laritheloud

No fry but this is the current status of the endler tank: Big guy is more active and vigorous again, hiding less. He’s getting chased by the other boys constantly. I have never had fry and I’m pretty sure he has a gonopodium, but would the other endlers be attempting to mate with the big guy just as a form of harassment??? I don’t know what to think. I did do one round of levamisole so far but it’s hard to say if that helped, the extra wondershell helped, or if he just improved on his own. any thoughts? https://streamable.com/9imcs9

That's exactly what I'm hoping it is! I noticed she dinged a few scales when she swam off from the male chasing her, too. Thanks for humoring me, Colu. 🤗

Hi, I noticed the thicklip love of my life has this single white spot on her caudal fin. It’s only one, it’s gotten more noticeable through the week but it hasn’t spread and no other fish have spots. No evidence of ich, no flashing. The male gourami chases the ladies because he is trying to nest in a corner so I see them being slightly rough. I’d love to hear that I’m worrying about nothing! I love reassurance! Note: She is acting 100% normal, eating normally, swimming normally, and generally acting fine. Just this one spot that's got me uptight. Ammonia 0 nitrite 0 ph 8 nitrate about 30 to 40 temp at 77 degrees fahrenheit

@CalmedByFishcorrect me if I'm wrong, OP, but I believe he means Blue Three-Spot Gouramis. I think I recall him asking about growth rate for gourami fry, or it might have been someone else! But yes, labyrinth fish take forever to mature.

Need: A planted tank light for a 20G long Want: A fancy pleco, a small group of kuhli loaches for my 10g, to figure out how to encourage my thicklipped gouramis to breed Wish: A dedicated, stunning fish room with enough space and floor support for all the tanks I want (including a 125G+ tank). But for now... I'd just like a 125-130G tank and a sturdy stand to go with it, enough room for four or five adorable fancy goldfish and a couple of dojo loaches. Another Wish: For all of my wet pets to live healthy, long, happy, stress-free lives with me so we can enjoy each other ❤️ And for my municipal water hardness to be more predictable.

I have a pair of 10 gallon tanks on the same counter. No issues. I'd feel okay with a 20 or 30 in the kitchen, though my husband expressed reservations. We renovated the kitchen when we moved into the place (down to the studs and reinforced the floor joists), so I know it's solid AND perfectly level.

Ohhh what color? The older Amazon listings have the wet/dry pics, the newer ones (under the label Aqua Naturals) do not.

@GameCzar I'm loving the Pisces aquarium gravel! I have silver pearl in one tank and I'm putting Midnight Pearl in my 20 long. Pretty, easy to clean, small grain and smooth. I also appreciate the wet/dry photos.

Try Taiwan or Christmas Moss. Taiwan Moss grew very well in my tank before I got tired of it and ripped it out.

Thanks everyone for being so kind. I apologize for my bit-of-a-meltdown last night. I'm a little embarrassed that happened. It's been a hard week, and the holiday times are usually pretty rough for people living with debilitating mental illnesses. Thanks for bearing with me. I took the night to calm down and hope all my invertebrates would pull through the levamisole treatment i attempted. They appear to, though they've slowed a bit and they're acting a little drunk. Hoping they recover with some time. The fish look all right. The sick one is still swimming funny and attempting to eat, but he was out, up, and in the fray with the rest of his fraternity. @Brandon p you bring up a great point about making sure it's a he! I wondered the same thing at one point. The first time I noticed the group chasing him around he had a very generous meal and was getting harrassed by all the males in the tank. I had suspected at the time that we got an accidental female in our group of males, but after watching him for an hour or two throughout the day, he definitely has a gonopodium. And we've had him for six months with zero signs of fry or pregnancies in sight. There certainly should have been babies by now if we had an accidental female. So I chalked up his difference in size and body shape as a part of his guppy-endler hybrid genes and let it be. I do believe he might be getting badgered to death, and it could be chronic stress that instigated the disease. The endlers are in a 10 gallon tank, and I had originally intended for it to have a maximum of 8 male endlers only. I ordered 8 and ended up with 14 including the extras in the bag, so... whoops! I planted it up, over-filtered the 10 gallon, put them through extensive parasite treatment in quarantine, and all seemed okay for awhile. I "knew" we had hard, alkaline water here, and figured they would thrive with our hardness levels. Of course, municipal water had a different idea. 🤪 It's astonishing that half the wells in town have virtually 0 hardness (turns a tinted color on the titer test at 1 drop) and the other half have a 10-12 dGH. Not fun to deal with as an aquarist, either. I think the wondershells should be sufficient until I notice the water turning again, or at least, I hope they are. I've been checking dGH pretty diligently whenever one dissolves completely to see where we're at before adding another. I've been dropping them in conservatively so I don't shock any of my critters, either. I also read more about livebearer disease and that, sometimes, it's not exactly preventable or predictable. I found it extremely reassuring to read that it doesn't transfer to other species and, a lot of the time, it might not even effect more than one or two individuals in a tank. So I'll keep an eye on the guy who's struggling and take it day by day. I won't be giving up, because I love this hobby, I love my beautiful tanks, and I love my wet pets. My problem is that I get a little too attached, and I have some extreme perfectionist tendencies due to my mental illness that sneak past my efforts to work past them. I'm doing my best for these guys to work around the difficulties that arise. Thank you again, everyone, and for slogging through this doozy of a post. Sorry for the TMI and the dissertation!

I'm trying. Maybe I'll shy away from more livebearers for now, though.

Ok, so after calming down for a few breaths I re-measured my GH in the endler/shrimp tank and it's at 10 or 11 dGH (where it was at before I lost my hardness)... so I actually think it's okay? My larger tanks are at 5, 6, or 7 but the 10 gallon has been around 7 or 8 and I just added another extra small wondershell yesterday.

I've always been scared to use water additives. Is Seachem Equilibrium safe to use? I didn't want to suddenly increase the hardness in the tank when I know they need a gradual adjustment, like it was when my hardness decreased. And I know that my water will shift back to harder water when the well sources shift again. 😞 This is very stressful. Thanks for your guidance, in any case. I hope I don't lose any more fish this month.

Will crushed coral raise my already high KH? I don't know if crushed coral will work very well in high KH low GH water.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh it's probably too late for him, he's lying down on the substrate 😞 I can add more wondershells but I'm not sure what else I can do. I'm very frustrated that my water changed so drastically. EDIT: Sorry, I'm just feeling discouraged about this. I had been borderline obsessive about checking my water quality, and I know I've mentioned elsewhere on this board that I have clinical OCD that makes it hard for me to stop 'checking' sometimes. My municipal water is something I can't control, and I'm afraid to take it a step further and invest in RO/DI and remineralizing.

https://streamable.com/v67ero Just got a clearer video of how he’s swimming and flashing right now. He’s the bigger guy on the left at the start of this video. Have you seen this before @Guppysnail?

Hey @Brandon p I'm going to try to be a bit more clear about what's happening so you know what I'm facing! The pH has always been high at baseline in my tanks, around 8.0 to 8.2. I try to avoid choosing strictly soft water fish for that reason, and I figured livebearers would be safe in this water, discounting the lack of GH which I'm attempting to compensate for. The worms I see in the tank are very few that I can see. I only occasionally see one swimming around in the water near the floating plants, or maybe one or two in the gravel. In the 10 gallon tank they live in I have never seen detritus worms. I do see the occasional hydra, but not enough to take over. The shrimp and my giant colombian ramshorn keep the tank really clean. I change the water at about 20-25% once per week, and add in a small wondershell as needed. I do not have a planaria problem. I have seen rhabdocoela, but only one or two in the bigger tanks. My shrimp colony has been thriving quite well, and it's only this one endler exhibiting issues at the moment in this tank. I did choose to try levamisole again and I'll try prazipro between levamisole treatments. The tank is lights-off at the moment while the levamisole does its thing. I use separate equipment for cleaning all of my tanks. I don't really want to try Fenbendazole or Flubendazole because I really love my snails and other inverts and don't want to kill them!

So @Brandon p are you suggesting I use levamisole on the tank again after 6 months? Because I have seen detritus worms in some of my tanks (presuming all of them) but I can't fathom how that would be distinguishable from these photos. I feel a little suspicious and wary if I'm not seeing a large volume of worms that this would be the case, especially since I treated with Levamisole and General Cure in the past -- granted it was months ago, but the tank has not changed in that time apart from how I defined water changes above. I do not feed live foods, but I feed some frozen daphnia as a treat.

Thanks again, @Guppysnail. It's tough when fish can't tell us what's up. So hard to know what to try or if it is anything to treat, especially when you think you've covered your bases already!

It's actually the biggest one in the tank. He used to be the plumpest, but he was always getting bothered and badgered by the other endlers and spent a lot of time retreating. I watched as I fed them this morning and he pecked at some food but didn't swallow. I have praziquantel, too, and I'm unsure which step to take next. Thank you for the kind words. I've had a bit of a rough week as I lost another Mystery Snail, one of my pseudomugil signifers, and one of my Rabbit Snails. The Rabbit snail was pretty old when I got it, I think, and it was 4 inches long... we have some babies that came of it and the remaining two adults still look good. I don't know why I have poor luck with Mystery Snails. The white snail perished after slowing down for the last week, while my black snail is HUGE and happy as a clam. EDIT: Of all the times I've tried Levamisole, whether proactively or to try and treat something, I've never seen any worms when I cleaned the tank after 24 hours. So maybe Levamisole isn't the treatment to use? I'm not sure if it treats any parasites that aren't visible to the naked eye.

And I'm back again with a problem in another tank. 😞 One of my guppy/endler hybrids is acting funny. He's skinny, his swimming is very... loopy? It's less controlled, and he makes wide swings from side to side. He's been flashing, and he isn't eating. The tank has been incredibly stable for six months, save for one detail: my municipal water has changed recently to have a near-zero GH, so I've been dropping WonderShells into the tank to compensate. It contains a colony of blue dream neocaridina shrimp and a colombian ramshorn snail in addition to the 12 endlers I have left after one passed due to a growth in his mouth a month ago. Additionally, the temperature in the room has been very cold and I had to upgrade the heater with a water change yesterday. Water temps were at around 75 degrees, and with the heater upgraded it's back up to 77-78 Fahrenheit. Other params: GH 5-6 with wondershells KH 10 Ph 8.2 Amm 0 Nitrite 0 Nitrate 10 I've used two rounds of levamisole on these guys when I first got them, and three rounds of paracleanse two weaks apart each. Is it time to do another deworming? Here’s a video. It’s a bit blurry but hopefully you get the picture. https://streamable.com/lpks5i

Thank you. I'm most worried about the rest of the tank, because the thicklip gouramis are my loves. However, I'm seeing absolutely no signs of issues, and from day 1 he was the only one who struggled along. Your help and advice is invaluable as always. I know I did what I could for him, and hopefully the rest of the tank will be just fine.

I chose to euthanize. I put him in a small container and this is the best he could do for swimming

Found him hardly able to swim and spiraling around the tank this morning @Colu. I am pretty sure he’s not going to make it, but my question now is what do I do about the 55 gallon tank? They are all visibly fine and have been for the 3 months they’ve been in the same tank. I’m not sure if I should drop any treatment in there just in case when I have no idea what this is, but I don’t want my other fish to get this either.

Yep, I'm keeping it up and watching carefully. We'll see what happens!