/danio tank, and the black canvas mesh tube is almost fully covered with moss.... yet my last betta still managed to tear up his fins. Think of the most sensitive skin on your body. Then, think about not having any clothes between that skin and any ornament in a betta's tank..... Once I wrapped my head around just how fragile those long, flowing tails are (thank you Gianne!) I got much better at selecting safer items for my bettas... and live plants like hornwort, elodea, java ferns and amazon sword, as well as crypts and buces, won every time. I don't see any of the tell tale signs (fuzzy edges, clearly identifiable blood vessels, etc) that indicate disease. I see stressed coloration (which you said is improving), what appears to be mechanical tears in the fins (as opposed to disease), and good scales. My bettas stayed healthiest with a little salt in the tank water (Gianne explains why this is so in their presentation), a lot of indian almond leaves, blackworms in the substrate, scuds in the indian almond leaves, live (or at least frozen) daphnia minimum of 1 to 2x/week, live or frozen bloodworms once a week, live or frozen BBS 2 to 3x/week, plus Bug Bites pellets for bettas (no fillers, and uses soldier fly larvae as main ingredient). The betta who loved flow, I let him have flow. It obviously made him happy. The rest had floating plants that were soft (no milfoil, it will tear their fins), large leafed plants, including pothos, that they could rest on, moss balls to lounge on, and I eventually switched over to only soft plants, indian almond leaves I had boiled first, and silicone decorations to protect them and their fins. Soft substrate of large, rounded river stones, or rounded gravel, or a carpeting plant on top of gravel. A ping pong ball for them to play with. You are trying really hard, when's the last time you just sat down and listened to your bettas? They will tell you what they need, if you, listen. There's no way to prove it, but I suspect they live happier lives if their autonomy is respected. Fastest, easiest way to respect autonomy is to take time to listen, and validate what they tell you by making the changes they ask for. You'll get there, just trust yourself, and trust your fish.

I had to go reread, and then cross-reference against other posts/comments that day. That was the day we had a lot of people sharing how we had all made mistakes following the API Nitrate Testing directions, and I shared my O-chem professors directions: "Shake reagent bottle until arm feels like it is about to fall off. Hold bottle vertical and add 10 drops to the 5 mL of water. Yes, I know the directions don't say you have to shake the first bottle. I tell you to shake the first to make sure you don't forget to shake the second. Now, after adding 10 drops from the first reagent, cap and shake your test tube. Your lab partner should be shaking the second reagent bottle until their arm *does* fall off. Now, add 10 drops from reagent #2. Cap your test tube with the better silicone caps, not the regular test tube caps. Shake your test tube with whichever arm didn't fall off for 60 seconds, and then read the results in 5 minutes later. I want to know, is our tap water safe to drink?" So, I imagine illustrated directions to most commonly used aquarium items, from @Streetwise talking many of us through programming our lights, to my O-chem professor's vividly graphic description of how to test for nitrates for API test kits, we should all have an opportunity to improve our communication skills, as well as new found compassion for the people who attempt to write directions for us to [poorly] follow.😆

I'm actually dosing twice the amount on the directions Roy, to get the nitrates up to 20 ppm. It's a 2.5 gallon tank and I am dosing 0.1 mL daily again. (thank goodness for medicine syringes)

@Goldie Blue welcome to the forum, and learning about fish as most of us have: by getting it wrong first. The valuable part is, it doesn't sound like you'll make the same mistakes twice. If you are a YouTube member, I can't recommend Gianne Souza's members only video enough. She also has a part 1 and a part 2 on the regular Co-op channel from a few years ago? She's an IBC Judge, and betta breeder. I bred bettas several years ago, and made some mistakes (like not keeping the air humid enough) that shortened the lifespans of my breeders and may have contributed to some problems I had with a few of the fry. If YouTube had been around then, i wouldn't have made the mistakes (I would have made others, instead, lol). Long finned bettas are happiest in shallow tanks, so I second the advice of moving to a shorter tank. Don't worry about the "cheap gravel substrate" your tanks have been set up long enough that even with regular vacuuming I'm sure you have mulm. Mulm is free plant food, I only spot clean my gravel, sand, dirt or rocks. Plants of any kind give you a buffer. Some plants need more nutrient supplementation than others. I am currently dealing with a tank I unintentionally underfed to keep clean water for the shrimp. Now all my plants are dying back and the snails and shrimp are eating them faster than they can recover, so take my advice with a grain of salt, as also as proof that even experienced aquarists are always learning new things. This tank back in April (above) and now (below) I underfed, didn't increase ferts for the growth, then got sick and didn't do any maintenance for a month. I'm getting back on my feet now, and the shrimp and snails ate the plants. This is the T4' a year ago, with algae and awkward teen stage growth in the tank (above) and tonight (below) All those plants allow for heavy overstocking, and my nitrates, nitrites and ammonia stay at zero. I have to fertilize every other day, or my frogbit gets holes in it. I removed over 100 endlers last week, and the water in here still looks like it is boiling at feeding time. No clue why this image keeps coming in upside down.... This was a bare bottom tank until mid-May, for growing out fry. Due to health stuff, I'm not actively breeding this year (passive still happens, lol) This is now a bachelor tank and longfin danio tank. It's also a 10 gallon, and I can overstock it because of the pothos. Again, ammonia, nitirtes and nitrates stay at zero unless I add ferts. Easy Green gets my nitrates up to 15 ppm... until the plants use it all. This was my Walstad tank, and the first time I got red stem plants to grow...after over 4 decades of fishkeeping. I'm still learning! (This tank has since been revamped, you can follow it's journey on my link in my signature) So, I'm trying to say don't be scared about making mistakes. It's how all creatures, including humans, learn best. Don't be afraid to try new things. Get our betta out of the 55 and somewhere he won't have to fight flow that will shorten his lifespan (I had a betta who loved to surf the flow, he literally played in it like a kid at an amusement park riding the roller coasters all day. It tore up his fins after 18 months, and he only lived to 2 years old... but he lived on his terms. If your betta is staying in his log, he's not living on his terms. Get him calmer waters, and warmer waters, and let the white clouds go wihtout a heater. It'll save you on the electric bill, too.) Mostly, have fun with the hobby!

Roy; Here's tank around April During April and the first half of May I was doing weekly trims and moving red plants to other tanks (which haven't had enough light and they failed to thrive). The tank on the right kept growing more and more of the AR roseaefolia, as long as I kept adding ferts. I pulled the water sprite out, because it grew faster than I wanted to trim. I didn't stay on top of the ferts for most of May, got back to daily microdosing since Memorial Day weekend. Based on how everyone attacked the green bean last night, I'm going to say I am severely underfeeding. Big Mama swarmed the green bean the second it hit the water. Less than 2 minutes and the other two shrimp, plus the snails, were making a bee line. Not even 6 hours later, it was decimated. This is what the tank looks like right this minute. ammonia: 0 ppm nitrites: 0 ppm nitrates: 10 ppm GH: 150 ppm KH: 40 ppm pH: 6.8 Temp: 70 F at 5 pm, has dropped back down to 68 F over 5 hours (we had temps over 100 F today with 6% humidity. I will be doing another water change in the morning to clean up the bottom, and I am now on week 3 of microdosing ferts daily. The pogostemon, Cyperus helferi (uprooted), and flame moss are growing quickly. My AR roseaefolia seems to be deteriorating more rapidly. Maybe it's just not a good fit with my water/available lighting and I have to accept that? It grows great, as long as I leave it floating at the top. It grew great from January until I got sick mid-May. Now, I can't get it to recuperate.... @Guppysnailthis is the same UGF that has been running in this tank since the first summer of the pandemic, if that makes a difference. I looked yesterday, and a few snails in the uplift tube, but they can easily get out of the UGF via the outlift tube because I made my own (I discovered TopFin and another brand don't have this option, and I can see babies getting stuck). This morning, after eating an entire green bean last night, a shrimp was in the tube.🙄 I'm thinking over the winter, everything needed less fodd, because the warmest the tank got was 68 F. Today when I got home from the docs at 5 pm, tank was 70 F and everyone was super active.... so probably need more food. @Seattle_Aquarist I wonder if leftover flake food/waste from the flake of Xtreme I fed every other day supplied a nutrient that I don't have enough of in my water/ ferts (ACO Easy Green and SeaChem Flourish)? And since I wasn't well enough to watch them eat the flake, I had switched to primarily veggies lightly blanched on a bamboo skewer, so I could remove leftovers daily, and maybe the plants suffered from not getting flake food? I was out of fresh green beans to blanch yesterday, and fed all the tanks a canned green bean. Then most of the tanks got a second canned green bean, and the T4' tank ended up with 6 green beans consumed between 5:30 pm (evening lights on) and 10 pm (lights out). So... everybody is hungry? But I got rid of the algae....🤦🏼‍♂️ (Pardon my long post, I'm thinking out loud, trying to learn, and sharing my thought process)

This is the same machine my mil had, that was my original fish room air pump until it no longer worked, lol. Look at my videos of the turtle's original pond, and you can hear the distinctive sound, plus see the "spa bubbles" Karma adored. More air may have been the secret to my success, and I didn't know it back then, lol. A nebulizer also worked in a pinch, and the airline tubing is fairly interchangeable. I also added a splitter and 2 4-ways to service tanks back then. May your angelfish make a full recovery! I am enjoying seeing I am not alone in exploring rabbit holes!

I combatted that issue with a side light: This is submersible, and can be mounted inside the tank. outside the tank. or added to the hood. Tank on the left has one half mounted under the lid. Other half is mounted at an angle between the two tanks, giving more light to both sets of plants. Most reds need a LOT of light. Hope this helps!

I'm trying to remember who else is in Australia....

The longer you allow the tank to season, the happier your shrimp will be. They are so lucky you are taking the time to do this right!

My tap (depending on temperatures, day of the week, and which source my water is coming from) can range from 0 ppm nitrates to 40 ppm nitrates, occasionally has nitrites (spring), can test 0 ppm chlorine up to dark green on the Co-op strips (especially right after they have worked on a water line), and KH is wildly variable too. Only consistent thing about my water, is it is always over 400 TDS straight out of the tap, and always 300+ ppm for GH. Even the pH can fluctuate, so I have to test my tap before every water change. This means I am very careful with my water usage (high desert living), don't chase parameters, don't use RO water (I won't waste 3 gallons effluent for 1 gallon usable water), and rarely do big water changes. When tap water tests close to my tanks, I fill up a bunch of gallon jugs from the PurFilter for later use in the tanks. Fishkeeping isn't really about keeping fish, its about water chemistry in a box. The fish are our reward for learning the chemistry🤷🏼‍♂️

Anything will try to escape if all of their needs are not met. My nerite, Houdini, likes to go on walkabout. He's 10 years old, and now lives in a 4' paludarium with a locking reptile lid because he can open regular tank lids. That being said, I've never seen evidence of endlers or neos escaping my outdoor porch pond. I currently have 3 Blue dream neos, and they go to the top of the tank because they enjoy filter feeding from the flow of the UGF. They will hang out in the plants they have deliberatly uprooted to float and play in. There is a 2" hole they could easily escape via, and have never tried. Big Mama looked out the whole once, then went back into the water. Now, she will wait at the hole for me to place the food in (especially green beans) but doesn't feel the need to look out. My carbon rili colony were in a lidless tank, and I had nor problems... meanwhile I had some ghost shrimp that were little escape artists! They got out of what I thought was a sealed tank!

And this is why I don't live anywhere in CA. About the only place that was remotely affordable was also nicknamed Fontucky... so🤷🏼‍♂️

Oh dear!

Anyone excluded from the group I'd be concerned about, otherwise your great water parameters, your attention to detail, and your live food regimen I'll bet has them in good shape pretty quickly. Maybe consider Gianne's betta breeding stress reducer, of covering up all the glass with construction paper (with the exception of a few peek spots) until they are eating well? Staying in a tight knot is reassuring, as long as you can get the stress down and the weight up, and deworm at some point in the future when they have good color and full bellies.

Mangrove, salt cedars, some sedges, and a few rushes were the only plants I successfully got growing for brackish. Keeping nitrates under control requires some engineering, @eatyourpeas has some good mechanical filtration recommendations on their Puget Sound tank blog on here.

It was very easy to do brackish when I lived near tidal floodplains and just hauled water in to put in the tank. It's not as difficult as full marine (ime). It's not as easy, or as inexpensive as freshwater straight out of the tp, probably a bit closer to using RO for neo and caridina shrimp, depending on which area of the world you are trying to recreate. Zenzo is best source for excellent videos on brackish tanks that I have found so far.

My recommendations: Get some nerites Get some shrimp What are your parameters? Manually removing it helps, but until the root cause is identified it will keep coming back and making you frustrated. I accidentally left a submerged LED on with the bubbler is attaches to for a week before I realized the timer wasn't on. Back corner of the tank was hair algae paradise (I had intentionally introduced hair algae for the nerites, to make sure they didn't starve) and was a thick mat by the time I figured out what happened. I removed it, transferred some more snails, painted a few plants with a little H2O2, and now I'm struggling with plants not having nutrition because I was still underfeeding and underfertilizing. our plants and fish are constantly growing and changing, and we have to adapt our practices according to what the tank says it needs.

I was doing the autistic rabbit hole on my shrimp, and discovered just how difficult it is to find reputable information on shrimp diseases. I figured I wasn't the only one, so I'll post the peer-reviewed research I find here. I started the rabbit hole because I saw what I feared were vorticella on one of my Blue Dream's (neocaridina) nostrums. It turned out to be a bit of green bean it was saving for later🙄. Finding peer-reviewed data for treatment is taking a while, but here's an article on the actual ID of one species (of over 200) of vorticella found on freshwater shrimp. There are quite a few links to more articles in the paper. This excerpt explains why it is so hard to find reputable information: "P"rotozoan parasites are one of the most important groups of pathogens that have a negative impact on the health of farmed and wild shrimps; however, they did not receive a lot of attention because of the technical difficulties inherent in their research compared to larger helminthic parasites (Lom and Dyková, 1992). Current studies of parasites in shrimps are mostly marine species (Chakraborti and Bandyapadhyay, 2011; Lightner and Redman, 1998). Due to the relatively low level of understanding of parasites in freshwater shrimp farms, the lack of effective treatment may lead to escalating problems." This will hopefully be changing! You can see Big Mama on the green bean, and the other two shrimp coming over the rocks toward the green bean. They crack me up! The snails are all headed to the green bean, too!

I was doing the autistic rabbit hole on my shrimp, and discovered just how difficult it is to find reputable information on shrimp diseases. I figured I wasn't the only one, so I'll post the peer-reviewed research I find here. I started the rabbit hole because I saw what I feared were vorticella on one of my Blue Dream's (neocaridina) nostrums. It turned out to be a bit of green bean it was saving for later🙄. Finding peer-reviewed data for treatment is taking a while, but here's an article on the actual ID of one species (of over 200) of vorticella found on freshwater shrimp. There are quite a few links to more articles in the paper. This excerpt explains why it is so hard to find reputable information: "P"rotozoan parasites are one of the most important groups of pathogens that have a negative impact on the health of farmed and wild shrimps; however, they did not receive a lot of attention because of the technical difficulties inherent in their research compared to larger helminthic parasites (Lom and Dyková, 1992). Current studies of parasites in shrimps are mostly marine species (Chakraborti and Bandyapadhyay, 2011; Lightner and Redman, 1998). Due to the relatively low level of understanding of parasites in freshwater shrimp farms, the lack of effective treatment may lead to escalating problems." This will hopefully be changing! You can see Big Mama on the green bean, and the other two shrimp coming over the rocks toward the green bean. They crack me up! The snails are all headed to the green bean, too!

Crowntails are my favorite! The females are perpetually eggy, lol. From back in my breeding days, a conditioned female getting ready to be introduced to the male.

My nitrates are still fluctuating, apparently in response to feeding the shrimp. Mornings after green beans nitrates will be at 10 ppm After the small water change and ferts, nitrates hit 20 ppm and drop overnight. I think I am underfeeding the entire system😅

As long as you wait until the 20 gallon is well seasoned, and seed it with good snacks like blackworms, or scuds, or some other microfauna (which conveniently come on pretty much all plants except tissue culture) the endlers can go up to 2 weeks without being fed. They just need lots of plants for the fry to hide in, and duckweed is also an acceptable food source as far as endlers are concerned. They key is to have a well-seasoned aquarium that has evidence of microfauna (I include baby scuds as microfauna). For your kitchen tank, you can make a lid with egg crate light diffuser. Either get fancy and put clear glass or polyvinyl on top, or polycarbonate or plexiglass. The egg crate does a great job holding more pothos in place. I'm currently playing with saran wrap over the egg crate, so I can play with my plants more easily. It's easy to use a few zip ties to creat a "hinge" to make it easier to feed fish/shrimp.

I don't have lids that prevent evaporation on most of my tanks. I keep a few gallons of ZeroWater (like RO, but without the effluent) to top everyone off with until I do a water change. Otherwise, the tank turns into a box of of liquid calcium, lol. My shrimp tank has a solid lid, I think that's it...

If you go read the genetic info on bettas on the IBC page, it starts to make sense. Back when I was breeding, a proper black and then the purple, were like Holy Grail colors in the betta community.

@mountaintoppufferkeeper like these?