Rube_Goldfish

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?

Are most (all?) scarlet badis in the trade wild-caught?

What changed to make them unavailable now? My experience is more or less the same; my LFS last had them about a year to a year and a half ago.

Haha, it just occurred to me that this didn't occur to me. It looks like a mustard bottle, I squeezed it like a mustard bottle!

Monte Carlo, HC "Cuba", dwarf hairgrass. Even without CO2, it's a shallow tank (right?), so I think they'd still carpet with good light. Pearlweed would work but would take a lot of maintenance. Cryptocoryne parva would work buy would take ages, unless you bought a ton of it, but would be low maintenance. Dwarf sagitarria might grow too tall in a shallow tank. Actually, depending on your hardscape and livestock, you could probably do something cool either moss.

Progress! Construction was delayed because of life, and it's obviously not done, so don't judge the mess too loudly. We still have to trim all the wood out and build the cabinet doors (most of my "stuff" is in what will be the cabinet, sort of hiding there behind the Philadelphia Eagles garbage can. Full tank shot! The current stocking is about 20 cardinal tetras, nine sterbai corydoras, two honey gourami, five otocinclus, two adult Apistogramma cacatuoides and six juveniles (though not for long; they're going to my LFS this weekend), at least one surviving Amano shrimp, and snails. I seem to be having trouble uploading anymore pictures, so I'll try again later.

White worms might be an easier option. Frozen bloodworms would be easier still, I'd think. The only live food my sterbai cories get is brine shrimp. Otherwise it's mostly pellet and flake with freeze dried tubifex worms and frozen foods sometimes.

Since you mentioned carpeting plants and since I'm imagining a 6.5 gallon bookshelf tank to be long and low, maybe something iwagumi, or at least iwagumi-inspired? Depending on your water parameters, either Caridina or Neocaridina shrimp alone could be cool, or any of the 'usual suspects' of small schooling fish: ember tetras, celestial pearl danios, a small rasbora.

Wow, look at that tank! I'm jealous and you're just getting started! I don't have a fish room, not really, but if I was designing one, I think I'd want it to be plumbed with a sink to make water changes easier. Additionally or alternately, you could have a barrel of dechlorinated, aerated, appropriately-heated water ready to go, too, tucked into some corner. What are the dimensions of that big tank? Where did you get it?

My Corydoras sterbai live and breed in a community, and I've got a pair of Apistogramma cacatuoides breeding in there, too, and at the moment, there are six juveniles about a week away from going to my LFS (they're about 3/4 the length of their mom at the moment). Anyway, I mention it because I was rolling off two cory eggs off the glass today and knocked both of them off my finger and into the water column. I turkey baster'd one up and watched as one of the apisto juvies beat me to the other one and slurped it up. C'est la vie. The troublemaker, looking a little blurry (won't pose for pictures):

From a practical, how-to-grow-cultures-for-food approach,* I'd also nominate our own @Lowells Fish Lab: https://m.youtube.com/@MakeMoreFish *Which doesn't even touch on fish breeding, the main focus of his channel.

I like Fishtory (formerly known as the Secret History Living Inside Your Aquarium) for deep dives on plants and micro critters. https://m.youtube.com/@Fishtory

I've also heard of people using sweet gum pods, but I've never tried that myself.

How much water are you using, and how many eggs? I hatch about half a teaspoon of eggs in a liter of water in my Ziss hatchery. If you're really trying to grow them out beyond 36-48 hours (depending on temperature), you're going to want to decant them out of the Ziss and into a tank, tub, or bucket. I would not feed them in the Ziss at all; unless you're hatching a tiny quantity in there, just their normal growth and consumption of their yolk sacks is likely fouling the water already, and adding spirulina isn't helping. Plus I don't think they even have mouths for the first few instars, though I'm not sure about that part.

I just got a Penn-Plax Net Breeder Box from ACO, but haven't had a spawn since it arrived (of course). So far, though, I've been using coffee filter baskets floating on a ring of airline tubing as a DIY breeder box, and it's been working pretty well. I also don't use any chemical antifungals, reasoning that they're getting the benefit of the whole tank's water, similar to @KBOzzie59 above.

Congratulations on the juvenile! I have mixed results rolling the eggs off the glass and on to my fingers; I think it's correlated to how long the egg has been on the glass, but I haven't really tracked it that well. Anyway, I accidentally drop a bunch of eggs trying to roll them off, so now I roll them off with my dominant hand and keep a turkey baster in my off hand, ready to suck up any I drop. It works surprisingly well!

I agree with @TheBlueBeetle and @Janoš Bećar Pecaroš. You might also try a nerite snail for algae, instead of fish. And while I don't want to speak for anyone else here, I wouldn't worry about asking a ton of questions here, because a) we all did it too and can now pay it forward and b) it's more opportunity to talk about aquariums and fishkeeping, and who doesn't like that?!