David80

Another plant that's doing something new. (Different tank) My amazon sword has decided to send a shoot out with tiny new leaves that have broken the surface. The back of the lid is plastic and I can easily cut a notch for it to go through. Is this a bad idea? I don't know what Amazon swords do when this happens.

I have an anubias on the back wall of my tank. I stuck it there about a year ago and just left it alone. Now it looks like it is going to bloom. I didn't even know they did that. How long do they last and is there anything I should do? Or do I just enjoy the show?

I have some wafers that they love. When the tank has a small algae outbreak I slow down their feeding. When I toss in a wafer they both are on it within 30 minutes and they just sit there and stuff themselves till it's gone.

Almost 3 months have passed since the cloudy water and strange white film in the filter. I've made some serious changes to the tank and it is absolutely beautiful now. The filter now contains a small bag of Fluval pre-filter media and 2 sponges. I also removed all of the plastic plants so we are now fully planted. I don't know much about aquascaping yet, but I'm learning. We have one amazon sword, one banana plant, a floating moss ball, some water wisteria that's huge now, one anubias, and one cryptocoryne wendtii. All of these are being fed by the co-op root tabs. The fish are super happy too. We have some guppies, neon tetras, a butterfly loach, 2 ottos, and 3 snails. After a long day of teaching I like to come home and sit in front of the tank and just watch.

Thanks for the info. I picked up some Fluval sponge media to add when this cartridge is toast. I have watched tons of Co-op youtube videos, and my sponge filter is from the site. I hope this is just a bacteria party in my filter and time fixes it.

About a month ago we purchased a 20 gallon hex tank for the kids. We wanted something easy for them to maintain. It has a gravel substrate and fake plants. The kids wanted it to be colorful. It has 8 Guppies, an albino cory, and a clown pleco. We added these over a 2 week period after having the tank set up for almost 2 weeks. I know that was a little fast, but with 4 kids begging we took a chance. I'm running the HOB filter it came with (Top Fin Silent Stream 20)but I removed the blue plastic because it was slowing down the filter in my opinion, a sponge pre-filter, and a small sponge filter hidden in the back. (ph 7.6, Alkalinity 200, 0 nitrate, 0 nitrite, it's well water) We had a bacterial bloom recently that turned the water white. It's almost gone now, but there's some white stuff growing inside the HOB filter. I've never had anything like this happen to my previous tanks. I'm wondering if that's something to worry about? The filter cartridge clogged shortly after the bacterial bloom. I replaced the cartridge and it is beginning to clog as well. I don't want to clean out the filter unless this stuff is bad for the fish. Any advice is appreciated.