AndEEss

Maybe I should start breeding rams horns…

I'm pretty pleased with my current set up. 75g with a lot of bottom dwellers and some bigger tetras. But occasionally I watch Aqua Design Amano videos on YouTube and think, man, I'd love a big 5', 150 gallon biotope or SA-themed rimless tank. Get a slow, directional flow going with some lily pipe outflows on one end and inflows on the other. A whole bunch of longggg Jungle Val waving in the current. Maybe a big log or a couple of rocks poking up above the surface. A bunch of cory cats, various tetras, and some ostracods and other microfauna. A semi-functional ecosystem.

Looks like more food.

My 5" yoyos have left baby (pinky fingernail sized) Japanese Trapdoors alone. A couple dozen have survived into young adulthood. They only go after pond snails that I farm in my quarantine tank as food for them. As I said in your other thread, there is a pond snail graveyard of bleached out shells at one end of my tank.

Step 1: stop washing your media. Unless you have SIGNIFICANTLY reduced flow, never do this again. The only thing you should do with your media is replace the floss pad. Other than that, leave it alone. Don't touch it.

Water changes, water changes, water changes. Nothing else you can do. What filter is she running, out of curiosity? You may be able to optimize it hold more media than stock, but until the BB catch up, that won't matter.

My yoyo loaches are 5”, 5”, 4” and 3”.

You need to do water changes. Stop adding BB. Get the nitrite down and keep it down. As you already have fish in the tank, you just need to do water changes every day until your cycle is back up. And, stop making so many changes to your tank at once.

From what I understand of Zebra loaches, they are very much like Yoyos in appetite and temperament. If that's true, they'll leave everything but pond/bladder snails alone. I have Japanese trapdoor snails, to include the second and third gen babies, which are 1cm or so in size, and my Yoyos don't bother them at all. Sure, they'll knock them off rocks and plants as they go whizzing by, but that's it. Now, if you're fond of Botias and pond/bladder snails, you're going to have to pick one, because I've got a bleached shell graveyard at one end of my tank. Literally, dozens of pond and bladder snail shells that have been swept there by the current, and they didn't die of old age... Re; temperament, I have 20+ cory cats, to include a recent addition of four young, ~3/4" panda cory. All four seem to be thriving, despite the fish-missiles lurking in the shadows that share the same food sources.

Every picture of a golden zebra loach I can find has two distinct spots on the tail. Yoyo loaches have banded tails. Yours appear to be the latter, particularly the second one.

Pretty sure that's a yoyo loach. All four of mine look exactly like that. I'd build some 1" acrylic lily pipes and run an in-line heater.

If you stay fishless, which I hope you do, don’t change your water. If you add fish, change water every day.

Please don’t do a fish-in cycle. You’d be needlessly torturing fish. Just buy ammonia.

You understand that nitrite is toxic to your fish, right? And that they are being killed by it? Ideally, you should have zero nitrite, and any time you DO detect nitrite, you should do a 50% water change. In your case, I'd do a 50% water change every day. And keep doing it for a while until your tank is properly cycled, meaning, nitrAte is accumulating without any detectable ammonia or nitrite.

I have a 3' Jungle Val growing out of a hole in a hollow piece of Malaysian driftwood. Vals are purportedly heavy root feeders, but this one seems to be doing just fine (and propagating multiple shoots).

I don't. I fertilize the water column. Which is how plants that grow on inert-ish (rocks, wood) substrate feed.

Reading this makes me really happy I have a very heavily planted tank. I literally put the siphon in, let it pull on one end of the tank, and refill at the other at the same time.

Ok. Listen to me. You do not have to kill any of your fish. Combine some of your tanks. Take the filter from the now-fish less tanks and put them in the tanks with more occupants. Put all three cory cats and the neon tetras in one tank. Add floating plants. Feed small amounts and add dechlorinated water when you can. Add a filter from one of your emptied tanks. Do the same with the other fish, in one or two tanks. Seriously, if you feed them a couple times a week, and add dechlorinated water once a week, this is 5min of total labor. They will be fine for a long, long time like that.

100g+? One suggestion: go to a local pond or creek and dig up some leaves and sticks. Put them in your tank. The ostracods and detritus worms that come as eggs will serve as food AND keep algae and uneaten food at bay. With such a low bioload in a tank that size, provided you have plants, you really won’t have to do any maintenance unless algae really bothers you. Like I said before, just add dechlorinated water to top it off.

You can’t take them to a fish/pet store? Most will take them. Can you please describe your setup(s) as completely as possible? I can’t tell if you have a single 5 gallon or 5 tanks, for example. If the former, a single water change takes minutes. Also, provided you have working and cycled filters, it will be a long, long time before nitrates get high enough to harm them. Months. Buy a big floating plant like water lettuce and you may just have to pour in some dechlorinated water once in a while.

An FX6 has the highest rated pump and likely highest flow rate at the output. And likely holds significantly more media.

The listed filter circulation of an FX6 is 563gph. Better have a really lightly stocked 400g tank if you plan on running only one FX6.

It's hard to say what kind of filtration would be sufficient without knowing what is in the tank besides water. For example, does it have a lot of fish? If so, what kind and how many of each? Does it have a lot of plants? Plants both take up ammonia as well as providing surface area for them to grow. If I had a 200g, I'd likely be looking for a sump or two FX-series filters.

That's a big, fat, overfed female.

Other people above mentioned IR; I’m simply pointing out that it won’t work very well. I’m very much aware of the differences between image intensification and thermal imaging.