Rube_Goldfish

Sorry! This one is specific to the Aquarium Co-op forum: out of reactions for the day. I'd like to click the Thanks reaction but I've used too many in the last 24 hours, so I have to wait for them to "re-charge", so to speak.

Again, ORD but thanks. Okay, that basically settles it huh? Frozen BBS for now, then learn how to hatch my own!

ORD but thank you! I've been using the turkey baster to try to target feed the ground flake food, so I guess I wasn't totally off-base. I've got frozen adult brine shrimp, frozen blood worms, and some San Francisco Bay brand frozen food mixes, but I'll try to find the frozen baby brine. And I guess I'll start trying to watch my own! Related to that last point: the other fish in the tank include honey gouramis, sterbai corydoras, and cardinal tetras. Do you know if they're too big to be interested in BBS?

This might be a long shot, but since a lot of fish stores can pack fish up to ship through the mail, if you can get the timing right, you might be able to get your LFS to ship your fish to either your new home or maybe to a LFS in your new town. Properly packed, fish can be just fine in the mail for days. I have never done this, so I don't know what the cost might be. I also don't know if it will be more or less anxiety-producing that driving them yourself, but it can't hurt to inquire.

I've never used it but CaribSea Peace River looked good in the bag in the store shelf, anyway.

If you've never tried bloodworms before, be careful handling them, because a lot of people have are allergic to them.

Those look really good already! I always struggle with aperture and shutter speed and all that (I'm an autofocus, point-and-shoot kind to photographer) but with lighting at least, you'd want the tank light to be as bright as it can and all other lights in the room off. Door closed and window blinds/curtains closed, too. My best successes have been pointing a camera at a spot and waiting for the fish to swim to that spot (and you can cheat by dropping some favored food there to bait them). Lastly, I've seen suggestions here (from @nabokovfan87 , I think?) about shootung digitial video instead anf then just doing screen grabs from that, instead of outright still photography.

For the record, I chickened out on feeding the culture so far. It still looks pretty cloudy, cloudy enough that I can't see any organisms. I'll see what it looks like tomorrow, I guess.

You'd want Easy Green for the epiphytes (Java fern, anubias, bolbitis, for example) anyway, since they're water column feeders, not root feeders. Truth be told, I don't know whether vallisneria is principally a root feeder or a water column feeder.

I've heard this before (probably from you, haha!) but I've never heard why before. Can you elaborate on this at all? I guess not all nitrates are equivalent?

Fair point! I'll have to get the magnifying glass out, then. But at least there won't be anything foul or unhealthy about it, so that's reassuring. Thanks again!

Thanks! So it should still be safe to feed?

Sand alone with root tabs would be fine. There's more maintenance in the sense that you have to regular put root tabs in, but that usually isn't too big of a deal. You could do a sand cap over an aqua soil. That's easier, in that you'd have 18 to 30 months worth of nutrients before you had to either start root tabbing or re-do the substrate, but it's definitely more expensive, especially right up front. If you do that, make sure the sand cap is think enough to lock the nutrients down and out of the water column; some aqua soils leech ammonia. Probably an inch would do, unless you have digging animals. You could do a sand cap over top soil, which will give similar results to aqua soil much more affordably, but it's more of a wild card in terms of potential nutrient leech, and could potentially be messy, especially if you're the type to uproot and replant plants often. Search for "dirted tank" for more about this approach. Personally, for an African cichlid tank, I would just go with straight sand (I like pool filter sand but there are a lot of options) with strategically placed root tabs as needed. Cichlids will have their own ideas about planting, so they'll make a mess of anything else you might try, and a lot of rooted plants have a potential to struggle anyway because of that. And if you're in there doing regular water changes, it's pretty trivial to just pop a couple root tabs in.

I have some Apistogramma cacatuoides fry that I have been trying to feed with Sera Tropical Flake food ground up in a mortar and pestle. I think it's working, at least a little, because they're about a week old, maybe a few days more than that, but if I'm being honest it's hard to tell. It's a community tank so Mom has them under cover a lot, and when I spray a cloud of powdered, ground flake in their general vicinity I lose sight of the already hard to see fry. I tried to culture infusoria using the method described in this video starting at the 1:38 mark: Twenty-four hours in, it smelled sort of bready, because of the yeast. Seventy- two hours in I went to feed it into the tank but it smelled bad, sort of like a garbage can ready to be taken out. Not gag-inducingly bad, but just moderately bad, if that makes sense? Anyway, that spooked me from feeding it in, and at this point I'm wondering if they're too big for infusoria anyway. Should I just toss the culture? I think the community's recommendation will be baby brine shrimp, at least for these week-ish old fry. I've never hatched BBS; is the Ziss hatchery really worth the money over a DIY hatchery? For the next batch of newly-hatched fry, should I just use commercial powdered fry food like Easy Fry and Small Fish Food?

The tricky part might be lighting, but if you've got space lights or a bright enough window (or maybe it's warm enough to put it outside where you live), it ought to work. I like @Pepere 's idea about old tank water.

Haha, touché! Thanks!

In addition to what @Wes L. said, do you have any algae eating animals in there? Plecos or Amano shrimp or something? Usually hair algae is pretty low down their list of preferred algae to eat, but they will eat it. But I think I might try turning the light's intensity down before shortening the photoperiod. The Aqua Sky is not the Planted 3.0, but you still might want to take a look at the thread discussing programming for the 3.0: Full disclosure: I have two Finnex lights and haven't used any Fluval lights.

Provided with root tabs it should be fine, but I'll caveat that I've never had vallisneria myself.

What species of apistos? @Fish Folk and @anewbie , do you have advice on which apistos can live in harem situations? That said, if your apisto pair is happy together, my inclination would be to leave well enough alone there, or at least have a Plan B if the new female isn't accepted.

Ludwigias have given me trouble where I've had good success with limnophila, bacopa, and rotala, so sometimes a plant just doesnt like your tank. Have you had any luck with any other stem varieties? @MattyM has some good suggestions above, especially the floating them part. What is the stocking? Anything that might uproot plants?

Yeah, that's kind of what I was trying to get at with floating plants, but you phrased it better than me. Anyway, yes: more and faster growing plants. You can always take them out later, after they've helped the epiphytes along, if you don't really like them.

@Mmiller2001 has a very cool moss wall in one of his tanks. I'd think that even cichlids would leave that alone. Otherwise, maybe vallisneria if you're willing to carefully prune and replant runners where you any them to be? Or Cryptocoryne spiralis, if you're willing to buy a whole bunch of pots of it. Actually, on the second thought, the crypt might be too vulnerable to the cichlids' grazing...

More this forum specifically than ACO as a brand, but I've definitely ranted things like "...No, that's the beautiful part, it's just ordinary seltzer water!"

If you don't have any plant weights, you can bunch a few stems in a ceramic bio-ring to weigh it down, or alternately, use a tiny dab of glue and a deft hand to stick a small piece of gravel to the roots.

Once I happened to overhear a mom and her young son looking for the octopus in a tank at my LFS. I had to disappoint them (but spare their time!) by telling them that Pogostemon stellatus "octopus" referred to the plants they were trying to look through.