Rube_Goldfish

The intens of light traveling through water is halved about every six inches (if I'm remembering correctly), but it travels through air much more efficiently. If raising the light would more evenly or more helpfully distribute the light in your tank, I say go for it. Three inches isn't even all that far removed.

If the lighting is too high for anubias, you might try Hydrocotyle tripartita "Japan" or Monte Carlo, both of which like higher light and can grow as epiphytes, though attaching them to that rock might be a real chore.

If you're feeling adventurous and the local laws allow it, you can likely find some kind of daphnia in any healthy body of freshwater. Just bring a net and bucket. And maybe be prepared keep it separated for a while as you watch for unexpected hitchhikers.

I guess I'm just living in the past! The glass seemed like a pretty clean break. I vacuumed and turkey baster-ed the pellets up as best I could, then added some spare sand into that spot to bury any I missed. After that I realized I could have used a magnet, but figured there likely weren't any left, and if there were, they were already under the sand.

Thank you, yes! It looked just like that one! I'll clear out all of the balls but will otherwise confidently move the new puffer into this tank.

I should add more detail: this tank held, up until sometime yesterday, a single pea puffer; we found her dead yesterday evening. The parameters tested out a little high on GH, KH, and pH, but otherwise fine, and the fish had no obvious injuries or illness. I chalked it up to the too-high GH/KH/pH and did a 90% water change in the anticipation of moving another pea puffer into this tank. Now I'm wondering if the previous puffer ate one of the small metal (?) beads that fell out of the bottom of the thermometer. I guess I'll have to fish them all out before putting another puffer in there.

I have a tank in which I just discovered a broken glass mercury thermometer. At the moment, there are no fish in the tank, but the bladder snails and isopods* don't seem affected at all. I have Sera multi test strips and the API master test kit but obviously have no way to test for mercury. Can I use the snails as the canaries in the coal mine? If they're fine, fish would be fine, too? *I think, anyway; they're small white dots zipping around.

That's a good idea, too. Mine are about the size of a big pea, on average.

And that's also how TDS meters work: measure the conductivity of the water and extrapolate that out to the "impurities" in the water.

I mostly have the same: lots of small bladder snail shells. While a cat litter scoop would be too big, I think, to fit between plants and hardscape, I wonder if I could use a slotted spoon? Or maybe just a coarser net.

My adult male Apistogramma cacatuoides is headfirst into a gap between stones: You can just see his tail fin there. Can fish get out of small spaces that they can get themselves into, or do I need to rescue him? If the latter, any advice on removing the stones so that I don't hurt him?

As your total plant biomass grows, you'll need more fertilizer, but I agree with @Tlindsey to keep doing what's working, or at least to make changes slowly. Maybe 18 drops for a while to see what happens, that sort of thing. It works in reverse, too; after a big plant trim, you'd need less nutrients than before.

Related to this topic: does anyone have any tips or tricks for cleaning up all those shells? I have a lot of old shells, and I guess I could just leave them to (slowly!) dissolve back into the water column, but in the meantime, they're a little unsightly. So far I've used aquascaping tongs, which take forever, and a fish net that I swish the sand back out of, but that's not much faster. Any better ways I'm not thinking of?

I don't know Iowa geography all that well, but ACO has a club finder: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/apps/store-locator

There's a channel on YouTube, Aquarium Plant Lab, that does a lot of emersed growth/propagation that sounds like it might be something you might be interested in.

I agree. I forget where I heard the advice, but I remember hearing someone say of flashing to think of if as a human scratching: if you saw someone scratching themselves, you wouldn't think twice, but if you saw them scratching themselves all day long, you'd start to think maybe they have a rash or something. Once-in-a-while flashing may just be an itch!

What sort of soil do you have under the sand cap? Is it aqua soil (and if so, what brand?) or is it potting/garden soil? How long was your tank running before you saw the ammonia spike? I ask because some soils (thinking specifically of ADA Amazonia, but that's not the only one) come pre-loaded with a fairly high ammonia level, which can be good for plants but often needs a lot of water changes at start-up to get the tank ready for animals.

If you have any fishkeeping friends, and if their floating plants grow as fast as mine do, they'd likely be quite happy to just give you handfuls of whatever species they've got. I bring a lot to my LFS, but even so, I sometimes end up having to throw out/compost handfuls of it at a time. If not, a local fish club might be your next best bet, but I understand that there are lots of places that don't have one, which is a shame.

Haha, I actually bought it because of your endorsement on some other thread here! Thanks!

I dropped the small heater that I use in my Ziss brine shrimp hatchery (this one) (I am having a bit of bad aquarium luck lately) onto the floor and it shattered. When it did, a bunch of silvery dust spilled out. What is that dust? Is it hazardous? Can I just use a vacuum cleaner to clean it up? I read a little further down the Amazon page, and it's apparently "highly heat-conductive sand". So I guess I can just vacuum it. Which is a relief!

I agree with @cmo1922. After trimming off the new, healthy growth, you could plant them anywhere just to grow them up, or even float them for a time. @Guppysnail has used suction cup clips to keep stem plants near the light long enough for them to convert and/or grow. But yes, discard the bad parts and replant the healthy bits.

If you want to try one of those DIY snail traps that @Dacotua mentioned, Rachel O'Leary has a good tutorial: The whole video is good, but the trap portion starts at about 2:20.

Just to put a bow on this saga, after temperature acclimating in the measuring cup, I cut a test strip in half and measured the cup and the tank (just in case; it ended up being essentially a 50% water change, and these shrimp have only been with me for two weeks!). They matched perfectly, and I released them into the tank. This morning I saw some of them munching away and am assuming the rest are doing so out of view. My new scape is similar to but not exactly the same as the old one, so I'll need some more foreground plants, I think, but all in all, it could have gone a lot worse. Thanks for the advice and well-wishes!

While the eggshells and all could raise the GH, you also have to consider that, when water evaporates, the water leaves but everything dissolved in it, like calcium and magnesium, stay behind. So then you top off the tank with more water with those minerals in it (among other things) and the concentrations of those minerals raises over time. This doesnt happen if you top off with RO or distilled water, or if the minerals are otherwise being exported by plant or animal take (the calcium used to grow your snail's shell is no longer in the water column). So to answer your question, yes, the raise in GH and KH don't seem so high as to make me question your test strips. But don't take my word for it, or the strips; take another sample back to the store and see what they find.

I love epiphytes of all kinds, because they're (generally) easy and undemanding, and because they're a sort of instant aquascape (and because they can hide 'problem areas'). My first live aquarium plant was a Windelov Java fern from ACO, still going strong about two and a half years later!