Rube_Goldfish

The company Contact Us page is here: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/pages/contact-us I didn't see a phone number there but I didn't look too hard. Otherwise you could try starting a thread in the General Discussion forum. But your best bet would be directly contacting them, I think.

I was getting ready to say that you could get a new group of high quality blue dreams from somewhere and add it to your current best shrimp to reinvigorate the colony and get new genes in the mix, but then I saw where you said you're ready to move on to red anyway. Sounds like Option 3 is your best bet.

Thanks! Yeah, the plants are more for me than for them, I guess. But I'll plant them with confidence and see what happens!

I am in the final stretch of setting up my 20 long Apistogramma honeymoon suite (I'll update the journal later). The hardscape sticks above the rim of the tank by about three inches (about 7.6 cm). When I planned the layout and bought the hardscape materials, I knew they'd be "too high" but thought it would look cool. What I didn't consider was that they'd get in the way of my light, a Hygger HG-999. I see that there are risers available on Etsy and Amazon, which I'll probably have to get. My question, then, is about PAR with a raised light. I know that water roughly halves PAR for every six inches (about 15 cm) of depth, but that air has a much smaller effect. But the light's spread would also be greater. So is the difference in PAR between a light mounted, say 2 inches above the water and one mounted 5 inches above relevant, or am I worrying over something negligible? I'm not planning on a carpet or any particularly difficult.or high light plants, so I'm hoping I can get away with it. Thanks in advance!

How do you clean a coarse ACO sponge filter that you know or suspect has shrimplets in it? Swish it in the bucket and don't squeeze it? And if so, would it be a gentle swish or can you get more vigorous? And does that actually clean the filter?

I am the furthest thing from a "real" breeder, but I have had luck with the ACO Easy Fry Food and clumps of hair algae I've pulled out of the main tank. I reasoned that it probably had tasty microfauna and would provide some cover. I usually start giving them BBS between day 4 and 7 post-hatching, but that's really sort of arbitrary and based more on when I can have a batch ready than anything else, and if I'm being honest, I don't know if they're actually eating them or not (because I made them hard to see with the algae clump). I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but I really recommend @Lowells Fish Lab 's video on breeding sterbais: He actually knows what he's doing!

I'd love to set up grindal or white worm cultures, but I am having trouble selling the idea of worm cultures to the rest of my family, and they've been very supportive of so much else in my pursuit of this hobby that I may have to give them this one.

I just saw this video today. I have a tank with two Apistogramma cacatuoides that gets frozen bloodworms now and then, always without issue up until this week, when the male (but not the female) starting seeming not himself. I have a different pair in a community tank with, among other fishes, Corydoras sterbai. So it's easy enough to play it safe and no longer feed frozen bloodworms to the first tank, but I'd still like to feed them to the cories. Mostly, though, I'd like this community's opinion on frozen bloodworms, especially for cichlids. I've been feeding Omega One Frozen Bloodworms, but was previously using San Francisco Bay brand, seemingly without incident. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qdTmKuezd6c&pp=ygUja2VlcGluZ2Zpc2hzaW1wbGUgZnJvemVuIGJsb29kd29ybXM%3D

Well, it ended up taking until the October meeting, but I finally made it out to my local club's meeting/auction. What a great experience it was! There was a guest speaker, I got to nerd out with a bunch of other nerms, and the auction was a lot of fun. Plus I got a big bag of narrow leaf Java fern for $14, and you can never have too much Java fern. Thanks again to everyone here for all your help, and to anyone else on the fence, definitely go check out your local club!

You know how sometimes you move on to other things and your brain keeps 'working the problem' in the background? Well, eureka: just turn the heater off 20 minutes before you turn the aeration off!

Thanks, @Guppysnail! So (two months later) I finally bought this exact model. My normal heater procedure in a tank, on the rare occasions I have to remove a heater, is to unplug it and let it cool for 10 or 20 minutes before removing it from water. My understanding of live BBS is that while you want to give them a couple minutes to separate from the egg casings and congregate down at the spout, they can't go too long without aeration before they start dying. So how do you drain out the water to harvest the BBS without damaging the heater?

No experience with barbs here, and none with crayfish, either. Is your only objection to livebearers their rapid breeding? If so, what if you just did all male fish of some kind of livebearer? All the color and activity, and the appreciation of harder/ more alkaline water, but none of tye breeding.

According to this page on Seneye's website (the first source I found), brine shrimp don't even have a mouth until their second instar, after their first molt. So they couldn't eat anything even if they wanted to: "Newly hatched brine shrimp hatch with no mouth or anus and live off their highly nutritious yolk sac, this period is known as instar 1, after approximately twelve hours the nauplii take on their first molt and develop a mouth, anus and a basic intestinal tract, this is known as instar 2."

Hi @Bayareafishnewbie , I'm still skeptical of the strength of your light, as I was generally under the impression that those sort of kit tank lights were only really capable of growing low light plants like Java fern, but I don't have any personal experience with them, and I'm assuming you don't have a PAR meter. But I think @Tanked is really on to something here with regard to nutrients. Your nitrates seem sufficient, but you might be lacking in phosphates or potassium. Two questions, then: are you growing any algae, and if so what kind, how much, and where; and are you doing water changes every 2-3 days to keep the nitrates from rising above 40 ppm, or is there some other reason? What happens if you go a week without a water change?

Yeah, I second this diagnosis. I think I see hair algae on the dragon stone itself, as well as whatever stem that is on the right (looks like a Bacopa species to me).

What make/model light do you have? You mentioned the light being under a hood; did the light come as part of a tank kit or did you buy it separately? My preliminary guess is inadequate light.

While I've never done it myself, I've heard of folks using Neocaridina shrimp as "nurse" or "tender" shrimp in whatever breeder box or tank you have the eggs in. Supposedly they'll clean off the fungus and (I think) even eat the infertile eggs while otherwise ignoring the fertile eggs.

I have a group of about 8 adult sterbai in a planted community tank that spawn kinda sorta regularly. That is, I'm sure there's a pattern, but I've never taken close enough notes on weather and feeding to figure it out. There seems to be some loose correlation to storms, but sometimes storms come and go with no spawning, and sometimes sunny days bring eggs. They get live baby brine shrimp roughly every other day, frozen food (mostly but not exclusively bloodworms) when it fits my schedule (mostly weekends) and flake/pellets the rest of the time. I probably overfeed. As to the eggs, I've never tried a tumbler, and while I've recently bought a Penn-Plax Deluxe Net Breeder, I haven't used it yet. What I've had success with is coffee filter baskets with an "inner tube" of airline tubing, floating in either the same tank as their parents or, more recently, a ten gallon growout. There, my biggest worry is bladder snails, which voraciously eat the eggs (hence the net breeder). Before the net breeder, I found a lid from a deli cup/wonton soup cup fit the coffee filter basket pretty well; it slows down the snails but doesn't completely stop them. Anyway, I leave them in the coffee filter basket with a couple bits of floating stem and/or a clump of hair algae until they're big enough to not be vulnerable to any other juveniles in the grow out, then tip them in to raise up. Maybe an egg tumbler or a hang-on-the-tank breeder box would raise my yield, but I figure doing it this way means I'm getting the benefit of the larger water volume while still keeping the eggs away from snails and concentrating the hatched fry for feeding and safety reasons. Oh, one other thing: though I have no first hand experience, I've heard of folks putting Neocaridina shrimp in whatever container they've got eggs in; they say the shrimp eat any fungus and/or fungus-infected eggs while cleaning or at least disregarding the healthy ones. I almost forgot: our own @Lowells Fish Lab has a great video on breeding sterbai cories:

I've got gobs of bladder snails, and some mini ramshorns, and some unknown quantity of Malaysian trumpet snails living in the substrate. But I've only had one (regular sized) ramshorn, for going on months now. So that fits with your observations, @Lennie, and with @Tanked .

I don't have first hand experience with either of Cryptocoryne spiralis or vallisineria, but they might work. The val would likely have you pulling runners, which might be too high maintenance for what you're going for. I do have experience with Aponogeton crispus; you'll need to thin and prune leaves but it's quite a simple job. Maybe a Madagascar lace? Edit: oh yeah, what if you just got a big, mature Java fern? It's slow growing but still has a real presence, and if you get a narrow leaf or trident variety, depending on your hardscape, you can probably arrange it to be fairly vertical.

I've heard of using tough-leafed plants like anubias with fish like mbuna or goldfish (MD Fish Tanks did it with his mbuna tank: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUANv2E7tuI), but you'd have to go into it being okay with the potential loss, I guess. I wonder if you could put tough epiphytes in the tank and then 'distract' the silver dollars with duckweed and guppy grass?

If your only goal is nitrate/nutrient export, then I agree with @kammaroon; floating plants will probably be your best bet. Otherwise, there are lots of small, slow-growing plants that would fit just fine in a 3.5 gallon tank, like a lot of the smaller epiphytes. Mosses would certainly fit the bill in terms of size. And if it's temporary, you can probably get away with just about any plant. What's the lighting like?

So I guess "overwintering" isn't really a concern for you, huh?! Is evaporation or overheating a problem? It looks pretty shaded.

The bench is a great idea! If you don't mind me asking, roughly where in the world are you located? I only ask because I'm curious about overwintering and what people have to do and can get away with at different latitudes, but if you're not comfortable answering I completely respect that, too.

Ah, okay. That's why the "I've never kept them" caveat is so important! There are a ton of small tetras and rasbora, but I've only ever had cardinal tetras, and I don't know what sort of swimming space the other species would need. My other thought would be a small livebearer, like endlers or teacup platys or something, but I suppose they'd prefer different water from what Agave would want, huh?