Rube_Goldfish

Painting the back of the tank black would help from an algae standpoint, but wouldn't that increase the risk of uncontrolled heating from the sun? Because darker colors absorb (and conduct) heat?

I'm obviously no expert, but yeah, basically slow and steady seems to be working for me. For a while there, I'd prune all but one pad, and prune any beat-up looking leaves, but now I'm trying to slow-and-steady retrain it to be low and bushy, as referenced above, so I snipped all the pads and the tallest leaves to remove about a third of the height. My plan is to remove leaves over time to try to retrain it to stay low. We'll see how that works, I guess. By the way, the best method I've found for pruning the lotus (and my Aponogeton crispus) has been to trace the leaf I want to remove with my hand as low to the base as I can, then pinch it, cutting it with my thumbnail. Scissors were just too unwieldy for me and I was never sure I was snipping the "right" leaf.

This is great, thanks!

I'm sorry if I'm repeating an existing thread somewhere, but while I know that warmer hatching water leads to quicker hatching of brine shrimp cysts, is there a chart anywhere showing ideal harvesting time compared to temperature? "The water is X degrees so I should harvest at Y time"? Or are there too many variables for it to be that simple? Secondary question: I should probably just invest in a submerged heater for my Ziss brine shrimp hatchery already; does anyone have any recommendations of heaters that will fit?

I don't want to hijack this thread, but @Pepere, if you've done some kind write-up or elaboration on this, can you point me at it? I also have a Finnex Planted Plus ALC, and the timer/controller is my only complaint about it, and if you've solved that for $12, I'm very interested to learn more.

Seachem's website has dosing calculators: https://www.seachem.com/calculators.php In theory, it should do all the math for you.

How would you know quality shrimp from a reputable breeder? Just read the reviews, or are there green flags or red flags to watch out for?

Yeah, that's a good point! I guess I'll have to take a slow and steady approach, just to be safe? I know some plants can tolerate being hacked back almost to the ground and others are more fragile. This lotus has always been a fast grower so it's probably fine, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to play it safe. Thanks for this thoughtful advice! I was initially hoping for a "pop" of red, but the lotus ended up being a very nice green-with-red-variegation (if I'm using that word correctly) that I've really come to appreciate, at least on the submerged leaves. The lilypads* tend to be a sort of maroon-y purple. It's a very cool plant! *Can I still call them "lilypads" if it's a lotus? Should they be lotuspads...?

Will their forever home be in one of your tanks? That's a nice big school! Congratulations!

I have a red tiger lotus that I thought would grow big, bushy, and most importantly, low, as a red colored focal point slightly off center in the foreground of a 55 gallon low tech community tank. While it hasn't really gone as red as I'd like, that's okay; my real concern is that it's so tall. I didn't know when I planted it that you can train lotuses to stay low. Now that the lotus has spent the last eight months or so growing tall leaves and sending up lilypads (which I've been slowly pruning), is it too late to train it to stay low and bushy?

If it makes you nervous to rearrange everything with the fish in there, you can put them in a bucket or other clean container. If you'll be quick, they wouldn't need a filter, but (depending on what kind of filter you're using) you could add the filter or even just an airstone to the bucket. But @Ninjoma is right that you can just do it with them in there; if they're anything like my cardinal tetras they'll stay away from what you're doing anyway. As to your second question: I think GloFish tetra are skirt tetras? Bettas can vary from individual to individual, but I think a betta should probably be fine with your tetras in a 10 gallon, especially a planted tank.

Do you mean walter worms?

Wow, I haven't been here on the forum (mostly) since March! And I've really missed this place; it's my favorite part of the internet. But work and life have been crazy, and then I wasn't sure how to get back in. Anyway, I'm now up to three tanks: a planted 55, an overgrown jungle of a ten, and another ten that I'm growing out A. cacatuoides fry in. (I sold my first fish last month: three apisto females and five Corydoras sterbai. I mean, sure, all that store credit and then some was immediately used up to replace a broken filter, but hey; I successfully raised baby fish!) Construction on the bookshelves basically totally stopped back around January, but we should have more free time this summer, so with any luck that will be done soon. Hopefully I can get some photos up soon, but in the meantime, I'm hoping I'll be back to being more active on the forum.

I have four Apistogramma cacatuoides juveniles, about two months old (born in mid-January), and I'd like to know how to sex them, or at least when that's possible. 1) 2) 3) 4) Also, when can I expect them to reach maturity and/or become territorial (they get along just fine for the time being)? For those of you who have sold juveniles, at what age do you sell them? Thanks in advance!

It's been a while, so one way or the other you probably came up with an answer, but I'd say that based on the "spiky-ness" of the dorsal fin that that's a young male. Here are my two adults: Female (guarding fry): Male:

I've been thinking about this some more. Sorry if this has been asked already, but do you have nitrates in your tap water?

Isn't this only true if there's enough water flow through the substrate? Because otherwise sand or gravel caps over nutrient-rich layers wouldn't work, right?

Haha, I'll say! Welcome to the hobby, and welcome to the forum! It seems like you've done your research, at least. Two months in and you've already got breeding projects!

That makes sense. I hope one way or the other something finds you!

I'm exactly the same way! If I want to learn a new recipe, my first web search is "Alton Brown [name of dish]". I don't always go with his version, but it's usually a great place to start. And I also am completely uninterested in cooking competition shows but can't get enough of Good Eats.

@Cory has mentioned in the live stream that the members discount is applied at the discretion of the retail partner. So maybe April's Aquarium does. Can't hurt to give them a call or send them an email.

@Ryan1988 , sorry if I'm telling you what you already know, but what @JoeQ is describing is Liebig's Law of the Minimum, which basically says that a plant's "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor)" (from Wikipedia). So if your plants need something else, they'll stop taking up nitrogen (in the form of nitrates) because they basically can't use it. That said, I agree that fairly frequent, consistent water changes will likely help and definitely won't hurt. I also like floating plants because they export nutrients quickly and easily. How's the flow? Dead spots can make algae more likely, too.

Wouldn't a pump with a prefilter sponge on the intake work? That way @Cheryl P. can have a waterfall and babies. I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that "dwarf" water lettuce was the same species as regular water lettuce, but it just couldn't grow to full size in an aquarium. Time to go down a rabbit hole, I guess. Edit: I think this is what I was thinking of: "In the wild, the florets of the dwarf water lettuce can get as big as 10 inches wide! If the water is completely still, it may get even bigger than that! Thankfully, things are a little different in closed aquariums! Captive growing environments typically stunt the size, stopping its growth once it reaches about four inches in diameter." (https://www.aquariumsource.com/dwarf-water-lettuce/) They give the Latin binomial as Pistia stratiotes, but maybe there are other species in the hobby, too.

If you don't have any "natural" inspiration for one species or another, I'd straight up ask the LFS what species they want and need, then choose something from that list. If nothing else, it would be a hedge against being overrun with fry you can't re-home.

Yeah, I don't like the look of it either, and I don't really know how I didn't notice it earlier, other than it just being in the back corner. Just gently push down, you think? I also thought maybe I could cheat and make a small pile of gravel up the crown, but if gently pushing down will work I think I'd prefer that.