HH Morant

I keep a journal for my aquariums. I write down water changes, maintenance, new fish, quarantines, sick fish and treatments, and any changes that I feel are worth noting. It is just a ring binder, so I can add pages. It helps me remember when I made changes, like adding an under-gravel filter or changing filter media. It also gives me a place to put co-op stickers.

I considered getting a backup UPS at one point, but I was unimpressed by the run time. Keeping the filters, heater, and air pump working for a couple of hours is not enough. Aeration is the most pressing need when the power goes out. I have several air pumps with built-in lithium battery backups (first picture below). They start running on battery power automatically as soon as the electricity goes off. They last for 9 hours or so. I also have 3 air pumps that work on flashlight batteries (second picture below). If I lose power during the hurricane season, not having a working heater is not a big deal because the weather is hot. In the Big Freeze in February 2021, I lost power and it was really cold in the house, I had to put hot water in the aquarium every 4 hours or so to keep the temperature up. I was changing so much water that way, I did not worry about filtration.

Changed water downstairs, too. Did not get through until late.

Changed the water in the upstairs tank which has about 50 juvenile angels in it.

You are right, Paracleanse and General Cure are the same thing. They both contain metronidazole and praziquanel, and in the same amounts.. I assume that you are putting the medication in the water column. If the fish have not stopped eating, medication in the food will work better. Some people (including me) believe that medication for internal parasites is effective only in the food, and has no effect if it is super-diluted in the water column. See AquariumScience.org article entitled "Fish Don't Drink." 12.5. Fish Don’t Drink (aquariumscience.org) There are multiple methods of making medicated food. See 12.7. Making Medicated Food (aquariumscience.org)

Dude! There are no fish in your aquariums! Get some fish! They will mess up your water parameters right away!

If you have some Repashy Super Green or Soilent Green it is easy to add medication when you mix it. I don't know what medications are snail/shrimp-safe because I don't have any shrimp and I don't have any snails that I care much about. If you put medication in Repashy, add the medication after it has cooled a bit, but before it solidifies. Exposure to high heat can make some medications ineffective. I agree that snails and shrimp should not be able to out-compete a pleco for food. Plecos can "smell" the food and I would think they are capable of finding it and out-muscling shrimp and snails to get it.

I had 0.5 ppm ammonia in my tap water for a while. The filtration on my tank removed it within 24 hours. If your filtration is not processing 0.25 ppm extra ammonia within 24 hours or less, you may need to improve your filtration. The 0,25 ammonia in your tap water is 0.125 ppm ammonia in your tank after a 50% water change (assuming the tank had zero detectible ammonia before the change). Your filter should be able to handle that easily. I gradually replaced the biological media that came with my canister filters with 30 ppi foam (ppi is "pores per inch"), which is much better than any non-foam filter media. See aquariumscience.org articles on filtration and filter media. The 30 ppi foam boosted the performance of my canisters and gave me clearer water. If you replace your filter media, it should be done gradually. I changed about 25% of mine each month or so. In my canisters, I put the new filter media last in the flow-path of the water, so that beneficial bacteria from the aged media could more easily seed the new filter media.

You're gonna need a bigger boat

The black stripe was back again this morning. Did not have a chance to get a picture. Not sure if it's good or bad.

Here are the same 12 fish around 1:00 pm. There is no black stripe. I can't tell which fish had the stripe before. I am not sure what caused the stripe, but it was apparently triggered by some excitement or mood of the fish.

I used the sodium thiosulfate today to do a 60% water change on my 125 gallon aquarium. I used my meat tenderizer hammer and a cutting board too crush it. It appeared to dissolve immediately just as Safe does. I used more than the label suggests, but I also do that with Safe every time I use it.

OK, below is a link to a thread showing a similar occurrence (with pictures). The first poster thinks he bought a school of praecox, then - two weeks later - one of them gets a black stripe. One poster ("Leahs Tank") explains that her praecox get the stripe when they are excited. The other posters ignore her and speculate on what weird hybrid the fish could be. The key is that the color is transitory. The fish did not look like that yesterday or the first 10 days I had it. I Thought I Had A Praecox But Could It Be Something Else? | Rainbowfish Forum | 400699 (fishlore.com)

What do you think it is? She looked just like the other female praecox in the tank yesterday. Do you think the other fish in the video are praecox?

Changed the water in the 20-gallon quarantine tank yesterday. This morning one of the female praecox rainbows has a black stripe and the males are crazy for her. Is the black stripe a spawning coloration for the female?

When I changed the substrate in my 125-gallon tank, I took a bucket and set it down on the inside the tank on the bottom. I used a scoop first and then a cup to put the sand in the bucket. At the end I just used my hands/fingers to get the last bits. The important thing is to have your container - it could be a plastic cup - inside the tank sitting on the bottom so you don't have to go far with each few pieces that you pick up. That's not very fancy, but it worked for me.

If you want a bunch of fry, cut the leaf off and take the eggs out. The angels won't be as aggressive without eggs to protect. The parents do nothing to care for the fry, and often eat them, so you are not losing anything by separating them. Sometimes they protect the fry from other fish, but you don't need that if you move the eggs to a container with no fish. I have put eggs in a bucket with a heater and an air stone. They were fine. I left them in there until they hatched and became wigglers, just sitting on the bottom. They don't eat at that stage, so you don't have to worry about food until the free-swimming stage. I took a turkey baster and sucked the wigglers up and put them in a 10-gallon aquarium with a seasoned sponge filter. Move some plants or rocks or something from your established aquarium in with the eggs so when they become free-swimming they can have some microscopic stuff to eat. You don't have to fill the 10-gallon tank. Just full enough to cover the sponge filter's lift tube is fine at first. Makes it easier to change the water, which I did every day for the first 2 weeks or so. I hatched brine shrimp for the fry to eat, but I understand that you can get by with very fine fry food. I also used Aquarium Co-op's fry food. Feeding several times a day is good. The problem with taking angel eggs out is this - it is a 4-month commitment to get them to a size the pet shops will buy. And if you have 200 little fish, you need 100 gallons of grow-out space (or more). Most of the time I just leave the eggs in the tank and the fish eat them.

I still have a few (40 or 50) angels in my upstairs tank. Hard to get pictures without glare during the day.

There are some good battery-powered air pumps. I have some that use flashlight batteries. The batteries last a long time, and you could always carry extras. That would remove at least some of the burden from the USB port. I have this one, which is "Amazon's Choice:" Amazon.com: Uniclife Aquarium Air Pump Battery-Operated with Air Stone and Airline Tubing Portable Outdoor Fishing Oxygen Pump : Pet Supplies

Sorry to hear about your discus. I hope they pull through. Thanks for continuing to let us know what is happening. I know it is hard to keep reporting when things are not going well. I am planning a discus tank and reading everything I can to learn.

It would depend on the design of the sump, but in the event of a failure of the siphon/overflow, with most designs the entire capacity of the sump would not be pumped into the tank, just the contents of the pump compartment. With most designs the water flows from the filter media compartment to the pump compartment by flowing over a baffle or through holes in a divider. The holes or the top of the baffle are at or near the top of the operating water level of the sump, so if the siphon/overflow fails, the water level in the filter compartment would only go down to the level of the holes or the top of the baffle. The return pump would empty the pump compartment. That may or may not be enough water to overflow the display tank. If you were using the 29-gallon tank as a sump, with the operating water line at the 17-gallon mark, and if the pump compartment were 20% of the length of the tank (6 inches of the 30-inch length), the pump compartment would hold about 20% of 17 gallons of water, or 3.4 gallons. I never thought about it much, but I guess the smaller the pump compartment, the better. It seems to me that the chances of this kind of failure are greater with a siphon than with an overflow.

I agree that a canister filter is probably a better idea. If you use a sump, you must have enough extra volume in the sump to hold all the water that would be siphoned into the sump if the power goes out and your return pump stops pumping. If your 125 gallon tank is 72 inches X 18 inches like mine, one inch of water in the tank is 5.61 gallons, but really a little less because we should be using inside measurements of the tank instead of outside measurements, so let's say 5.5 gallons per inch of water. If you have your siphon one inch below the water level, you need 5.5 gallons of space in the sump. If you have a 10-gallon sump, that is going to be the smallest sump of all time. Also, having the siphon only one inch below the water line would require very close monitoring of the water level. If the water line gets below the siphon, your return pump burns up. If you have the siphon 2 inches below the water line, you need 11 gallons of spare space in the sump. Add a safety factor of one gallon and let's say 12 gallons. If you use the 29-gallon tank as a sump, that leaves 17 gallons of sump volume, but you have to subtract the return pump section and the mechanical filtration section (if you think you need one) to get the volume for filter media. I would like to see you do it just to see how it works out. But I would use a canister or two, and/or an under-gravel filter

This evening I fed the dwarf neon rainbows in the quarantine tank.