HH Morant

My tiger lotus bulb grew a plant, then I cut the bulb from the plant and it grew another plant. It did not work a third time, though.

I used Easy Carbon in my quarantine tank when it was overrun with green hair algae. I could not see any difference, but I did not give it much time to work. I decided that light was the main problem and started decreasing the light intensity. I could see the hair algae was not such a huge problem after that, but it is still there. I decided the hair algae in a quarantine tank is not so bad because it keeps the water quality perfect. If ammonia/nitrites/nitrates increase, the hair algae increases, and I twirl the hair algae around my aquarium tweezers and pull it out. It is like harvesting nitrogen. In a display tank, hair algae is generally considered more of an eyesore than an asset. I think adjusting the lighting is the best course to control it.

Houston says hello and welcome!

Her you can see the zucchini is losing the fight. The bristlenose fry like zucchini, but I have found that when there is Zucchini and Repashy Soilent Green in the tank at the same time, they go for the Soilent Green first.

For the babies I put the zucchini in the microwave for 20 seconds or so. For adults, I just give it to them raw.

Chowing down. They never stop.

I think the life cycle of ich is about 10 days (maybe less), so without fish the ich should be gone from the tank if you leave it vacant longer than that. Heat is supposed to speed up the life cycle, but I don't know by how much. Correction: After I posted the above, I read an article that says ich can remain dormant in an aquarium for months without fish. So much for the lore of fishkeeping as opposed to science. The article also said established filtration also helps to eliminate ich - another reason to leave the fish in the established tank. I am sure heat can kill ich, but how hot the water has to get, I do not know. I don't know if 92 is hot enough.

Welcome to the forum, Neha! I just noticed you are new here.

One possible explanation for a reading of zero nitrates is that sometimes people do not do the API nitrate test correctly. The API nitrate test is a little tricky. You need to make sure you follow the directions exactly. Put in the 10 drops from bottle number one, invert the test tube two or three times to mix the drops in the water. Shake bottle number two for 30 seconds before putting 10 drops into the test tube. Then shake the test tube for 60 seconds. The underlined part is sometimes overlooked, and can result in a false zero reading.

The carbon does not remove nitrates. I don't know what the explanation is for zero nitrates. With one betta in a 10-gallon tank the fish and fish food are probably not creating much ammonia/nitrite/nitrate. I am not sure if a pump of Easy Green causes an immediate rise in the nitrate level or not. As you pointed out, the plants are consuming some. 3 weeks is not very long. Until the tank is better established, things can be unpredictable. It is best to have patience, keep testing, and do what you need to do to protect the fish. The rest will come with time. One thing I failed to mention before - when you are having an ammonia problem, it might be a good idea to skip feeding for a day or two. Uneaten fish food and fish poop create ammonia. But with one fish, maybe a little food is not such a big deal. It just depends on what your testing tells you. Good luck!

I think I'm going to leave that one alone.

0.5 ppm ammonia is not enough to be toxic to fish, and I assume you decreased that reading by 30% when you did your water change. You should keep testing. Once you know you have an ammonia issue, you should test more often to make sure it is not getting worse. If you are using the API test kit, it measures total ammonia. Some portion of that total ammonia is free ammonia, which is the toxic kind. The higher your pH, the more free ammonia you have. So the higher your pH, the more important it is to stay on top of the ammonia issue.

My bristlenose love zucchini, although I don't boil it. They also eat cauliflower, but I don't have that very often. They also come out at feeding time and eat food that gets to the bottom. Or at least I think they are doing that. Do bristlenose eat things other than vegetable matter?

Wow! You better love angels, because you are going to have a lot of them. Great job and beautiful fish.

There are several methods of scratch repair for windshields which you can find on the internet. I recently "fixed" a small imperfection in my aquarium glass (on the outside) with a windshield repair kit. It made the imperfection much less noticeable. Mine was a small spot rather than a long scratch.

Angelfish are difficult to sex sometimes. With some pairs, I am only sure when I see which one lays the eggs.

Cory with macro lens

You can glue anubias and java fern to anything. A 5 gallon tank will be full if you buy one of each of the plants you list. You can always get more later if you decide its not enough.

Oops, the dosage of Prohibit in cattle and sheep is one milliliter per 50 pounds weight (not one milligram)[corrected]. One milliliter is equivalent to 1000 milligrams (one gram) per 50 pounds weight. Not good at metric.

Expel P is 11.3% levamisole (113 milligrams in a one gram packet). Not sure what the rest of the powder in Expel P is. The dosage is one packet per 10 gallons, so 11.3 milligrams per gallon, a bit more than the 2 milligrams per liter which the presenter in the video says is the (minimum?) therapeutic dose. According to the guy in the video, Prohibit (a medication given orally to cattle and sheep) is 84.7 % levamisole and costs about $20 for 52 grams. The 52-gram package is $25 at Tractor Supply now. The package says it contains "46.8 grams of levamisole hydrochloride activity." The 46.8 figure is exactly 90% of 52 grams. The dosage for cattle and sheep is one milliliter per 50 pounds of body weight. I have used Prohibit before to treat fish food, and I have used Expel P in the water. I don't know how you decide that a treatment was successful. If the fish die, not successful. If the fish survive, I am not sure that means the medication did it. When I used Expel P in the water, some fish died, but some fish did not die. Some of the fish were not eating when I treated the tank with Expel P. My experience has been that if a fish is not eating, chances of survival are not good. When I used Prohibit in the food I suspected internal parasites in some of the fish, but I was not sure. I guess the only way to be sure is to see the worms protruding from the fish's anus in the case of camallanus, but with other internal parasites I don't know how you can be sure that a living fish has them. Anyway, no fish died. All of the fish were eating at the time of treatment. I fed food medicated with levamisole for 4 days and then food medicated with metronidazole for 4 days. I waited a week and repeated.

The Amazon sellers, if they are buying the products from Co-op at full price, are salesmen who work to sell Co-op products at no cost to Co-op. They make money for Co-op. Maybe it is best to leave them alone. That is apparently what Co-op has decided to do.

Going from one aquarium to 23! You are going to convince your SO that you are not afraid of commitment.

I just have an air pump with a built-in battery, which keeps a sponge filter and bubble wand going for more than 9 hours after the power is out, and an extra air stone as well if I am home to put it in. I also have a couple of other battery-operated air pumps, so if I am home I can have several going at the same time. Every time I see something like this, especially during hurricane season (I am in Houston), I think I need to get a back-up natural gas generator for my house.

In February during the Big Freeze down here in Texas, my power was off a lot more than it was on. I figured out that if I got up every 3 hours and removed 5 gallons of water and replaced it with 5 gallons of hot water (my hot water heater was natural gas) I could keep the 120-gallon aquarium within a 2 or 3 degree range (76 to 79). I did try to disperse the hot water when I was pouring it in, but the fish did not seem to mind. But that was a lot of work, and I did not have to do it for very long. My neighbor had power so we ran an extension cord from his house to save my fish. I have good neighbors. You could freeze some 2-liter plastic bottles of water, put them in the tank, and see what that does to the water temperature. Maybe several bottles would could keep the temperature in an acceptable range for hours. You would just have to monitor the temperature to learn what the effect of different numbers of bottles would be and how long they would last.. That way you would not have to remove water and replace it, just take bottles out and put other bottles in.

I'm not sure fish need a stable temperature, since temperatures in the wild fluctuate every day. Sunny days the water gets warmer, Cloudy days, cooler. Rainy days, even cooler. The water is a different temperature 3 feet down than it is at 5 feet or 10 feet, and the fish swim between these depths. But, of course, the water can be too warm for too long. So I think keeping the temperature out of the danger zone is important, but some fluctuation below that is OK. What is too warm for too long? Now that would be valuable, concrete knowledge. I don't know.