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Mr Aqua Man

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Everything posted by Mr Aqua Man

  1. Scuds =) https://www.fishkeepingacademy.com/scuds-in-aquarium-should-i-remove-them/
  2. Nice attempt at trying! I have BBA growing in my tank but I have it under control. It's funny when you want to grow it, it's hard to, and when you don't want to, it may grow.
  3. Ah, thanks for the reminder! Good to know. I was concerned that there could be BB collapse w/ using No Planaria.
  4. Thanks for the info, @eatyourpeas. I appreciate you sharing your experience. Please remind me, what is BB in this context?
  5. Hi @eatyourpeas, have you made progress on this tank style! I love the idea of making a BBA focused tank.
  6. Hi @Guppysnail, thanks for the info. I have heard of this feature of planaria which is honestly quite fascinating. They are very resilient (unfortunately for our sake). AFAIK, when I suck them up with my tub line, I'm not cutting them into pieces and am sucking them up whole. I can end up with over a hundred planaria all moving around in the bucket when I do it.
  7. Hello friends, I have been struggling with planaria for quite some time. I have read many suggestions about gravel vacuuming and feeding less. I've tried both inasmuch as I can. I have a monte carlo carpet (picture attached) so it's perfect for them to hide in. I do vacuum it (at the risk of up-rooting plants) and I collect a lot of planaria. However, at the end of the day, I can't keep up with it and I'm done trying "natural" ways of getting rid of planaria. Thus, I'm looking to treat the tank chemically with either Panacur C (fenbendazole, animal de-wormer) or No-Planaria made w/ Betal Palm Nut extract and produced by Genchem. I've seen a few of my shrimp be killed by planaria so I'm very fed up with them. I've read many stories, good and bad, about using both products. For example, while using No-Planaria some had their biological filter bacteria crash and thus, toxin levels rised rapidly. Or, that fenbendazole has killed shrimp and made them early molt. Or, many stories of people using either product and both worked fine with no problems. My tank is stocked with some valuable fish (chili rasboras, other micro rasboras, celestial pearl danios, emerald dwarf rasboras, pgymy corydoras and a lot of cherry shrimp) so I'm very hesitant about doing any chemical treatment at the risk of killing any of my livestock. I know that Girl Talks Fish (who works with Aquarium Co-Op) has made a video about using Panacur C and the dosing of it but I'm still hesitant. Can anyone shed some light on the truth about the safety of using fenbendazole or No-Planaria in an aquarium? Is there just some level of risk that much be accepted if using either? Is one more riskier than the other? Should I try to remove all my fish temporarily when treating the tank? Are fish more at risk to either of these treatments than shrimp are? Thanks for your help and insight! Tank specs: 22 gallon, remineralize RO water with Salty Shrimp GH/KH+, C02 injection, Oase Biomaster 300 filter w/ Seachem Matrix media
  8. Hi @lefty o - thanks for the recommendation. I will consider performing a black out. Would you expect the BBA to start turning red and dying off after the black out? What's the intended result? Hi @Streetwise, thank you for pointing that out!
  9. Hello friends, I have been struggling with BBA proliferating in my tank after previously battling green string algae. Currently, BBA is the predominate algae out of control but hair algae is also making a comeback. I will list a number of my tank parameters below and hope that someone has any ideas on how to modify my tank care to stop helping BBA (and hair algae for the matter) grow. I'm feel pretty defeated as of late and am contemplating getting out of the "high tech" tank territory since it has been quite problematic for the past number of months with algae. Background Story Some background, in August, I decided to switch to using Aquarium Co-Op's Easy Green (EG) from Seachem Excel in addition to Easy Iron (mistake). The reason I added Easy Iron (EI) was to try and support mini Alternanthera Reineckii and thought I should add some more iron to help contribute to the vibrant red color. I was dosing 2 pumps, twice a week with EI and EG. That's when the BBA started. After doing that for 2 weeks, I stopped using EI altogether thinking that was the cause. Perhaps foolishly, I also thought that I could "out compete" the BBA by starting to now dose EG daily (following George Farmer's fertilizing method) since I am running a high tech setup. I started dosing EG daily for 5 weeks with weekly 50% water changes and the BBA remained steady or got slightly worse. Presently, I switched back to dosing EG only twice a week still w/ weekly water changes. With every water change, I'm having to remove a lot of BBA including bleach dipping my C02 diffuser and cutting the top of all the Monte Carlo Carpet each time, trimming plants and replanting stems, etc. The BBA may have gotten slightly worse tbh after I stopped dosing fertilizers daily and switched to twice a week. I don't know what the main cause is. Perhaps my lights are too intense. Perhaps I need to use a different fertilizer. Perhaps by C02 is not dialed in. What I do know is that BBA is thriving now in this tank ever since I started dosing EI and it won't go away. Before I had BBA issues, I had hair algae issues. This has made it almost impossible to keep flame moss (or any kind of moss) b/c algae will inevitably grow on it. Water Solution Testing I took these measurements yesterday (10/25) before performing a 50% water change on my 22 gallon long tank. I should mention that the water I use is remineralized reverse osmosis water (RO) using Salty Shrimp "Shrimp Mineral" GH/KH+. I take RO water and remineralize to about 200-220 total dissolved solids (TDS). I follow this method from Flip Aquatics. pH = 6.8 Ammonia = 0ppm Nitrite = 0ppm Nitrate = 5ppm I still don't fully understand how interpret the GH/KH measurements but below are the number of drops it took to change the color of the GH/KH solution, respectively. GH = 13 drops KH = 6 drops Plants Monte Carlo carpet Rotala Macrandra Mini = x9 stems Rotala Indica = x6 stems Flame moss - used to be on the rocks seen pictured but got too covered in BBA and hair algae and now treating in sperate bucket with Seachem Excel and Hydrogen Peroxide. You can see some of it in the one "nice" picture of my tank I included. 3 Buce = there are 2 bigger buce you will see in the "nice" picture and 1 very small one elsewhere in the tank. I also removed the 2 big buce to treat separately with excel and H202 to kill BBA Hydrocotyle Tripartita "Japan" = a few "clumps" Cryptocoryne wendtii Bronze = 3 Critters Celestial Pearl Danios = approx. 12 Galaxy Rasboras = approx. 4 Chili Rasboras = approx. 18 Phoenix Rasboras = 4 Pgymy Corydoras = approx. 8 Otto Catfish = approx. 6 Red Cherry Shrimp = approx. 8 Amano Shrimp = 3 Used to have 1 female betta - R.I.P Lighting / Ferts / Filter / Water Temp / C02 / Type of Water / Substrate / Misc I attached the screenshot of my Fluval Plant 3.0 light. Looking at another post on this forum, I'm wondering if my lights are too high. You will see that the light cycle starts at 12pm and ramps up to 100% at 12:30pm and goes till 6pm (6 hours total) . I just changed that today to reduce my lighting time in hopes that would slow down BBA growth. However, for the past number of months (6 or so), my light was starting at 11am and ramping to 100% at 11:30am and turning off at 6pm (7 hour total). Filter - Oase Biomaster Thermo 350 w/ Seachem Matrix media, Seachem Purigen and filter wool Water Temp - set to 74 degrees fahrenheit w/ heater that is apart of the Oase filter Fertilizers - as mentioned above, I currently only use Easy Green Lighting - Fluval Plant 3.0. It is handing about 1.5 feet above water. C02 - 5 lbs. tank. Gets to 30ppm about an hour after the lights turn on. The C02 turns on 2 hours before lights turn on. I take RO water and remineralize with Salty Shrimp "Shrimp Mineral" GH/KH+ to 200-220 TDS. Tank size = 22 gallons (long) My tank is in a basement that has a pretty consistent temp, however, I heat my tank as mentioned above. The tank is located next to a window sill so it does get a bit of indirect sunlight every day and it goes with the season. I live in the midwest US. I started injecting oxygen into the tank for about 3 weeks now after I gave up for now on using water skimmers. I suffered to many fish deaths from my nano fish being sucked into water skimmers to their death. (See my other post - I have yet to follow up on it). Substrate - ADA Aquasoil 2.0 with ADA Aquasoil Powder type on top. Finally....I typed as much info as I knew to provide. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer. Like I said, all this has made me want to get out of the high tech space for aquariums b/c of how many hours I have spent deep cleaning my tank and trying to diagnose the root cause of algae unsuccessfully. After being in the hobby for almost 2 years now, I still feel very much like a n00b and am humbled and frustrated! Thank you for reading and your help!
  10. Hello friends, I hope you all are doing well. I'm a first time poster here but long time (subjective?) follower of Aquarium Co-Op. I'm sad to report that I have inadvertently killed some fish with my water skimmers and I've tried many possible remedies including various sponge additions and mesh fabric. Nothing has yielded a viable solution yet. However, I do think my tank does need a surface skimmer since I have a heavy bio-film build up and am running C02 so need gas exchange. In the interim, I'm running oxygen injection which I normally don't do but I can't currently use a surface skimmer as it is resulting in dead fish =( . The fish I'm keeping are CPDs, a few Dwarf Emerald Rasboras and now, 2 less Chili Rasboras as of this morning (I tried another solution to the problem but didn't work). Collectively, all of these fish are small enough to get sucked into my surface skimmer even when blockers are installed. Before I post pictures and provide more explanation, I wanted to see if anyone has derived a solution to this problem? Thanks for all your help.
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