Rube_Goldfish

How big is your school of cardinals? I have a school of twenty in a 55 gallon community tank with sterbai cories, honey gouramis, and otos, and they just sort of laze about all day (unless I startle them and they dart from one end of the tank to the other). But I've heard that tiger barbs can be aggressive when the shoal is too small and they act out of fear; maybe tetras are the same?

What does cc mean in this context?

Every so often if I get some weird or unexpected test results I bring a sample to my LFS to double check. It's sort of a hedge both on gone-bad reagents/strips and my own user error.

That and max out your tank light, if it's adjustable.

There are a lot of great options here. I'd probably choose something on the bigger side but slow growing, like a nice size Java fern or a bigger Anubias, or faster-growing stems that can be trimmed and replanted.

I think there are enough snail partisans here of all places that you'd find lots of support for your Snailbnb. It shouldn't be too hard to do, either, if that's the way you want to go.

I tried three of them (Alternanthera reinickii, Cryptocoryne wendtii, and Rotala H'ra) and all of them just immediately melted and never rebounded (going on about two months now). I am not running CO2 and it's a 55 gallon tank so there was a lot of water for the light to penetrate, so maybe it was just user error. I might try again someday in a smaller tank or if I ever try injected CO2. They were from my LFS at three cups for $30.

Great thread idea! I wish I could do a before-and-after of this tank but the micro SD memory card with all the build photos just went and died on me, and I never got around to backing it up. (It's why I've been dragging my feet on updating my journal. Does anyone have any insight on dead micro SD cards?) But I took this photo of my 55 gallon community tank earlier tonight. It's been running since the beginning of November so it's really just settling in. Now I just need the patience to wait for the plants to grow in and fill out a little!

I cut double-walled polycarbonate sheeting with a box cutter. Score it real well, then snap it off on the edge of a table or something.

I'd wait until @nabokovfan87 or some of the other experts to weigh in on the temperature thing; I've been double-thinking (that's a thing people say, right?) it ever since clicking Submit.

50 ppm nitrates should be good, unless you have very sensitive animals in the tank. Can you turn the heater down a few degrees? All else being equal, plants grow better in somewhat cooler water (74-76 instead of 80). If you have to have it that warm for a fish that needs it, we can work around it, though.

@Cat23 This is the Fluval 3.0 thread @Patrick_G is referring to:

The other thing I thought of was that I've heard of people chopping up earthworms for fish that would otherwise be too small to eat them, but I just don't have it in me to pull out a cutting board and knife and chop up worms. There are so many other feeding options that are far less gross! But if you've a stronger stomach than me that might work on mealworms, too.

I would suggest that if you put the new Stingray on an existing tank, don't change anything else (stocking, feeding or fertilizer schedule, etc.) for two weeks or so; that way if anything goes wrong or right you'll have more confidence to know it was the Stingray and not some confounding variable. But generally I'd want the brighter light on the taller tank, because light intensity falls dramatically with water depth.

As far as I've heard/read, yes, either a substrate has active nutrients but breaksdown over time (could still be root tabbed, though) or is inert from the start but is essentially unchanging.

Oh yeah, I forgot that carbon would do it, too. I kind of remember that Purigen is reusable or rechargeable, where carbon gets "used up"? Like I said, I've never used Purigen.

If you don't have slate, you could still use any other kind of stone. Either one big enough to weigh it down, super glued to the wood, or multiple smaller ones. If you don't like the looks of the stone(s), maybe you can bury them under the substrate. Or you can do what I did, which was to balance a stone on top for a couple weeks. It looked goofy, but it worked.

Though I have no first hand experience with them, I've heard good things about API Accu-clear for fine particulates and Seachem Purigen for tannins (mainly through MD Fishtanks, I think). If water changes alone aren't doing it, or aren't doing it fast enough, they might be worth looking into.

I just spent about two hours netting seven Amano shrimp out of one tank to move to another and definitely said out loud "how was Forrest Gump able to do this when he couldn't even see them!?"

Did either the angel or the gouramis recently reach maturity? They might now be territorial in a way that they weren't before? I don't know angels that well but that one gourami photo is full-on breeding coloration.

That's interesting, because (I think) I remember having heard that the indigestability (that's a word, right?) of chitin makes it act like insoluble fiber would in our human digestive system and help, uh, push things out. You keep trout?!

You know, this a good point, too, and I love that there are "many paths up the mountain" so that folks who want no-filter no-heater no-tech tanks and folks who want the latest whizbang high tech gizmos can all have what they want. In terms of a relaxing, enjoyable hobby, there's definitely something to be said for technology like timers and auto-feeders and whatnot.

Considering that bloodworms are also insect larvae, and that earthworms are also a favored treat of some fish, I imagine any omnivorous or carnivorous fish big enough to swallow one would likely love mealworms. I assume the mealworms would drown pretty quickly if they weren't eaten right away, so I'd start my experimenting very small at first and be prepared to scoop dead, unbeaten mealworms out if it doesn't work. If you try it, do please report back here, I'd love to know your results!

There's probably more room for efficiencies and bringing costs down (to buy and operate technology) but I'm probably just thinking as the customer rather than as the aquarium tech company.

The thing I've always wondered about the MD style substrate-in-bags approach is with root tabs. I know plant roots can penetrate the bags but I can't get root tabs in there, and while aquasoils don't need nutrients for a while, they will eventually. Or are the bags just set up knowing that the whole tank won't run beyond, say, two years anyway? I know MD seems to think anything past a year or so is ready for a teardown, but I also know he has a YouTube content beast that he has to keep fed.