David Ellsworth

Yeah you will need to replace the particle board shelving. I would recommend using the muscle racks that have the shelf to leg connector with round metal pegs and the wire shelfing. There is one that is like 44.5" x 24" on the shelf dimensions at menards. That is just wide enough to place 3, 20 gallon tanks endwise on each shelf or one 40 gal tank per shelf with room to spare. They have a 1200 lbs rating per shelf for the one I found at menards. I place either 1/2" or 3/4 " plywood cut to fit over the wire racks for stability.

I know you're probably ok, but be sure to check your local regulations taking stuff locally. I looked into collecting in my state and they have weird restrictions about taking lake water (wanted to look into local water critters), any water has to be tap or well water that you transfer fish, etc. to. You can't take lake water for example due to boating/zebra mussels/invasive species. Just be sure to double check restrictions on anything taken.

I have some Heterandria formosa, the least killifish in a 5.5 gal and they are doing pretty well. They are neat little live bearers.

Well speaking from a biological filtration method it should be more than adequate. Every surface that touches water could house bacteria. What does your tank maintenance schedule look like? How often, how much, what do you do? What types of plants have you tried? You should be doing rather large water changes with that kind of bioload.

3 gallon would make some awesome shrimp tanks, or maybe a couple heterandria formosa. I have a small group in a 5 gal. They stay super tiny. A future project of mine will be a 1 gal glass jar from walmart to turn into a small shrimp tank. Just for fun.

LRB Aquatics has some information about blackworm culturing on youtube. He keeps them in a 10 gal aquarium and feeds them fish food and shrimp food iirc. I recently tried to source some live blackworms, but the main farm in California is having water supply issues and so all their worm production has halted. Sorry I wasn't more help.

I've got one 30" stingray on my 20L and it puts out more than enough light, almost too much for such a shallow tank. If you have the glass lid making a dark stripe blocking light you can head to Amazon and there is one company that produces a lid with a clear plastic hinge instead of the dark brown one. The clear hinge works great on my tank and doesn't block light.

The only reliable way to chill a tank long term is to buy a chiller. You can look on saltwater aquarium sites that sell those products, a saltwater fish store would have some or you could check Amazon. May need a pump to pump the water through the chiller as well as some tubing. They are expensive though, like a mini fridge that cools the water flowing through it. Also acrylic tanks insulate better than glass tanks. You did mention asap, so you csn look at a fan blowing on the surface of the water, that csn lower temp by 5 or more degrees. Combine it with the above frozen water bottle trick and that should help. But I think a 1/10 hp chiller would work for a 40 gal tank. If you can't get a chiller for a long term solution, then you may have to see if the place you got it from can take it back. It will only suffer with prolonged high temps.

That sucks! There was a pet store in my home town since I was a child. They were around for 40 years or more. They had dogs, cats, rodents, birds, and a large fish room. Was great. They closed a few years ago and turned into a dog grooming place. Not sure if the owners were retiring or had issues with the business. They supplied to the whole central and northeast corner of my state.

I got my Apache Butterfly from Goldfish Island and she came in very healthy and well packaged. She was massive like almost the size of my palm while sitting in it.

My local fish stores are 2.5 hours in one direction and 3 hours away in another. And that is for a petmart or petco. I order almost all my stuff online, apart from tanks, at least the larger ones.

If your looking to custom build an undergravel filter check out Amazon, it has some modular undergravel filter plates to install. I've got some on order to set up in a large tank like either my 90 or 75 gal. You could glue your own fitting to the plate that would fit any uplift tube you want. Far easier to adapt what is out there rather that reinventing the wheel. Other have done a pvc network under the gravel with slits cut into it. If you are looking for a more even flow pile up more gravel near the uplift tube and slope it shallower the further you go away from it. I use only one uplift tube on my filter plate cause I want very low flow.

There are some great fish on that list! But, I'm concerned about possible agression. With angels, rams, Apistogramas, etc. There maybe issues with agression if they start pairing off or if the barbs/tetras get nippy. I haven't kept rams or Apistogramas yet due to my massively hard water, so maybe others can chime in here about that. You could split your list up into several tanks and they would be amazing.

Would be a great place to raise fry, matching the parent's water parameters and all, if you have a refugium section set up in there. Obviously just make sure the fry are unable to get sucked back up into the display. Or don't put new fish that haven't been quarantined first down there and you should be fine.

I have an undergravel filter set up in a 10 gal yellow fin white cloud tank that is working well. It depends what you want the tank to do. If you have high flow, either a powerhead or tall uplift tube, then stuff will get sucked in and gunk things up. I went low flow. I cut an uplift tube just above the substrate and have an airstone in there. I just want low flow to get water through for the bacteria. I'm trying to get a lower oxygen level at the bottom of the substrate for nitrate reduction. I have a thin layer of fluorite red on the filter plate, and then a thick layer of Safe-T-sorb over that. I had to wash both well. I have 0 ammonia, 0 nitrites, but still getting nitrate so I think my plant level is too low. I have 10 adults and about 8 to 10 fry growing up in the tank now. Its been set up for about 2 months.

I agree with Andy. I would try mixing RO water with some tap water. Mostly RO water, maybe 3/4 RO to 1/4 tap? That should keep levels on the lower end.

I just got a new butterfly goldfish in the mail yesterday (June 2) and noticed a mark on the fin when I placed her into the quarantine tank. The only thing I can figure is that it is a scar of somekind? I wanted to get another opinion and see if it is cause for concern or can be helped. In the pic it is the line on the fin on the right side.

If you're worried about it you can chuck it out and start over. Otherwise like someone said above you can let it dry out for a few weeks and put it in the oven for a while to kill anything. If you bake it, it may break down and crumble to dust and you may have to through it out anyway if it dries out too much. Do you have any other tanks with shrimp? Are they impacted too? If it is bacterial it would impact your other tanks if you are sharing nets and tools. You could buy a copper test kit just to double check to make sure you don't have high copper content that is poisoning inverts if you really wanted to look into it. Ammano can be touchy sometimes. Most tanks you have to make sure and feed them specifically because they are pretty big for shrimp and can't subsist on algae alone if it is all gone. I throw in crab/invert pellets in occasionally and a few green beans to make sure all my shrimp get food. I'm not saying you're not feeing them, just thought I'd mention it. Shrimp and bottom feeders can get overlooked by fishkeepers sometimes.

I have about 10 yellowfined whitecloud mountain minnows that I bought months ago. I have them indoors in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter. I have fairly hard tap water. I'm using safe-T-Sorb as substrate over my undergravel filter, with some florite red under the safe-T-sorb. I put in some fist sized or slightly bigger stones from a greenhouse selling landscaping stuff. Pretty sure they are granite or something. I have a little gap between them only one fish wide that they can swim in like little canyons and they seem to love it. Then I have some Java Fern Wendelov stuffed in between the boulders so there was a tiny cave they could swim in under the roots and the males would shimmy and try to lure the females nearby under and into the cave. So...long story short. I would try adding some rockwork or larger gravel to the bottom or maybe even on one end of the pond with gaps they can explore if you don't have any. Mine seem to like them. I have about 10 fry in my tank now about .25 inches I think? The adults ignore the fry so I just leave them in the tank. I've been feeding them Hikari first bites, and the adults love micro-pellets, extreme community crave flakes, frozen daphnia. They go nuts for frozen daphnia.

That is a large category from maybe 1 inch to close to 2 feet depending on species. What type of African cichlids are they? Some of the catfish get huge too, what type are those?

I wouldn't be too worried about pH for particular fish. Most are pretty flexible. I have some chili Rasboras and have very hard water (8+ out of the tap and high 7's when it sets out 24 hours) TDS is about 630 ppm. Most fish can be pretty flexible with water parameters, but stable parameters are more important. I do use some RO/DI water and then add minerals (shrimp king gh/kh) because my tap water has 1 ppm ammonia and it plays havoc on quarantine tanks I set up. My display tanks have plants in them and with smaller water changes it isn't as big an issue, just free food for the plants. I can't do large water changes with tap though due to ammonia. As others mentioned you do want some KH to stabilize the pH, or it could drop dangerously low. Organics that build up in the water help to lower pH, driftwood, leaves, fish waste, carbon dioxide from plants and fish. Unless you're doing something special that reacts negatively to KH like certain shrimp.

So many fish these days are captive breed and they are raised in a wide range of parameters. Many of the soft water fish can tolerate slightly harder water or higher pH. Many of these soft water river systems can get harder and softer at different times of the year so fish can tolerate SLOW changes in pH. You only run into problems with breeding as the eggs of many soft water fish need soft water to develop. I have both blue neon rasboras and chili rasboras in mid 7 to higher pH and harder water and they are both doing fine. The most important thing is clean water with no ammonia/nitrates and stable water conditions.

I'd give it a try. My guppies go insane over any food added to the tank. They are huge pigs. I throw in the hikari crab cuisine sticks for my shrimp and they chase them all the way to the substrate and fight the shrimp for them, so I have to throw in an extra one or so. It's pretty funny.

You could, but it would be pretty inefficient. It wouldn't be bio media if it was acting as mechanical filtration. The bacteria need a surface to grow on, but if it is all gunked up or slimed up it clogs the pores of lots of bio media and reduces bacteria growing space. You could put a sponge down before the water hits the bio balls, especially if the water flows like an aquaclear/tidal from the bottom up. That would collect the particulate in the water and not gunk up the bio balls. You could still use them without this in a different type of filter, but you will have to rinse out your bio media more often I'd imagine.

You've had the tank set up for a little over a month? That maybe a lot of fish all at once for a relatively new tank and one of them a pleco. I think you may have added too many larger fish all at once (gourami, angel fish, platties, pleco). The pleco produces a lot of waste and needs lots of food, furthermore, he may outgrow the 20 gal eventually (they can get up to 7 inches I believe). Those angel fish are likely going to get too big for a community 20 gal as well. I bet they are fine now, being small, but many people keep them in 55 gal tanks or larger because they can get large. I would increase the frequency and amount of your weekly water changes. maybe 25% to 30% two times a week or so and see how that helps. You may have to adjust this more. Your tank will likely adjust to the load, but keep an eye on the pleco and angel fish. As many of these fish get bigger they may work in your tank, but you will need to increase your water changes and maintenance accordingly.