Rube_Goldfish

Okay, I forgot to take a picture, but I've got a moment. The new tank is in place, substrate/hardscape/plants all moved, and the filter and heater reinstalled. I had six adult shrimp in the tank, and caught all six. I didn't see any shrimplets, but then again, the adults had only been in the tank for fifteen days, and I haven't yet seen any molts or berried females, so I really wasn't expecting to see any babies. The shrimp spent most of the afternoon in a measuring cup with some moss and a couple red root floaters, and now that cup is hanging in the tank, temperature acclimating. So it's not how I wanted or expected to spend my day, but everyone survived (including me!) so I'll take what I can get.

Did ACO used to sell a big container of Easy Green with the idea that you could refill your bottle? Or am I mixing that up with the Easy Fry Food?

Thanks. Everything but the glass will be the same, and I've some buckets and totes to keep everything wet, so hopefully the cycle isn't affected. I'm more worried about catching out all the shrimp, and hoping I don't squish any while uprooting plants and jostling hardscape. Wish me luck!

Nope, the front 2x4 is wet, so the only reasonable conclusion I have is that it's leaking. Off to the store to get a 10 gallon tank, and spend the rest of the day tearing down and redoing the tank. Hopefully the shrimp aren't too bothered!

I hope you're right! The air pump powering the sponge filter seemed slightly out of place, so maybe that's it. I've had this tank for about 15 years but never actually used it or filled it with water until September 2021, so maybe that ages the silicone? I guess we'll find out.

I went to do my first water change and trim a few stems in my two week old Neocaridina shrimp tank this morning when I discovered a small puddle on the stand next to the rim. I could find nothing that maybe have made a splash or any equipment that may have squirted any water out. There's no lid, but the biggest animal is a neo shrimp, and there is only a sponge filter (with a check valve). I took about half of the ten gallons out, gently lifted the tank, and Mrs. Goldfish slid some 2x4s under the rim. I added enough water back (the same water; one complication at a time) to cover the filter, the heater, the plants, and the hardscape, and now I'm waiting to see if the 2x4s become wet. Ugh.

In some recent MD Fish Tanks videos (YouTube aquascaper), he's paired juvenile angelfish with cardinal tetras, reasoning that by the time the angels were big enough to be a threat to the cardinals, the tetras would have mostly passed due to old age anyway. But I've never kept angelfish, so I can't directly speak to it.

I wish I knew what to tell you. To be honest, I've been lucky enough to have no first hand experience with BBA, but I wanted to suggest floating plants because they use up nutrients quickly. @nabokovfan87: you've tackled blackbeard algae before, right? I think if you treated your filter in that way, you'd kill off the beneficial bacteria in it. Since your tank is long running, that might be okay, since there's a lot of bacteria on the substrate, plants, hardscape, glass, and so on, but you might essentially be doing a new fish-in cycle. Plus you'd still have the BBA in the substrate. If you're comfortable going through a fish-in cycle though, it ought to work. I have had no luck with any carpeting plants, though I'd think with CO2 it should be a lot easier. If not Monte Carlo, maybe dwarf hairgrass, or micro sword? I'm still nursing along some Littorella uniflora, which seems to be neither growing nor dying. Cryptocoryne parva should work but would take ages. Dwarf sagittaria is pretty easy growing but might get too tall. If you aren't comfortable doing bigger water changes, could you so small changes more frequently? Maybe stick with the 5 gallon change but do it once or twice a week? I'm sorry I can't be more helpful.

Maybe a silly question, but how old is the test kit, and are you sure you did it right? You should still do the water changes as described above, but reagents do expire, so it could be a false reading.

Yeah, it might. @JoeQ has a journal wherein he talks about solving algae can sometimes involve actually turning the light up, in fact. Because, as he states in the journal, the best long term way to get rid of algae is a high amount of plant biomass that will outcompete the algae. Which is why the recommendation of the fast growing plants. You can make a sort of "corral" using airline tubing as a boom to hold floating plants only where you want them, so that they soak up nutrients and only shade what you want them to. But that won't work above a sponge filter because the floaters won't like the bubbles. Hmm. Can you do spot treatments of hydrogen peroxide, then? Maybe kill off the BBA in small chunks rather than all at once? But to your larger point, yeah, you don't want to kill off your plants in order to kill off the algae.

Floating plants can grow quite quickly, which soaks up nutrients but also gives the benefit of shading the tank a bit. Salvinia minima, frogbit, water lettuce, giant duckweed (but not regular duckweed!) should all work pretty easily. Just about any stem should work and quickly, especially as you're injecting CO2, though if nutrient reduction is your only goal, I'd also recommend pearlweed. If you don't mind uprooting the existing plants, you could give them all the reverse respiration treatment. You could do that to hardscape and the filter, too, but that's a last resort thing because you'd be resetting your cycle. Otherwise, spot treatment of hydrogen peroxide kills BBA, though again, I'm not sure what to do about the BBA on your filter that won't harm the beneficial bacteria that live there.

That's a fair point! Heaven knows I've splashed my fair share of water around all of my tanks!

I can't back it up with a scientific study or anything, but I lean toward the idea that redness has more to do with the intensity of the light than the iron in the plant (or water). Not that plants don't need iron, but I think they really just need a lot of PAR to turn red. Though I have also noticed that my red root floater seems to follow the nitrate deficiency idea; the intensity of the light on that plant doesn't seem to matter as much as the concentration of nitrates. But I agree with @lefty o above; ACO makes Easy Iron, though I use Leaf Zone for the potassium boost (the other ingredient in Leaf Zone).

While I agree with @FLFishChik that it may just need time, I've recently learned that some sellers pack up Java fern by tying multiple rhizomes together, on the assumption that you the buyer will snip off the thread and separate them. How did yours come? Can you clearly see a rhizome or multiple rhizomes?

In a word: yes. If it were me, I would just use it and not think twice. But I don't know your budget and patience, and I do know that this is supposed to be a fun and relaxing hobby, so if replacing the mat is going to give you peace of mind, then maybe you should replace it. But yes, I think the mat is just fine as-is.

Have you tried calling or emailing Fluval? Or maybe your LFS has a contact person whose name they could give you, or maybe they could even contact them on your behalf? Or find Fluval's Twitter/Facebook/Instagram account and ask there? Otherwise maybe you could find a used one on Facebook Marketplace or its equivalent, even a broken one, for parts. That might be cheaper than the service kit.

I'd leave them, unless they're physically in the way or smell bad or something. I had Salvinia natans, which is obviously a different species, come in the mail. The starting leaves slowly rotted/melted away, but as they did, they also grew runner* plants and now I'm giving them away. So the dying leaves may make new, healthy plants first, and if not, you can always toss them later. Basically, don't discard them until there is a compelling reason to. I had thought too-strong flow might have been the culprit, too, except the salvinia right next to the frogbit looks fine. Maybe just give it some time. * Are they still called runners if it's a floating plant?

I can't imagine that that tiny overhang will cause any issues. The mat's purpose is to smooth out any imperfections or small bits on the stand that may cause pressure points on the bottom pane of glass, and that mat is still accomplishing that goal. I think you're fine.

I agree that it's totally subjective. Other than just trying both, which isn't really practical if you're not running multiple tanks, I'd say to look at lots of tanks online and at your LFS, and see which ones just look better to you, and go from there.

Bladder snails will breed, whether you want them to or not. You can't control it directly, because they are hermaphrodites and can self-fertilize. You can indirectly control their population with the amount of feeding: more food means more snails. (In fact, I use their population level as a sort of barometer on how much I'm feeding.) There are also rabbit snails, pond snails, piano snails, spixii snails, and assassin snails, and probably more that I'm forgetting. Assassin snails eat other species of snail, by the way, so you'll likely want to avoid those. There are also Japanese trapdoor snails; I don't know much about them. And Malaysian trumpet snails, which look cool but spend most of their time burrowed into the substrate, which can be useful but sort invisible. Nerites and mystery snails are the easiest to control in terms of breeding. I think rabbit snails eat plants, but that's half-remembered; don't take my word for it. You might also like scuds and seed shrimp, rhabdocoela and hydra. I'm still learning about a lot of these micro critters myself, but I've heard Carolina Biologics is a trusted source, as well as fellow hobbyists. And a lot of them will just sort of show up on plants if you don’t take steps to prevent that. Bear in mind that lots of fish eat most of these small creatures, so if they share a tank with fish, you might not see much of them. I'd classify shrimp differently than those other small animals, but if you like little creatures, you might like shrimp, too, like Amano shrimp or cherry shrimp.

I have no experience with it, but I know a lot of people use guppy grass or hornwort for those purposes.

Yes, I'm in Pennsylvania and their operation is really top-notch; I've bought a bunch of plants from them and they all arrived in good health. And if they hadn't, i have no doubt they would have sent replacements right away. In fact, I sort of remember them saying something to the effect of their online plant sales being limited to plants that shipped well. I'm trying to not sound like a commercial, but ACO is really good at this sort of thing, and their plants are great (and their customer service is even better). That said, @AllFishNoBrakes is right that some plants just won't take to your tank. There are no guarantees with living things, you know?

The easiest recommendation is to buy a bunch, maybe a half dozen species, and see which ones like your water the best, in that it's real easy for me to spend someone else's money! Otherwise, some of my favorites are bacopa species, ludwigias, rotalas, limnophilas, and hygrophilas. There's also cabomba, anacharis, Pogostemon stellatus "octopus", and pearlweed, and lots of others that I'm surely forgetting. I love stem plants because they grow quickly (soaking up nutrients as they do), can grow tall to visually fill vertical space, can provide cover for fish (and especially fry), and be easily propagated (so that, with time, one pot can become a whole tankful of plants). I'd start at ACO's stem plant selection and see what looks good. Then look at other tanks that you like the look of and try those stems, too.

Like I said, I farm them in my other tanks, something I was doing anyway, whether I wanted to or not! (Truth be told, though, I like the snails in my tanks, so I never really tried to get rid of them.) You might get lucky with frozen foods, and if not, snails are easy to culture!

I've got one pea puffer each in two of five tanks, and snails in the other three. They don't call them "murder beans" for nothing! That said, if I feed a little too much into the other tanks, I figure "well, I'm just feeding the puffers' food". They also love grindal worms. One of them loves baby brine shrimp and frozen blood worms; the other will eat both but doesn't seem very enthusiastic about it.