Rube_Goldfish

Uh, are you suggesting somebody having eaten a small pizza box?

The first line on Mrs. Goldfish's fishkeeping resume, if such a thing existed, would be "eliminated duckweed in two tanks", both of which had and still have other floating plants. She got a pair of oversized plastic tweezers from the dollar store and just spent time pulling out any duckweed she found. It took a while, but eventually she got it all, and we've been duckweed-free for about a year now.

I had two male and one female A. cacatuoides in a moderately planted 55 gallon community tank. One of the males was a sneaker female at the LFS, I think; I thought I was getting a 1M:2F trio. The female and the more dominant male were really harassing and beating up the other male, who we ended up rescuing out to an empty 10 gallon. If we hadn't, I'm sure they would have killed him, even if just from the stress of the harassment. With more males and more females? It might work, but you should have a Plan B, just in case, especially when/if they start spawning. @anewbie Any thoughts here? I don't know A. trifasciata at all.

Well, how was your hatch with the glass thermometer?! And I got into hatching live brine shrimp when I had some unexpected spawning, but it's so easy and it's fun to watch the fish really engaged with their food that I feed it out to all my fish (my biggest is an adult male Apistogramma cacatuoides, but still), so hopefully yours liked the fun treat, too.

Sorry to revive such an old thread, but I'm planning a shrimp-and-chili tank and was doing research (that is, browsing the ACO Forum) when I came across this comment about cleaning sponge filters. I've only had Amano shrimp, so this has never been a concern for me, but I am planning to run an ACO coarse sponge filter. So how do you clean it if it's full of tiny, hidden shrimplets? The only thing I can think of is to siphon out some water into a white bucket, then gently shake/swish the sponge in that bucket. Is there some trick I'm not thinking of?

If you have local fishkeeping friends (and I know that not everyone is so lucky), you could each get different varieties and split them up, and maybe do a group order to save on shipping.

Ah, I hadn't thought of that! I just use the old school glass thermometer that came with the Ziss, so it didn't cross my mind that you might be using something different. Yeah, I didn't think the salt type or concentration was the problem, and your temperature set-up with a heater is better than my 'well I guess they'll just hatch faster in the summer' approach (I should just stick a heater in there already), so I didn't think that was the issue, either, but your case was a weird one, so I was trying to eliminate potential explanations. Hopefully removing that digital thermometer ends up solving the issue for you! What's your plan for growing them out? And just out of curiosity, what fish are you growing them out for?

See, that's why I'm always torn between "I think I might something useful" and "but I don't have any firsthand experience with it". Thanks for the correction! Ooh, a mouth broader could be cool!

Or maybe a new color! Or maybe Caridina, if the parameters are right and you want a new challenge.

That looks like a great start, and I bet your betta, name or not, loves all the swimming space!

Are Neocaridina shrimp a "flight risk" for crawling out? They'd probably make fun inhabitants.

The hardscape looks great, and I can't wait to see it planted. Plus this journal's title is inspired wordplay!

I can second the Apistogramma cacatuoides, unless you want parental behavior from both parents. My two apisto moms are attentive momma bears; with the two dads, they've mostly not been a threat to the fry but also don't help at all. I have no first hand experience breeding any of the following, but I think both Bolivian rams and German blue rams provide parental care. Bristlenose pleco males guard fry, as do some (all?) gourami species.

"Aquarium salt" means straight sodium chloride with no additives, right? So that shouldn't be an issue. (I use kosher salt, because it's affordable and I keep some in the kitchen anyway. I mention it because ionized table salt isn't a good choice.) My water starts off clear with the brown cysts bouncing around in the water, circulated by the bubbler. After 24-36 hours, depending on temperature*, the water becomes a sort of opaque brown/orange because of all the freshly hatched brine shrimp. When you say "milky", do you mean the water loses clarity and becomes opaque, or do you mean it literally becomes white or whiter? If they are dead and/or unhatched at 24 hours, check at 18 hours, just to see. The only other thing I can think of is that my first hatch was bad, with a disappointingly low live hatch rate, so I went back to the YouTube tutorials I'd watched.** I decided that my air pump was pushing too much air through the airstone*** and put an air valve on the line and turned down the airflow from 'rolling boil' to 'gentle simmer', and my hatch rate became much improved. I assume the eggs or shrimp were getting battered around too much before and dying, but I guess I don't know for sure. Anyway, if your airflow is too high, maybe you can turn that down? * I don't use a heater. I start off with 85°F water then just rely on the ambient temperature. ** I can put some links if you want, but it sounds like you've already done that homework. *** Technically not an airstone but a plastic Ziss air diffuser, but who's counting?

I'm gathering supplies: I have basically everything I need, I think. There's most of an ACO small sponge filter in there; the sponge itself is seeding in my 55 gallon tank, but it'll be used on my 10 gallon fry grow-out tank. That tank currently has an Oase HOB rated for up to 20 gallons, so that'll get put on this 20 long. One thing I have been looking for but not finding is "aquatic compost". MD Fish Tanks has been using it a lot as part of his "substrate system" in conjunction with gravel, sand, and root tabs, so I thought I'd go that route, too. He says you can find it at any pond supply shop, but I've been asking around and mostly getting blank looks and shrugs. Maybe it's a British English term? If I can't find it, I'll just root tab the stuffing out gravel and sand and wait for mulm to build up. I can be patient and I'm not planning on any difficult plants anyway. Then I'll have to cut another polycarbonate sheeting lid. Oh, and I'll need the hardcape, too. I guess I don't have almost everything I need after all.

That looks great, even at this early stage. I'm looking forward to more updates!

Okay, I'll try to fit it into the schedule! My LFS had some representation there last year, but I found out about it too late to attend. That should be enough time to arrange babysitting...

I can try to find a video showing it if you want, but I know some people will put a bucket in their kitchen sink with a pump in it, get the temperature right, leave the flow on (any overflow will just go down the sink's drain), then turn the pump on so the water flows out of the bucket and into the tank. I know I've seen people on this forum do that, I just can't remember who.

I live close-ish, enough to make a day trip out of one of the days, at least. I've never been to any kind of show or fish meet-up, not even to my local club, shamefully. What should I expect? If I can only go to one day, which day should I go?

I'm sorry to be That Guy, especially on a good post as this, but just to avoid confusion, Seachem's flocculant is Clarity; Stability is their bottled beneficial bacteria.

I'm sorry to hear you've had so much hassle, and I'm even more sorry to hear about health troubles, but the tank looks great! The substrate may not be quite what you envisioned but I think it looks really natural, and you can always change substrate down the line if you end up not liking it. It sounds like the Fritz7 stuff is dechlorinator? I'm sorry if I'm telling you things you already know, but did you cycle the tank/filter at all? If not, a dechlorinator will bind ammonia and buy you time, but follow the directions on the bottle, since it is possible to overdose that stuff. Now that it's the next day, what does your ammonia test say? How do the fish look?

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm hoping to avoid. I've seen Debbie try to run off bladder snails, who seem to ignore her, and her mother in the 55 is constantly trying to drive away sterbai cories twice or three times her mass (they move, usually, bit never seem too bothered by her). "Fierce" is a great way to describe it.

In December 2022 I bought a pair of Apistogramma cacatuoides from my LFS to include in my then-new 55 gallon planted community tank. The male did not survive quarantine. So I bought a second pair, reasoning that a 1M:2F trio ought to work in a four foot planted tank. Shortly after adding all three to that tank, we realized that we'd mis-sexed the new pair and they were both male. (Knowing what I know now, I think one of them was a sneaker male.) One male ended up on the outs with the other two fish, and was being pretty relentlessly hounded. For his safety, he was removed to an empty-of-fish but still running 10 gallon planted tank that was waiting to be re-set as a shrimp tank. My LFS had said they'd take him back, but that it would have to wait until after they'd finished moving to a new location across town, so he'd have to stay in that 10 gallon tank for about three weeks. You might be able to see where this story is going. Due to construction delays, my LFS didn't open at the new location until about four months had passed. In the meantime, the pair in the 55 had spawned, and four females survived to a saleable size. I netted out three of them to take to the now-open LFS, but one of the juveniles eluded capture for a few days. By the time I'd caught "Debbie" (named for D.B. Cooper, equally hard to catch), she was mature; on a hunch, I put her in the 10 gallon. She and "Adam" (originally named "Amber" by my kids, big Sofia the First fans) have now had two successful spawns, and between their easy productivity and the fact that they're right next to my home office desk, I've grown attached to them. So what was originally a three week arrangement has become permanent, which means I can no longer keep these fish in a ten gallon tank, and I'll be upgrading them to a 20 long (and the ten they're in now will finally be able to turn into a shrimp tank!). To add on to the excitement, Mrs. Goldfish will be principally designing the aquascape, her first. We looked through a lot of photos for inspiration and have settled on a triangular composition using rounded river cobbles on pool filter sand with some kind of wood (she's got surprisingly strong opinions on driftwood!). I'll be handling the planting and maintenance, but it's always fun to incorporate loved ones into your hobby/obsession. Other than what type of wood to use, the only real open question at this point is tank mates. Other than bladder snails, Debbie and Adam are alone in their tank at the moment, and while there is something to be said for understocking, if I could have more fish, it would be a shame not to, right? But I want to try to balance "more fish is better than fewer fish" with the knowledge that they will still breed, and I want a) fry to survive; b) Debbie not to be too stressed chasing away 'threats' to the fry; and c) to not put fish in a tank just to be harried by an overzealous mother protecting her fry. I know the real answer is that I have to decide if this will principally be a breeding tank or an aquarium that occasionally has breeding activity, but hey, who doesn't want to have it all? So with that in mind, does anyone have any suggestions for tank mates? I have Corydoras sterbai in the 55 and would love pygmy or panda cories in thid 20 long, if that's not too much. I thought clown killifish might be a good option, because they're small and spend so much time near the surface (right?) in contrast to the apistos. Would a bristlenose pleco be too big for a 20 long? Would Amano shrimp and/or otocinclus be harassed too much by apistos? With apologies to Blaise Pascal, if I'd had more time, I'd have written a shorter first journal post, so if you've read this far, thank you. Here's Debbie and Adam in their too-small, too-messy tank: Hopefully I'll have more pictures next time.

Maybe this is obvious, but do you run the washing machine with no detergent, filter pads by themselves?

Do you mean you wouldn't go for Monte Carlo or you wouldn't go for a budget light? Or maybe just not that combination?