Wesley

Those are some big outdoor mini ponds.

Can you please post all water parameters? (Temperature, PH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate, KH / GH) Nitrates at 5ppm is fine and nothing to worry about. I'm not sure why you thought it would be a problem? You just started building an ecosystem that needs to come into balance where fish waste is converted into plant food. I would suggest to read up on these articles: The Easy Guide to the Nitrogen Cycle for Aquariums WWW.AQUARIUMCOOP.COM Are you getting started with your first fish tank? Then you may have heard of something called the “aquarium nitrogen cycle,” followed by a bunch of complicated scientific terms and graphs that seem a little overwhelming. No... Freshwater Fish Tank Cycling - How to Prepare for New Fish WWW.AQUARIUMCOOP.COM Have you ever seen a fish in the wild living in pure, crystal clear water with no other contaminants? Probably not. That’s because life doesn’t flourish in “pristine” conditions, but rather when there’s a whole ecosystem of...

How are your water parameters looking after a week? Is your main aquarium cycled and are there any fish in there? If not do you have a friend / coworker or someone else where you can get some filter medium from? See if you can jump start the cycle by introducing beneficial bacteria to your main aquarium and move the endlers there to give them a bigger volume of water. To me it seems like you never have had the tank cycled or had the cycle crash, somehow. Salt isn't going to fix this issue as the root cause of your problem is chemically and not any disease.

Non virgin females are never guaranteed to use the sperm of only the last male. They can mix any stored sperm packets and quite often they will just simply use old and new though usually after a couple fry drops this ratio shifts to the newer male. What I would do is put the male with a couple females for a couple days, seperate them after and after 6 - 8 weeks the female should start dropping fry. Raise the fry to two months of age and usually you'll be clearly able to tell the traits you want. Cull the ones you don't want and if you want to keep choosing the male / female pairs to sex them early on. This method is what I use to continue line breeding some mutts I found that looked really great.

Thats some great advice you have there @Jessica. I definitely should write that down just in case. Goes to show that different industries can compliment this hobby. I bought some cheap resin decorations from Aliexpress. Should've just stayed away from them, couple came in broken (who sends that crap in a plastic bag) and almost always the paint started chipping, which was unfortunate.

Doubt you'll be able to remove the tiles after they've been siliconed in place, keep that in mind too if you're going to silicone them into a $1000 tank 😛

I'm not sure what an alum bath is. But I'd usually just soak new plants or infested plants in a salt bath for a couple minutes. This almost always kills of the snail eggs and snails. Make sure to rinse the plants afterwards to get rid of any salt.

Have you tried dimming the lights a bit? You can use some tape to cover some LEDs. I think they like to hide in the plants and come out more when its a bit dimmer.

Do you have an accurate PH measurement? In another post you mentioned the temperature was at 77. You say you've been having this tank for at least since the start of the year, has it been cycled before and how have previous water test reading been? Just a thought... Are you sure you are not having ammonia poisoning? .25 seems way to high and the fact you measure no nitrite and no nitrate rings a bell for me indicating that your filter may not have been cycled causing toxic levels of ammonia & bad water which results in these symptoms. Note that ammonia toxicity isn't just tied to the PPM but also to the water temperature and PH. I usually use this calculator Free Ammonia Calculator WWW.HAMZASREEF.COM Aquarium calculator; Estimate the free (un-ionized) ammonia (NH3) concentration, given the total ammonia concentration.

Thanks for the article. I wasn't aware of that situation. That is very unfortunate. Perhaps instead of moving the single wcmm, move the crayfish to a seperate tank and treat the whole tank with aquarium salt. Keep it mind that doing 50% water change is only going to get 50% of the salt out so it might take a while to dilute salt levels down far enough to reintroduce the crayfish. I personally cannot aquire Levamisole where I live, though perhaps Greg from Selectaquatics is able to ship you some to Canada. This helps with internal worms & parasites, which if a salt treatment won't help is probably your best next bet: selectaquatics@gmail.com Levamisole WWW.SELECTAQUATICS.COM Levamisole medication

While I'm not 100% sure, I don't think this is fungus. This seems more of a parasitic cause which would've come from the fish store or any plants you may have brought in. I'm pretty sure there are fish medications in Canada.

How long has this tank been set up with the current stocking? Did you quarantine your fish before they were introduced? I've had a similar issue with my platys recently which I fixed by using salt & change of substrate and parasite medication. Corys recommendation was 1 tablespoon per 3 gallons for my situation. Make sure salt is safe with your current stocking.

Note: I do not use the aquarium coop ferts as I'm not from the states, so I might be wrong here. Also I do normally not use this method. Yes thats normal. What is happening is correct and expected, your plants consume the nitrates which will lower the level of nitrates, which isn't a bad thing per se. Are you seeing new growth since you've planted? I see there is some diatom algea on the gravel and some algea on the walls, which is a good sign. Put in the plants, keep it going for another week or two, get the plants and algea growing and then I think you're good to start introducing fish, just take it slow.

Overstocked, don't do it. Please research the minimum tank size for each species and the recommended school size. Also make sure your tank is fully cycled before you start off or you'll just kill everything within a couple days. The Easy Guide to the Nitrogen Cycle for Aquariums WWW.AQUARIUMCOOP.COM Are you getting started with your first fish tank? Then you may have heard of something called the “aquarium nitrogen cycle,” followed by a bunch of complicated scientific terms and graphs that seem a little overwhelming. No... Freshwater Fish Tank Cycling - How to Prepare for New Fish WWW.AQUARIUMCOOP.COM Have you ever seen a fish in the wild living in pure, crystal clear water with no other contaminants? Probably not. That’s because life doesn’t flourish in “pristine” conditions, but rather when there’s a whole ecosystem of... Beginner plants: Top 10 Easy Aquarium Plants for Beginners WWW.AQUARIUMCOOP.COM Planted aquariums are very popular nowadays because of their natural beauty and amazing ability to consume toxic waste compounds. However, many beginners have trouble keeping their green foliage from turning...

Guppies pretty much breed themselves really. Just feed them flakefood. Keep some floating plants so that the fry have a place to hide.

Thanks. To me tablespoons are like "a hand full of x". I'm not from the US so not really used to imperial units. 🙂

Thanks for the reply. Is salt safe with baby bristlenose? How many grams is 1 tablespoon of salt? Google gives me anything between 12 to 20 grams per tablespoon. I havent tested PH in a while, I will do that tomorrow. The tap parameters as reported by our water company are: PH - 7.68 CO2 - 9.6ppm Cl - 13ppm (Should be save < 20ppm) 11.4 dH (Pretty hard) Ive been battling this for a while and am thinking of nuking the tank if I cant get it fixed. Next up salt & meds for worms / parasites. If that doesnt work I will take the soil out as I dont know what brand or type it is.

Okay so I have no idea what is going on. I treated for ich, bacterial & fungus infections. At first I thought it was nitrate burn, but water parameters checked out. Then I thought of columnaris but it has been around for about 10 weeks, only one death so far. My next guess is some internal parasites / worms but I don't know if that would cause any issues I'm seeing. The aquarium they are in I got from my mom as she didnt want to take care of the fish anymore. They didnt show any symptoms before when they were babies. One thing I noticed is that any medicine with coloring seems to be gone within 3-4 hours (Esha Exit (blue) & Esha 2000 (yellow)). Even with the filter off. Could the substrate play any part in that? I dont know exactly what it is, though it looks like some aquasoil / PH lowering soil. I'm thinking of taking the substrate out if I cannot get this issue solved. I tried my best to take some pictures of some fish but they cannot sit still. I ordered some meds for internal parasites & worms. If that doesnt work I'll ask a vet for some levamisole, I'm not in the US and its a prescription drug here. Symptoms: - White scales above eyes / mouth - White scales on top near the end of the tail for one platy - 1 Thinning platy, white stringy poop. The rest are fat & happy and regulary have solid poops though they do have some white scales. Water parameters: - Ammonia: 0 - Nitrite: 0 - Nitrate: 10 ish Suggestions? Ideas?

I noticed that trimming it will give it more room to grow back again. I think it also likes a lot of movement.

Looks great! Does waste accumulate under the tiles? Or did you silicone them in place?

This happens when you start inbreeding a new genetic line. After 4-5 generations this should occur less unless you keep introducing new genes. I don't know if bend spines will result in offspring also being deformed. Its up to you really with what you want to do with them. Wether thats disposing them or keeping them.

Mutts are the best. Its always a surprise what color variation the next generation is going to be.

There is no real "solution" to change the sex ratio as there could be so many factors. What I would suspect is that its temperature / water paramters dependent in combination with genetics or just bad luck. Ive got the same issue with my platies. I had some fry from previous spawns and they all turned out female. The mom unfortunately died before I got the tank and they all grew up female. My theory is that the male killed off any baby males. Or maybe just a coincidence.

Not really an idea but do color blind people have issues with reading the test colors / charts?