KittenFishMom

Last night, I set up the "Fluval hang on breeder box" with java moss in it from the tank. I was too tired and it was pretty dark, so I left moving the eggs until morning. This morning the 9 eggs in the photo were gone, but other I had spotted yesterday are still there. I am debating putting some of the in the breeder box and leaving the rest alone. vs just leaving all the eggs alone. I have 2 peppered corys that are large and I was guessing were both female. I recently added a smaller paleatus (I think) with little dots in rows. I haven't any idea if it is male or female. I am wondering if relatively large water change with room temp water triggered the spawning. But I am not sure which 2 fish were mating. I don't know if corys can cross breed. I kind of don't think so because I have never heard or seen anything about crosses. I would think that if they could, I would have heard about it by now. Who knows, maybe my corys know something no one else does? They are smart, they live in schools and all.

I do have the Fluval 0.3 US Gal hang on breeder box in my hand. I bought it for guppies, but the guppies where not interested in giving birth in it. I wasn't trying to breed the corys, it just happened. I can't imagine how to move the eggs to the box without damaging them.

When I came home tonight, I saw white spots on the wall of my aquarium. I thought they were water spots on the outside, but they are on the inside. This tank only have neon tetras and corys, so I think they might be cory eggs. Do you think they are cory eggs? I am holding a US dime to the outside of the tank for scale. Note: there are 9 possible eggs, the rest is food in moss. If they are, What do I do? All my other cycled tanks have guppies and I am probably snails. I have a breeder box that hangs on the outside of a tank, and the water circulates with an air stone. It would be fun to raise these, but I haven't a clue as to how to move the eggs, or what to do next. I do have fry feed and a brine shrimp hatchery. Any thoughts or advice is welcome.

The fish club meets more than an hour away, once a month. The person I spoke with offered to feed them to his turtles. otherwise they need to be bagged and labels and brought to the monthly meeting and I have to wait until the end in case any are left that I must take home. I got the feeling the club is more into pure bred fish than colorful mutt guppies. The LFS is 30 minutes away and will except donations of a max of 20 fish a week. We are centrally isolated in Central NY, on Owasco Lake. We are so exhausted, we really don't feel like waiting around for no shows and having strangers tromp though our cottage checking our belongings out. Maybe in a month or so, but not right now. I am pretty sure I will want to rehome all the guppies and not get them again, so I think I will need to send all the plants where the fry might hide away with the guppies.

@jamieterrin They don't send us the tests. We have to go to the lab and get the bottles, carefully follow the instruction, run the water at lease 5 minutes, collect the water in the test bottle and carefully cap the bottle without letting the threads or cap touch anything. Then we have to ice the bottle and drive it to the lab within and before a certain time, (say within 2 hours of collecting, and before 2:30pm) but never on Friday or a holiday. Then pay the money and wait for them to call with the results. That is after shocking the well and waiting and then running all the chlorine out and testing for chlorine for a few more days, before getting the test bottles. It gets old after awhile.

@Chick-In-Of-TheSea This doesn't always work. A friend bought 4 male hamster in 4 separate cages for his 4 kids. Within a week each male gave birth to a good size litter of hamsters. The kids were thrilled, the poor Dad, not so much.

@jamieterrin My well is bad. The drought is keeping the folks the fix wells too busy to fix our well, because we do have water and others do not. guppies + plants = too many guppies to deal with.

@Flumpweesel We put a cat down due to cancer in the fall, I was with Mom when she died. We put a cat down 10 days later due to a tumor, I have been loosing fish all spring and lost 2 cory this morning. culling is hard for me right now. I haven't ever picked up a fishing pole since Mom stopped eating much. There isn't much demand for guppies other than for turtle food. I will rehome what I can and use the clove oil on the rest. Once the well is fixed, I might try a tank or 2 again, but not guppies.

I like planted tanks, so I will avoid guppies in the future.

We are a level 24 feet from the lake shore. We can use lake water for flushing etc. Surface ground water gets into the well when it rains, and we have to shock the well. We got a UV filter, but when the well water is cloudy, the UV doesn't work and we have to shock everything again. We have to test the water to know if it is clean. It is not easy to know when it is contaminated.

Well 2 of the 5 cory are died. I move the other 3 to the tetra/guppy tank. I will break down the cory tank. If the corys wipe out that tank I'll rehome the guppies and 2 male bettas and start fresh after the well is fixed.

I just turned on the light for the tank with the 5 corys. I tested the water last night because it looked strange. but all the readings were fine. Now the water is looking cloudy and white. I am going to move the corys and do a water change and see what happens. This happened after I took the guppies and duckweed out. Maybe they were feeding on something.

@jamieterrin I have 4 10-gallon tanks and a bad well. I don't want to start up my bigger tanks until the well is fixed. We called to get the well fix yesterday, but the well folks are very busy because of the drought. I'm using bottled spring water for the water changes. I was asking for advice on predators in this thread. I have a male betta in 2 tanks. The corys in the 3rd didn't seem to notice the fry. The forth tank has some neon tetras. I want to cut back to 2 tanks until the well is fixed. Maybe 1 tank if I rehome a betta.

@jamieterrin My mother suddenly needed 24*7 care for 4 months. When I bought clove oil to reduce the population, CARE suggested I add extra plants and move the fish around to balance the bio-load instead. Now that Mom is gone, I'm picking up the pieces. I did not expect to loose almost everything but the guppies. I did not know the guppy population would to explode for fast in 4 months of neglect. I have only been keeping tropical fish since November, I am still pretty wet behind the ears and up to my elbows.

@Brandon pThe LFS will only accept a donation of 20 guppies per week. It is a 30 minute drive each way. Giving them to the store does not cover the gas to drive them to the store. I think they are producing more than 20 per week. They are very mellow fish. They don't flinch when the cats jump on the tank lid. I put some culls in a mini pond with weeping willow branches and a ton of duck week. I'm hoping the branches root and the guppies don't produce too many fry by the time comes that I have to take the pond down in the fall.

@lefty o What "slightly larger fish" do you recommend? I am working with 10 gallon tanks until we get the well fixed. (made calls about the well today.) @lefty o the corys show no interest in the fry.

@PineSongThey say the only reason to grow zucchini in Ithaca is to keep you friends from giving it to you. I am beginning to think guppies are the zucchini of the fish hobby world.

@lefty o I don't have room to keep adding more tanks. How do most guppy keepers keep their population in check? I like giving them a high quality diet and environment. But I don't have unlimited room for more guppies. My first thought when I saw the fry was" start hatching brine shrimp". I want to provide for them, just not so many of them. It is very hard for me to not feed a tank one day a week if there are fry in the tank.

Dear CARE Forum: Thanks for all your help and support during this very challenging time of my life. My tanks are getting back into good condition. I have found someone with a large tank who is willing to take a lot of guppies. My problem is the guppies are acting like those birthday candles that you blow out, and a moment later they are lit again. I have taken all the guppies out of one tank and it just has 5 corys and a lot of snails. I am getting ready to try to move all my neon tetras in with the corys. I have been removing the plants a few at a time for the tank with the tetra's and guppies' tank, so as not to stress them too much, in hopes of making catching the neon tetras easier. I lifted the lid today and saw a major school of little guppies. I thought the adults controlled the population when there where few plants. I was then watching the cory tank. It had several bad periods of times over the last 4 months. I took the remaining 9 guppies out about 5 days ago. Some had twisted spines, probably from low calcium at some point. I also took out almost all the duck weed. Tonight daphnia were swimming all over. I thought the fish had finished them a long time ago. Then I thought I saw a scud swimming by. It wasn't a scud, it was a tiny guppy. Then I saw some more, and more again. There had not been babies in that tank in a very long time, but there are a lot now. I wanted to have that tank just be corys and tetras. Any advice on a kind way to deal with these little guys? I moved a male betta into a guppy tank, hoping to slow down the guppy population growth. Tonight I saw a lot of tiny guppy fry that must have ben born after I added the betta. When I got first got these guppies, I did not think they would live because the water was filthy and they did not have a working heater and had been badly neglected. Now I have a huge number of guppies in an amazing variety of colors and patterns. I just need to give away most and get the remaining ones to slow down their production. Every time I turn around I see more big eyes on tiny silver bodies asking to be fed. @Fish Folk do you think female flag fish might be a good idea?

@lefty o and @nabokovfan87 and @Brandon p Given that I still don't trust the well completely, I am still using bottled spring water in my tanks. We are calling folks to fix the heat pump and the roof and the well and the dock. It all takes time, Plus I was power of attorney, so there are all the legal things to deal with. We will get the well fixed, but in the mean time using less bottled water to fix up the tanks is better. I have a lot of tall square clear gallon bottles. I think some 3 year old would love building a wall with them and bursting through it. Too bad our son is 29 years old. I would rather see the bottles reused before they get recycled, but they will probably all get recycled before I figure out a great use for them. Thank you for your help and support. Trying to figure out how to begin is often the hardest part at times like these. I would love to add new fish to cheer me up, but I know I need to get the tanks back in working order before I make the problem more complicated. I have been daydreaming about setting up a mini-pond for the guppies, but I would have so many more to rehome in the fall. I found a clear pop up pond online, that looks like it would be great fun, but I am going to try to wait until next summer. Do frogs eat guppies? Do racoons? I bet the water snakes would find them in short order. They like to sun themselves in the garden.

The big tanks are empty and dirty. They had native fish in them and need to be completely cleaned and washed with peroxide. Same with the filters. I am not up to that yet. I was thinking about cleaning the 15 gallon tanks and trying to get a cycle going, but I don't have a place to put them until I can move the 10 gallon tank. The 55 tank is full of half water bottles with little plant samples I saved when I put all the plants I ordered for the 55 build in the 10 gallon tanks. (I had planned starting the build in March. Then Mom's dr called and said she could not be alone again. She is no longer with us, and we are just starting to pick up the pieces of our life we drop in February.) I do like snails, but there are now so many, when I feed the fish, the snails quickly crowd over the feed that gets to the bottom and the corys can not get at the food. They cover the pellets before they soften. The fancy guppy food falls between the crowded snails, and the guppies can't get at that food. This all results in more snails and over feeding to try to get some food into the fish. (very small amounts of food often during the day)

After months of neglect due to my Moth's failing health, my tanks are in sorry shape. I now have time and I am trying to get them back in better shape. My guppy population exploded when I added lots of plants to deal with being away so much. I feed lightly for a while, but the fish were not doing well, so I started doing some "feast and famine" style feeding, which got the snail populations to explode. I am trying to do deep cleanings in only parts of each tanks at a time, so I don't lose my nitrogen cycle. The water coming out of the substrate stinks, so I am trying not to get too much of that water mucking up the tank water. One problem is I moved fish around to try to balance the Bio load. I now have guppies in all my tanks (4 roughly 10 gallon tanks). Is there any good way of separating the guppies from the corys, bettas, and neon tetras with out traumatizing all the fish? Is it possible to get all the guppies completely out of a tank, or are they like the duckweed in my tanks? Once they enter, they never all leave. I have rehomed the gold fish with a bunch of guppies. A friend is coming this weekend to help me try to sort the guppies. If I could move the guppies into 3 of my tanks, or maybe even 2 before we start sorting, then I could put the corys and the neon tetras in my forth tank, and not bother them while sorting. I have 2 bettas, so one could go in with the corys and neon tetras and the other will have to be in a guppy tank, or maybe a fish bowl while we are sorting. When we are done sorting, my friend will take some culls to a friend of hers with a big tank with only bottom feeders. I want to keep some of the prettiest guppies in one 10 gallon tank and then work at rehoming the rest. These are tough guppies, they have been through some rough times and don't ever flinch when the cats jump on the tank lids. I might try to find out how to give them away through the forums fish swap topic that seems to be new. I know nothing about shipping fish. with this hot weather it would be better to have them picked up or have us deliver them not too far from Central New York. I also want to set up to 2 15 gallon tanks where I have a 10 gallon tank, but I have to figure out how to move the active 10 gallon tank. I do not plan to run my 120 gallon tank this summer, and will probably wait until the weather cools off in the fall to start a build on my 55 gallon tank. Mostly, I am just working towards trying to get my tanks back into better shape right now, and rehome as many guppies and snails as I can. A bunch of snails are going to the friend with the gold fish. The gold fish loved them. These are bladder snails and brown rams horn snails. All the fancy snails did not make it.

@Colu That school of thought fits the situation. I think the light feeding has been going on too long. Do you think I should treat my other tanks to be on the safe side, or do you think having loaded those tanks with lots of live daphnia may have boosted their immune system enough. There was still lots daphnia in swimming in the other tanks several days later.

@Colu It is strange that Columnaris suddenly showed up. I haven't put anything living in that tank, just dry and frozen food since the end of February. I did put daphnia from the lake in the other tanks, but not in that tank before the problem started. I would think it would have to be introduced to the tank recently if it is very infectious and did not have symptoms for months. Is it something that could have been lurking and recently became symptomatic due to stress from feeding lightly?

I want to give the fish a high quality live food that will last for several days with out fouling the water while I am away, caring for my Mom. I can restock from the lake frequently, on any calm night. the daphnia come up to the flashlight and are easy to catch.