Dark River Aquatics

It’s easier than you might think!!! I’ve made a bunch of planted overhead sumps, plastic window planter boxes are a great shape and fairly cheap off Amazon - I use those with a bulkhead on one side to return water to the tank, and either a power head or canister filter return to pump water up into the boxes. Personally I like using a mix of lava rock gravel & flourite as substrate/root media because it doesn’t float like leca does, and then it’s just a matter of adding plants. I’ve had good luck with a wide variety of houseplants, emersed forms of aquarium plants, basil, mint, and a few others - although mint takes over VERY quickly and tends to choke everything else out. You got this! There are a lot of videos on YouTube about building above-tank sumps, then it’s just a matter of building something tailored more to plants than to actual “filtration”. Although the amount of substrate media & plants do provide a whole lot of filtration at the end of the day. I would also look into the effects of water conditioner on plants grown for consumption - when I started doing this years ago the internet warned that certain types of conditioners would build up in plants to levels that can become toxic when consumed by humans, but I don’t remember anything more specific than that. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!!

Hmmm, looks like I still need to practice with the formatting a little bit but we’re getting better! Progress, not perfection 🙂

It’s been a busy week and a decent amount of aquarium stuff got did! Hopefully I’ve figured out how to format these posts a little better too Before getting into what I had planned to post about, the Oscars did a thing this week… Apparently they are M&F, it’s the first time I’ve seen them spawn and luckily they’re the world’s most placid Oscars and they didn’t get very defensive or aggressive towards the other fish, and the eggs appeared too white to be fertilized and were eaten overnight…. Phew, because I am in no way physically, financially, mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with a bajillion baby Oscars… But on to the intended post - I did finally plumb the planted sump onto the 40g last weekend and didn’t get around to posting it until now, but it got did! This sump project actually started about two months ago, I found a big plastic tub planter thing at Home Depot - no idea what the volume is, I’m guessing around 8-10g maybe? It’s a peculiar shape but it works. The original plan was to try red mangroves so I did some research and the internet told me they like a fine, silty, compact substrate with some open water on top. Considering there would be open water in the sump, I thought it would also be a neat idea to keep cherry shrimp & scuds in this sump and let the babies wash through the overflow down into the main tank as an occasional treat for the fish - a freshwater refugium if you will. It’s probably over-engineered but I ended up putting a divider into the sump to have a mix of soil & deep sand on one side, and a simple thinner sand bed closer to the bulkhead with more of a water column over it. The substrate is soil from my yard mixed with flourite, probably 2” deep, with about 3-4” of Black Diamond blasting sand over it, and a couple inches of open water above that. I intentionally mixed the layers together a bit as the sand was being added, so it ended up being closer to 1” of dirt/flourite, an inch or two of dirt/flourite/sand, then a couple of inches of sand to fully cap it. I usually make overhead sumps with a mix of flourite & lava rock gravel with plants directly rooted in the substrate, but for this setup with a few inches of inert sand and a few inch deep water column I decided to use hydroponic baskets for the plants - this would allow the use of flourite/lava rock which I’ve had good results from and trust to get the job done, it would support the plants much closer to the water surface and ensure only the roots would be submerged, and it would make the setup more modular allowing easy rearranges of stuff. The mangroves would be loose in the sump, and various sizes of modular plant baskets would give plenty of options for different selections of plants and flexibility in their arrangement. I started with peace lily and parlour palms and added more species over time. I also got a heater just and made sure it would fit - I allow the room to get fairly cool in the winter and with a lot more evaporative cooling from the flow with no cover on this sump, the heater is there as a fallback safeguard in case the tank ends up cooling down too much. I cut & fitted the bulkhead in place, and used some zip ties to cinch the side walls together and prevent bowing/flexing/sagging when the container is filled. The internet told me mangroves like a decent amount of light, so I ended up ordering a gooseneck LED lamp with three separate 6500k 25w heads, with a built in dimmer & timer. The lamp is secured on a stand of 2” PVC that’s just pushed into the substrate and secured to the side of the sump with some zip ties - with this will allow a lot of flexibility in the height of the lamp heads to adjust it over time as the plants grow. I’m not wild about the color rendition - it’s very yellow compared to the other tank lights and I find it obnoxious, but overall the setup seems to work well. Then I basically let it sit for close to 2 months. With the amount of soil used I wanted to give it plenty of time to cycle and make sure I wasn’t attaching an ammonia bomb to the tank, so I let it marinate for a couple of months with occasional water changes and took my time adding plants. Unfortunately the mangroves aren’t doing very well and I’m not quite sure why - I took a week to acclimate them to freshwater, and they have direct 75w of light for 12hr a day but a couple have withered away to nothing and the remaining ones are still green but haven’t grown much. I’m not sure what I’ve been doing wrong and I’m not much of a mangrove keeper yet…. But! The other plants are going gang busters. The peace lily has multiple flowers, the parlour palms are growing steadily, and I’ve since added: -green pothos -marble queen pothos -anthurium -green arrowhead -monstera deliciosa -horsetail rush -chameleon plant -inch plant -lucky bamboo Turns out that the baskets are not, in fact, as modular as I thought - some plants like the peace lily, arrowhead, and anthurium have developed extensive root systems very quickly and anchored themselves into the deep substrate bed. At least they’re happy though. Last weekend I decided it was time to get the whole thing running. I fitted some 1” PVC pipes to use as an outlet, and found a cheap HOB at Walmart to use as a diffuser / water catcher thing with the lid & cheap stock mediate moved. It also houses a sponge block with some more pothos, mostly just to maximize the available space and to grow in over time and add to the jungle look. The outlet pipes are PVC cemented together in certain places and friction fit in others to prevent leaks but also allow it to detach easily as needed, painted black to look a little better, and I spent some time playing with the orientation of the elbows and drilled holes in the end of the outlet to minimize noise - it’s completely silent now aside from the flow exiting the HOB and isn’t any better or worse than if the HOB was powered and running on its own. It’s been running for about a week now and so far so good. It’s powered by one of the two Sunsun canisters running on this tank, I simply added some extra hosing to the outlet and attached it to the sump, and gravity does all the work returning water to the tank. There’s also a ball valve on the outlet to throttle the flow down a little bit - I’m a fan of gentle, slow filtration and have no idea how many GPH this system is but it doesn’t matter as long as it has some moving water. The container on the bottom shelf of the rack houses scuds, and I’ve already added a couple scoops of them to the sump and they promptly disappeared into the roots. Cherry shrimp will go in soon, I have a bunch growing out in another tank and they’ll be added probably with a small amount of leaf litter to cultivate food and the freshwater refugium will hopefully work as planned. I’m really liking it so far 🙂 Lastly I ate an avocado the other day and decided to repurpose some of those little black plastic plant pot things as a holder for the avocado pit, and attempt to grow that as well. I just cut the bottom off of one pot, glued it to a second one, and voila - we have an avocado cradle! If the mangroves end up failing, as they seem to be, hopefully this thing will still give some height and varying leaf texture to the setup. And that’s it! The 40g is now running significantly more plant mass, the overall system is looking pretty good to my eye, and hopefully the fish will end up with an occasional snack of baby inverts. Thank you to everyone who has been reading my rambles, I’ve been enjoying making these posts!

Welcome, and gorgeous setup! Looking forward to seeing more!

Just a small update after a relaxing tank maintencey sort of afternoon - removed 99.9% of the duckweed from the 40g today and generally spruced it up, and removed the rotala macrandra from the back left corner of the Tefé 15g and replaced it with some hygrophila sunset and a few stems of ludwigia ovalis. It feels good being able to see into the 40g better now that the duckweed isn’t blocking a lot of the light 😄 The Tefé babies are also starting to show some patterning in the tails! Super excited about that Planning to finally plumb that planted sump on the top shelf of the rack into the 40g tomorrow, got the bulkhead siliconed up this afternoon and properly sealed, cut and dry fit all of the overflow pipes, and potted up the last few plants to fill it out. I absolutely love planted overhead sumps, there are a few pictures of the setup on my Oscar tank attached - with some luck and a lot of Easy Green this one will be as lush!

Hopefully I’m not the only lunatic here who likes to get creative with Repashy - Tonight’s a la carte item for the apistos & cories is Igapo Explorer, some freeze dried tubifex cubes shredded up in a cheap herb grinder, and a sprinkle of daphnia for extra complexity 😄

I think it looks awesome! Love that piece of wood and the sand

What do you do when you order a bunch of dwarf hairgrass from the Coop, and each cup comes overflowing with grass & runners and is way more than you banked on getting? I figured it was great justification for setting up a nano tank 😄 Luckily there was a sale going on at one of the box stores and I got a small 3g cube for cheap, and decided to scrounge rocks from the woods behind my house and put together a dirted shrimp tank. I already had plenty of dirt, aqua soil, aragonite, a light, some misc plants, and cycled coarse sponges aplenty so I ordered a Finnex PX-360 and a ball valve, sourced a few other filler plants from a local store, and put this together in an afternoon. I am a complete psychopath and love canisters, so the Finnex + ball valve seemed like a logical move because why not put a full blown canister on a 3g? The equipment is an Aqueon 3 cube, Finnex PX-360 filter full of aged coarse sponge pulled from other filters, a Two Little Fishies brand ball valve on the outlet hose to throttle it, a Nicrew 7W LED gooseneck lamp (started with a 10W and decided to scale it down after the first week), and dirt/Flourite/Fluval Stratum for the substrate with rocks straight from my backyard. The substrate was mixed with equal parts yard dirt, sphagnum peat mix, and Flourite dark for the base layer mixed with water squeezed out of established canister sponges to seed it with goop & bacteria, then capped with Fluval Stratum. I’ve had great luck with this approach in the past and IMO there does seem to be some magic that happens using straight up soil with a lot of established filter goo - the cycling process happens quickly with the initial ammonia spike, and this tank was able to process the ammonia down and produce nitrates within 48hr. It still takes the normal amount of time for the tank to age and fully establish but hard well water and soil is a great combo IMO. The plants include cryprocoryne Tropica, dwarf hairgrass, some marsilea crenata, hydrocotyle tripartita Japan, a misc unidentified stem plant from a local store (haven’t bothered to ID it yet but if anyone knows the name that would be awesome), and a couple of cuttings of two small types of Buce - I believe they’re mini coin and Kedagang mini but might be wrong. The inhabitants are a handful of cherry neocaridina from a friend of mine, all mixed grade but reproducing like crazy now. They are quickly filling up the tank and some of the juveniles will be moved into a new 75g I’m setting up soon for a growing ancistrus colony. There’s also a big red/orange ramshorn snail, and of course some bladder snails because they’re ninjas and some eggs made it in. At this point the tank has been set up for 2-3 months give or take, there’s a decent amount of green hair algae & green spot algae, I’ve messed with the plant arrangement slightly due to the dwarf hairgrass going wild along the front, and I seldom do water changes anymore. I’ve never fed it aside from occasional very tiny pinches of Bacter AE and just let the tank do its thing. I did end up needing to put some aragonite into the filter due to the ph slowly declining from the soil, but the aragonite buffered it right back up and the ph has been stable ever since. The largest piece of rock seems to be shale of some kind, which has a few small rusty spots but in the past I’ve never noticed any detrimental effects from rusty rocks and after doing some research it would appear that rust isn’t harmful, and the shrimp don’t seem to mind it so I’m keeping an eye on it but am mostly unconcerned unless there are any changes in the shrimps’ health or behavior. It’s not going to win any scaping awards but it’s producing baby shrimp at a nice clip and I recently had to trim the stems and replant the crowns, and despite the algae (which I’m not really opposed to having, it can stay) it’s a mellow little tank and fun to watch. Some of the plants are showing signs of nutrient starvation so I might start dosing the water soon, but will probably just let it ride and see what happens. Pictures are mostly of the build with a few of the critters 🦐🐌

Mine will eat pretty much anything except vegetables, the thing they go nutsest for though has been Repashy Igapo Explorer mixed with Grub Pie, with ground up cubes of freeze dried tubifex worms & freeze dried daphnia mixed in - they go bonkers for it, it was originally mixed up to fatten up my apistos to spawn and the Kuhlis got in on the party

Possibly a stupid question but is methylene chloride the active ingredient in PVC cement? Did some googling and that popped up as one of the first things, I already have some Oatey regular clear PVC cement listing methyl ethyl ketone 78-93-3 as the first ingredient, will this do the job?

Thank you so much! Would it work to glue the strips to the underside of the frame as well? Ideally I’d like to be able to use glass lids, but structural integrity def comes first

Hi all! So I found a used 75g where the price was right (traded for fish & plants), but it needs a reseal and a new cross brace. I’m looking at it as a fun challenge and something new to learn as I always just buy new tanks and this will (hopefully not backfire) as both a basically free tank and a new skill set. So the reseal process looks straight forward enough, but the cross brace is troubling. It looks like it was melted off by a very hot strip light, one side is all melty and the other looks snapped off. I’ve done some preliminary research and found several ideas - ordering a replacement frame (but I’m not sure what brand of tank this is), using a strip of glass siliconed or epoxied to the frame in place of the brace, just slapping a clamp across it, or stripping the top frame completely and eurobracing it. So I guess my question for the collective nerm-mind here is; what do? Please advise 🙂

Loved this read, thank you for the detailed posts! Looking forward to more updates and you have me wanting to experiment using h2o2 instead of meth blue with my next batch of apisto eggs

He’s a menace! Beautiful tank though, love the backdrop of green!

Like some of the others my well water is ph 8.2, gh/kh around 11-12 (Per the API test kit’s results) and I’ve had great luck with snails, neocaridina shrimp, various Corydoras, various Bristlenose and a few random L-number Plecos, and otocinclus. I’d maybe try some snails, bristlenose should do well in that size tank with your other fish, or maybe give Corydoras another go and possibly treat them with some quarantine meds before adding them

The next ongoing project is a 40g Breeder that’s been around for close to a year, this tank started with a piece of wood I got from a friend for fish-sitting while he was on vacation and I decided to build a scape around it. I love the idea of biotopes & naturalistic tanks, so this ended up being a pseudo-biotope-inspired sort of deal. It’s in no way region specific but the goal was to make it feel like a small stream, and to experiment with mild tannin staining, a heavy amount of botanicals, and to give BioHome media a go. The tank is now pretty heavily overstocked but runs at less than 20ppm nitrate at all times, even with 5-10 gallon WC’s every month or two and very heavy feeding (and no gravel vacuuming at all). I’m honestly not sure if that’s because of the BioHome, the plants, the deeper substrate sections with anoxic zones, or a combination but something seems to be working. The substrate in the planted sections is layers of lava rock & SeaChem matrix in the deepest parts, with Flourite Dark and ADA Amazonia Light layered above that. There’s also a couple inch layer of Super Naturals Sunset Gold sand in the foreground (love that sand!) and an ever changing mix of botanicals littered around. I’ve used a lot of mini catappa leaves, Texas live oak leaves, oak leaves & twigs & dried acorn caps from my yard, alder cones, birch cones, coco bracts, sterculia pods, dregea pods, banana stem pieces, jacaranda pods, and probably a few other things that I’m forgetting about. There’s also a lot of mixed, small pieces of various types of wood built up in piles to create complexity and secure spaces for the fish - plus I like the general chaotic, natural look it creates. The filtration was a bit experimental at first, I used two of the Sunsun HW-302 canisters and two of the Sunsun HW-602 booster attachments daisy chained into one of the canister’s intake pipe. The first booster is half coarse foam and half medium foam for mechanical filtration, and the second booster is full of crushed lava rock gravel mixed with SeaChem matrix for some initial aerobic bio filtration. The main canister is then full of BioHome - I used the super sized BioGravel in each tray, then poured the small normal sized BioGravel around it to maximize the available space. This filter also runs a ball valve in the outlet pipe with a spray bar and is at considerably slower flow than it would normally be. My thought process was to slow down the flow to A. not clog up the first booster as quickly and B. to give the BioHome more of chance to develop anaerobic bacteria. Whether or not that worked is open to some debate, but I’ve been happy with the low nitrate levels. The second canister is mainly coarse foam, fine floss, and a single tray of BioHome more intended for polishing and moving water in the tank itself than full cycle nitrate reduction. Oddly enough, the BioHome seems to filter out tannin staining very efficiently and I’ve had a hard time keeping the water tinted - it’s the only variable in this tank that would explain why the tannins get removed as I don’t use any chemical filtration. There’s also a small HOB added a few months ago simply to house some emergent plants, which are pothos and inch plant for now. The inhabitants were gradually added, and there’s a colony of Apistogramma Borellii (1 male, 5 females, and currently 5 rogue juveniles that will probably be removed - especially any males), a small squad of 5 Black Schultzei Corydoras, 5 CW010 Gold Laser Corydoras, mixed schools of 7-10 ember tetras/black emperor tetras/purple emperor tetras, a large and reclusive L-169 Gold Stripe Panaque, half a dozen short fin super red Bristlenose that are growing out and will be moved, two long fin calico bristlenose that have started spawning and will get their own tank within the next week or two, a large female long fin green dragon bristlenose, a few otocinclus, and a whole bunch of bladder/ramshorn/Malaysian trump snails. It is arguably WAY overstocked but I spend a lot of time observing this tank and everything was added gradually and so far all seems well. The feeding is heavy on vegetables, live baby brine, and few types of Repashy, with supplemental frozen and pelleted foods. The stocking is largely because I was curious to see what this system could handle and kept adding things, keeping a close eye on the water and making sure everyone stayed fed and there wasn’t much jostling for space. I’ve only ever lost 1 otocinclus and two ember tetras (both soon after being added), and the original male Borellii lasted about 6 months and dozens of spawns before finding him dead one morning. I panicked when that happened, double checked the water quality for days, and thought maybe I missed something with my preventative medication ritual for new fish but never figured out what the cause was. Overall I’ve chalked it all up as a win, and now that a lot of the BN’s are getting bigger they will be moved out very soon. This tank was at one point grow out space for some of my Rio Paraguay Ancistrus and worked nicely for that so I’ve kept the ball rolling using it as a bristlenose playground when they’re still small, and the amount of food that goes in seems to help keep the ecosystem strong. The plants have changed a bit over time; there are some large red/bronze crypt wendtii, some smaller crypts that i forget the name of (maybe Beckettii?) jungle vallisneria that approaches the 48” mark before I trim them, corkscrew val, dwarf sag, a large dwarf lily that has started putting out babies, some mixed buces, Anubias jalapeño, Christmas & Java mosses, helanthium tenellum, some interesting green algaes, and recently an outrageous amount of duckweed that managed to sneak in. One of these days I’ll work up the energy to purge the duckweed but that’s a pain. The lighting is a cheap Beamswork LED strip on a 7hr photoperiod, and this tank gets light nutrient dosing weekly. I’m in the process of building a planted sump for this tank that still needs to be plumbed in, so that will be its own post somewhere down the road. The pictures are snapshots of the build, the tanks evolution, some of the inhabitants, and the recent addition of a large branch of wood resting on top with pothos runners from the neighboring tank’s planted sump and runners from this tank’s eventual new sump

Thank you for the kind words! I totally agree that planting fairly heavily right from the beginning is important, and probably overlooked. I try to find a balance between a lot of plant mass right from the beginning and leaving enough space for everything to grow in nicely - I’ve definitely overdone it before and ended up with plants competing for space & light, but balancing a tank is so much easier when you start with a lot of plants right from the onset 🙂

Tried to get some better shots of the Tefé babies, their blue markings are starting to come in well

Thanks, I love them too! So much personality in such a little package 🙂 I just posted another entry about the babies & their tank, and have another batch in a breeder box again - I let the mom eat most of the spawns just due to space limitations but these ones have been super fun to care for. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to post videos soon!

After raising the first successful Tefé spawn in a breeder box in my Ancistrus grow out tank, I set up a 15g tank dedicated to the baby Tefé’s. The original intent was to have this be a grow out tank, and eventual permanent home for the best looking keepers out of this spawn - but I went a little overboard with it. The substrate is a mix of 3 parts topsoil from my yard, 1 part sphagnum peat, and 1 part Flourite dark. Above that are thin layers of more Flourite, some crushed lava rock gravel & SeaChem Matrix to build up height and keep it all more aerated, then black blasting sand along the front and Landen Soil built up in the back. The hardscape is just rocks from the woods around my yard, all scrubbed under hot water and put in place. I’ve used a lot of rocks like this over the years and have never run into any issues even if they occasionally rust a bit. The filter is a small Sunsun hang on canister, I’m not wild about it but my usual choice of the Finnex PX-360 wasn’t an option due to being sold out (I’m assuming covid related), so it’s a bit noisy and sucks some air and will be replaced eventually but it works for now. Filter media is a lot of coarse sponge and some established matrix from other systems, and now has a bag of aragonite to help mitigate some mild acidification from the soil mix. The plants include several types of Ludwigia, bacopa and rotala as well as pogo octopus, echinodorus parviflorus, some mixed crypt wendtii’s, crypt spiralis, crypt nurii rosen maiden, AR red mini, dwarf sagittaria, marsilea crenata, Monte Carlo, guppy grass, anubias nana petite, and several different species of Buce. The nutrient dosing has been small amounts 2-3 times a week, and the light is an LED strip I had laying around suspended about 6” above the tank - I believe it’s a NICREW of some kind, and right now it’s on an 8hr photoperiod. There’s been some minor brown diatom buildup and a baby green dragon Bristlenose was added to help mow it down and it’s been doing a great job so far. I let the tank marinate for about 2 weeks before adding any fish even after the water was testing as “cycled” after just a few days, mostly to let the plants establish a bit and settle in. The baby Tefé’s were added at about the two week mark because they had outgrown their breeder box, and there’s roughly 25-30 of them although they’ll be thinned out and a lot will be rehomed. The goal is to pick out the best looking male and 1-2 females to keep the line going and move the rest out before it turns into World War 3 in there. So far they’ve been getting multiple feedings of live baby brine and/or Xtreme Nano 2-3 times a day, and they’re growing like weeds and starting to color up nicely. They’re as bold as their parents and are a lot of fun to watch. The novelty of adding them to this tank was a blast - watching them explore something other than a breeder box and experience a lot of their life firsts was amazing. They didn’t understand what glass was at first, there was a small learning curve experiencing a mild current flow for the first time, and they seemed to enjoy exploring a much bigger space that was all their own. The pictures are mostly of the tank build, substrate layering, plant growth, and the Tefé babies themselves. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to add videos soon as it doesn’t seem to like the ones I try to upload from my iPhone

I guess the purpose of this journal is to document various projects, tanks, builds, etc to share what happens, hopefully gather advice & input, and to alleviate my friends from my insane babbling by having an additional outlet to ramble in 🙂 I don’t, and will probably never claim to be anything more than a hobbyist and am certainly not any sort of expert, but if someone else can learn from this then that would be super cool too I currently have about 10 tanks but we’ll start with a current project, which is caring for and breeding a pair of wild caught apistogramma Tefé which I inherited from a friend. He was breaking down some of his projects and asked me if I was interested in this pair and a wild caught pair of Trifasciata, and jumped on it even though I usually like to take longer establishing tanks. Their tank is a 10g; planted, with a soil under layer and a mixed pool filter sand & gravel cap layer. They appear to be thriving and spawn regularly even in my harder well water which comes out of the tap at ph 8.2, gh/kh both around 10-12 drops (on the API kit). When I first got them I tried slowly softening their water with small additions of RO water over time until I realized they were actively spawning and appeared to be acting normally & happily in the well water so I stopped trying to change it. Other details of the tank include a random plant list of guppy grass, pogo stellatus octopus, a few types of Ludwigia, aponogeton ulcaceus, microsorum durin besar (which is not receiving enough light/co2 to turn orange yet unfortunately), and a mix of crypts. It’s a tank full of leftovers but it’s seemingly healthy enough for the fish so I haven’t messed with it much. There are two small HOB’s which recently had pothos, parlour palm, and inch plant added and there’s a healthy layer of duckweed & salvinia minima as floaters. The tank usually runs at around 5ppm nitrate with small WC’s every month or so, and it gets a very light nutrient dosing once a week. The male Tefé is a lot of fun; he very quickly learned to take food right from the tip of the feeding pipette and is very interactive, he behaves more like an Oscar in his interactiveness than most other apistos I’ve kept over the years - he’s a little bit beaten up, and my friend told me he arrived from the wholesaler like that, but his behavior is very active & inquisitive. He stays clamped most of the time unless he’s displaying for the female, which still causes me a little concern, but he’s been through several preventative medications and doesn’t appear to be ill in any way - the clamping is interesting though. They spawn every 3 weeks on average, and get a lot of frozen brine, live baby brine, But Bite granules, and xtreme nano to fuel them. The female gets moderately feisty when she’s on eggs and keeps the male away, but I’ve never noticed any particular aggressiveness out of her. The eggs do get eaten within 24-48hr if I leave them to her care, I’m assuming because the water is fairly hard & alkaline and they fungus up. After a couple of failed attempts, I eventually pulled the eggs and hatched them in a glass jar of pure RO water + methylene blue + air, and managed to hatch out multiple spawns of fry this way. The babies are now growing like weeds in their own setup which I will document in the next post. Overall I was super happy to have the opportunity to care for these fish, both for the vote of confidence from my friend (who is a way better fish keeper than I am, at least in my eyes), and to have a neat wild caught apisto pair. There was a definite weight lifted after the first successful spawn, I was a little anxious about it and felt a responsibility to them and to facilitate some babies so it was a great feeling when it was finally successful 🙂 The pictures attached are from when I first got them in early February 2020, their early tank setup, and a few progress pictures between then & now

Hi! I used to live out in Franklin county, and am up in NH now so just wanted to say hi to the local fish fam!

Oh, and depending on how far you are from the Nashua area, I will gladly hook you up with some plants!

Hi from New Hampshire (and used to live in MA!) 29’s are great tanks, I think your stock list looks great and second the advice to start with plants right from the beginning - they’re not as difficult to keep as you might think, especially some of the hardier species, and they’ll help keep the system healthier overall and make keeping the fish easier in the long term. Plants like anubias, cryptocoryne, some mosses, Java fern, dwarf lilies, vallisneria, sagittaria, some of the rotala/Ludwigia/bacopa species, some of the echinodorus sword plants, and a variety of others are typically pretty easy to take care of and IMO with a quality substrate, lighting (which it sounds like you’ve got figured out already) and plants right from the beginning you’re setting yourself up for a nice looking and healthy tank. Personally I use canisters as well, I just love them and think the 207 is a good choice. I tend to diverge from Cory’s methodologies in that sense, and with substrate - personally I’ve had the best luck with a nutritious substrate instead of gravel + root tabs but that’s probably just with my personal style because I forget to add tabs as often as they’re needed and like heavily planted tanks. I like to use commercial aqua soils, or dirt from the yard + an aqua soil cap even for easier plants with added fertilizer dosing in the water. It sounds like a lot to absorb & take on all at once but it ultimately boils down to keeping nutrients available via both the substrate and the water, and with some practice you’ll figure it out in no time. Even if you kill a few plants it’s all part of the learning curve, and you’ll figure out what plants do well for you and which ones are trickier. I attached a pic of my own 29g, it’s a few years old now and used to run injected co2 but for the past year it’s been no co2 with all slower growing plants like Java fern, Anubias, crypts, bucephalandra, mosses, Crinum calamastratum, and a few others. It’s an aqua soil substrate, two small canisters and a small sponge filter, a cheap beamswork LED, and it gets weekly light doses of nutrients to the water. It’s a little messy these days because I don’t ever gravel vac, but the fish have been going strong for a few years and some of them have been spawning like clockwork. A lot of this hobby is just time and a willingness to experiment and learn, so jump on in and have some fun figuring it out as you go!

Hello! I’ve listened to/watched the Coop videos for a long time and have been meaning to join the forum for a while and finally did it 🙂 I live in New England and have kept tanks off and on for 20 or so years, as entertainment and as therapy for anxiety and The Big Sad. I keep freshwater, all planted tanks and mostly smaller South American fish at this point - currently mostly different species of apistogramma, ancistrus, cories, mixed tetras/pencilfish, some guppies, and a larger cichlid tank with Oscars and a few others (it is currently a 75g and will become a 150-180 soon). I dabble with scaping and breeding, and am currently breeding/raising triple red cockatoo apistos, Opaline & yellow head borellii, and juveniles from wild caught pairs of Trifasciata & Tefé. Also breeding & raising Ancistrus Rio Paraguay from a pretty prolific colony, long fin calico BNs, and am growing out some super reds to try next. Oh; and mixed mutt guppies too just because they’re fun and it’s dang near impossible not to breed them 🤪 I also try to use a lot of house plants in my systems and have several DIY above tank sumps with various things, the next goal is trying to grow some red mangroves in freshwater. I’ll attach some pictures of a few of my current tanks, some current fish and some fish & tanks from the past - I’m attempting to do this from my phone and am a little technologically challenged so hopefully it works. I’m very much looking forward to finally being a more active member of the community after a long time lurking! Cheers!