laritheloud

Thank you, gardenman. I struggle with anxiety troubles so of course my first impulse was to wring my hands rather than enjoy that my fish are happy in my tank. It's my issue to deal with, and I've calmed down since then. I have 3 gourami (one thicklip and two honeys) that are just about to clear quarantine. I'm scheduling them to be moved into the display next week. In the meantime, I'm actually running out of storage space for all the fish stuff I have, I'm running 3 filters concurrently on the 29 gallon (to switch from an aquaclear 50 to a tidal 55), and I'm about ready to invest in a 40 gallon breeder or a 55 gallon to go in my fish room. The extra cabinet space is going to help a lot. If it ever becomes a problem, I can move them to the bigger tank. I really love seeing the little ones grow up, and they're extremely cute to see little juvenile fish joining the school. What I was most worried about is overstocking my 29, but I've heard that it'll be okay if a few tetra make it and expand the school. I don't have any plans to add any more fish to the display at this time (though I was toying with the idea of a male honey, and I've been since second-guessing so I'll wait on it for awhile). Here's the stock currently, including all the surviving fry I found in the tank: 6 corydoras elegans 9 diamond tetras 3 mystery snails 2 nerite snails 4 or 6 amano shrimp, I usually only see 4 at a time but I put 6 into the tank so I assume they're hiding bladder snail snague (snail plague. But I love them.) It's moderately to densely planted, the hardscape covers the unplanted parts. And then to round it out I'm adding my 2 female honeys and 1 thicklip gourami next week.

Found a third diamond tetra fry today, and I gotta say, it's really stressing me out to keep finding babies. I really just wanted a peaceful community with schooling fish, some corydoras, and my honey gouramis, but the breeding activity wasn't something I was prepared for with the tetras, especially since I heard that they were not easy to breed. My 29 gallon isn't big enough to hold a never-ending supply of tetra so I really have to start netting and taking them in to the store.... *EDIT*: Maybe tetras aren't for me? There's 8 of them including the two new juveniles but excluding the next round of fry, god knows how many there are. I've been contemplating rehoming them and replacing them with a lower-key fish but it just really sucks to stress about fry all the time. I'm super bummed about this, even though it should be exciting.

Water Lettuce was my first real 'floating' plant and I love it. It's large and easy to control growth of new plants because of the size. It does a great job cleaning the water and clearing nitrates in my small tank in about a week. I'm going to move some trimmings to my display, too.

Nerite snails are extremely difficult to breed. The eggs hatch in brackish water, then I've read around that you move them to marine water, then back to brackish... I have heard it's really hard to successfully feed the larval stage and most die quite early on even if the hatch is successful.

Nerite eggs, most likely! Female nerites will lay eggs but they will never hatch.

Wow, that's quite a change! Most of my snails have a noticeable line where they joined my tank, but only my zebra nerite changed striping direction.

Gosh when I compare the photos she looks SO much better!!! Also I think our thicklip gourami is also a female, what do you think?

I'm back with an update! I treated the quarantine tank with two rounds of General Cure. At around the second dose of the first round, I started seeing evidence that the treatment was working on the juvenile; there was one night after the second dose when she struggled to pass a very distressing looking poo (quite long, could have just been intestinal irritation or a tapeworm, I couldn't find it during cleaning). After that she steadily improved. The first week we got her she would rest overnight quite a bit. Not fully lying down like her shop-mate that died, but resting. She was very small and skinny. Halfway through the third week she's done it less and less. Now it's nearing the one-month mark, and I'm seeing zero bottom sitting. She's out and about, enjoying the floating plant trimmings I put in the tank, eating vigorously, gaining weight, and growing. Poop all looks normal. The other two gouramis never showed signs of illness and are still doing great. If everything is looking good, I don't need to do a third round of treatment, right? I'm planning on keeping them in quarantine for at least another week and a half without meds, then I want to move them to the community tank. That will be about 5 to 6 weeks total in quarantine. I know it is best practice to reset the quarantine clock when symptoms clear up. Should I hold them in the 10 gallon quarantine for an extra 3 weeks then? I want to make sure I'm giving them the safest, healthiest start I can.

oh 100%. I watched a teensy baby bladder snail clean off an enormous Anubias Barteri leaf in one day. Not a speck of brown left on it, and it systematically moved to another leaf the next day.

All this time I was thinking the cories were eating them all... until I saw a big tan-colored mass beneath that moss. Dang shrimp! I ordered mine, but even the amanos at the LFS were very small. They've got a ways to go with their growing, but they've been through at least 2 or 3 molts since I got them a couple months ago.

I love my Amanos, but they're definitely not the workers I was expecting -- not yet anyway. I think mine are still too young. 🤣 Currently they're the tank sneaky jerks, always hatching evil plots under a specific clump of java moss and stealing the corydora tablets for their very own.

Is it daylight? My cories tend to be most active in the mornings and in the evenings. They chill out on and off throughout the day.

This is my absolute dream. I'm starting to plan my next tank, which will be at least 90 gallons but I hope to get something as big as 120 gallons for fancy goldfish. I love seeing that your goldfish are doing so well with all of this plant life! I'll probably end up with something a bit more sparsely planted, but I'll just quietly admire what you've done here. Simply gorgeous. Do you have any tips for someone just starting out with goldfish?

Thanks, rotating the pic helps. It looks like a root to me!

I don't actually have an answer for you, but how do you breed by color? We started with I <i>think</i> just one, and the one snail was a dark copper tone. That snail has produced offspring in shades of gray, beige, yellow, and dark copper. Do you tease out the colors and hope to keep the line a purer color? I'd assumed my one snail reproduced hermaphroditically but I'm not sure if that's actually the case. This is really really cool. What colors do you have right now? And they're not pests to us, either. We love these little guys.

I haven't experienced fungus on my snails, but I did nurse a mystery snail back to health after an apparent poisoning incident (came that way from my local petsmart). When mystery snails (not sure about nerites but it could be similar) experience copper poisoning or a high toxin in their environment, their foot will curl and wrinkle and produce a cottony white discharge with black specks. It looks like cotton fungus, but it is in fact a discharge that is a sign of irritation. Clearing the water of whatever is poisoning them (copper, ammonia, nitrites, some other heavy metal) and time helps them to heal. I gave my ill snail a space of its own to heal up, along with very clean water, and in a week it opened up into a very active and normal mystery snail with no sign of irritation. If that's what your nerites are experiencing, it's pretty simple to clear up. I'd just use normal tap water, don't mess with hardness and kh because it looks like it's fine for your snails. Have you checked for copper? EDIT to add: I don't know if there's anything wrong with this nerite snail in particular, though. The sides of their bodies often look like that, and the foot looks like it's nice and flat and functioning.

I have a gold female and a wild type female, and I find my gold female incredibly docile and my wild type female a touch food-aggressive but nothing major. I don’t have a male yet but my LFS typically carries wild types!

I have consistently heard that honey gouramis do better in groups! I hope someone with more extensive experience with honey gouramis chimes in, though. I don't want to steer you into getting a third gourami when I'm not sure it'll alleviate the behavior. It's likely the male will always chase around females and get a little territorial when he's in a breeding mood and nesting, but I've also heard that honey gourami aggression tends to be very mild overall.

Is there anything else in the tank? I think 3 in a 20 long could definitely work. If you don't have floating plants, add some.

Oh, this is so sad. I'm sorry this is happening! I have two female honey gouramis and was planning on hopefully adding a male to them, but this is telling me to think twice before doing so. I hope your female and male can cool off and live happily, whatever you choose to do.

No, don't put a clown loach in a 29. They thrive in groups and need very large tanks!

I do not. The corydoras occasionally find and eat their egg clutches but I just let them do their thing. I like snails too much to do anything about it.

It will reproduce, lol. We started with one and now they're all over. I love them!

I looooove catfish, snails, shrimp. I'm not worried about the shrimp, there's plenty of biofilm and algae for them to feast on. BUT I know that Mystery Snails are big eaters, and I'm never quite sure what the corydoras are subsisting on. They are growing and active, though, I'm just worried about whether I'm feeding too much.

I leave Sundays as a fast day. I do have a question regarding overfeeding/underfeeding/feeding just enough. I have 3 mystery snails and 6 corydoras in my display tank. I tend to feed my diamond tetras first to keep them busy, a pinch of flakes that they can eat in about 60 seconds or less. Then I drop in a pinch (and I mean a pinch) of repashy soilent green or community plus and one tab/one half a tab (depending on the size of the tablet) of sinking wafer for the corydoras. My mystery snails look pretty good... I do supplement them with fresh veggies once a week or so. But they also seem to munch on the fresh new shoots on my water sprite. How do I balance 'not overfeeding' with making sure my bottom feeders get fed? And inevitably the tetras swoop down and try to steal tablets and repashy once the flakes are done because they're little piggies.