carefulest

I have a tank that's really similar actually, with white clouds, celestial pearl danios, amano shrimp and nerite snails. There's also a hillstream loach in it. Yes, that's normal. I'm planning another trip to the fish store tomorrow. 🙂

I would think that if you plan on breeding fish, you need space to grow out the fry as well as enough room for the breeding stock fish to feel comfortable. So probably there's nothing you could do in a single 5 gallon.

I was in my LFS one day when I saw a no-brand low iron glass 10 gallon tank selling for $50. I quickly made it into a holding tank for plants and conveniently I had an extra light and filter ready to go. I held some Ludwigia arcuata there that I pulled from my emersed growth setup, while thinking of some different aquascaping ideas for the new tank. First I thought to make it a farm tank for plants complete with an actual little resin farmhouse and plants arranged in neat rows. But then someone I know who has a shrimp breeding business wanted to rehome a lone CPD with me. When I went there I bought 10 yellow neocaridinas and decided to make it a tank for them. Another friend gave me a bunch of narrow leaf Java fern and some Hydrocotyle leucocephala. It's said that the only fish that can be safely put with the shrimp are otocinclus. I set my light (Twinstar series A) to a 12 hour photoperiod and grew some algae. I also like other invertebrates so I got 4 Amano shrimp, 2 red racer nerites, and 2 clithon corona snail to help tame the algae. I gave a clithon corona to my wife's tank, where it's doing a great job dealing with a small algae outbreak. So can I keep this system balanced to meet the needs of a full tank loaded with algae eaters? This might be a really interesting experiment to try. In the meantime I've been trying to plan the scape. I'm going to use the plants already there, like Iron Chef. I bought some tissue culture Pogostemon helferi and Staurogyne repens. The plan is to use these together with the Ludwigia all arranged in random patches as a kind of foreground, foregoing the traditional carpet (though there is some Monte Carlo in there from another tank). For hardscape, I have a piece of wood that was found in the mountains and some basalt with quartz veins from the beach. I'll put the Java ferns and some other epiphytes, maybe a nice bucephalandra, on the wood. Tomorrow I'm planning to pick up the otos and plants I need to finish. I'll probably make a video on my Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC86e8JIClN4j3oZ4W11iGEA) and an update on this journal when I get it all set up.

Tissue culture plants transition easily to submerged and emersed growth (though in emersed growth they are a bit delicate and cannot take low humidity right away). Just rinse off the roots and plant them in the substrate, they'll do well I'm interested in seeing the results of this if you have pictures! Pogostemon Helferi and Rotala Macrandra are considered on the difficult side growing submerged, but they are beautiful plants, I'm curious to see how they look in your setup.

Hi everyone, I kept fish when I was a kid and in college and in recent months I've been getting back into it after moving back to Los Angeles. When I was in middle school I used to frequent a message board called Koko's Goldfish World and it was totally eye-opening for me. While forums in general seem to have waned a lot since then, I think the type of community they support is very valuable and I hope to recapture some of that here. I love small tanks with natural design. check out my Youtube channel.