Rube_Goldfish

Two fish are in a tank. One of them turns to the other and says, "Do you know how to drive this thing?!"

I second what @JettsPapa says, but I'd also suggest some faster growing plants. Vallisneria is fast-growing, yes (or can be), but floating plants (water lettuce, red root floater, frogbit) do double duty by soaking up nutrients and shading the tank below. And because they're not rooted, you can remove them afterward if you don't really want them. And of course there are all the fast growing stems that'll help, too. Otherwise it's just manual cleaning, small tweaks, and time. Good luck!

The only one I have first-hand experience with is Bacopa caroliniana and I love it. I've got it growing well in low tech ten gallon and low tech 55 gallon tanks. It does not send runners but will need periodic trimming depending on how fast it grows. The other three stems you listed should be the same.

I like the melamine scrub pads, the magic eraser ones. I always seem to leave lines when I use a credit card.

I'm sorry to hear that the A. cacatuoides didn't pan out, but the A. agassizii look great! Good luck with them!

Any updates to this? Did you ever get any more spawning? I had a pair spawning in a 55 a couple days ago; Mom has been tending to them pretty closely, Dad has been ignoring them. Otherwise, the male and female basically ignore each other. It's a community tank so my expectations for fry survival are low, but there are a lot of hides and Mom is fearless. I saw that pulling the free swimming fry didn't work; knowing what you know now, when would you separate them from Mom? Thanks!

Yes, basically. I have a red tiger lotus, not a lily, but from what I understand it's basically the same principle: consistently trim any leaves/lily pads that go higher than whatever height you want, and eventually the plant "learns" to stop trying to go higher than that. My better half likes the lily pads, so I always leave at least one, so I guess I'm not a very good plant trainer! Edited to add: I found a thread where some more experienced lotus/lily keepers discussed this

If you're willing to "train" it red tiger lotus or dwarf aquarium lily can work in the midground.

If you want minimal maintenance but still want height and "presence", for lack of a better word, I'd try a big Java fern, probably a narrow leaf or trident. They grow slow, which means they won't need much from you, but also means that you'll either need a bunch of them to start or buy a big one from someone with, well, a big one. They don't even really have to be on hardscape, per se; you can just weigh them down with a dab of glue on a pebble just heavy enough to keep them from floating away.

My sterbai corydoras, the biggest fish in a 55 gallon tank, are also the most skittish. If I walk over to the tank too fast, they stampede all over each other, plants, and hardscape in order to hide. Then if I stay still for about a minutes they forget I'm there. I guess they're like the tyranosaurus in Jurassic Park: their vision is based on movement?

I used a frosted white window cling film from Amazon. I like it but don't love it. In my case, though, it's because the wall behind it is painted navy blue, so it sort of darkens the film, dark enough to sort of dull things but not dark enough to make anything pop. Knowing what I know now, I would have used a black cling film. That said, maybe I can find a cheap LED strip line and shine it up onto the cling film from the back...

Oh, you meant "jumped out and hit my roof" literally?! I assumed that was figurative!

My LFS also has a small section with scorpions and tarantulas. Scorpions, or at least the ones they have, glow under black lights, so they have black light flashlights to show off the effect. I was in there once when a family was looking at the arachnids. Trying to be helpful and show off the cool effect, I told the mom about it. She tried to get her 8-ish year old son to try, but he was having none of it. He set the flashlight down on the ground, shouted out "no thank you!" through tears, and ran to hide near the platies. So that's the story of the time I made a child cry at the fish store I don't work at.

Yes, quite a lot, actually. You know, I was just thinking about this journal this morning. We really got down to brass tacks in October 2022 and I had the tank planted and flooded in early November. I took extensive (excessive, really) photos to try to document everything, and should have just made contemporaneous posts here. Then, about early to mid-December, the micro SD card with practically all my photos (not just of the tank and build, either) suddenly went bad and it's all gone. I took it to a local phone/tech repair shop and they referred me to a forensic data recovery center, but they'll charge me $75 just for a quote, and recovery would likely go in to the hundreds. I'm probably going to do it anyway - I've got a lot of kid and family photos on it - but the whole thing was really discouraging. I really should have used some kind of cloud back up or at least a local back up, but I just didn't. So that discouragement led me to put off updating, which then made the updating become this big overwhelming thing. Which is ridiculous; this is supposed to be fun, not feel like a term paper. But inspired by your new tank, I'll just roll up my sleeves and do what I can. I'll include photos that I have and going forward, and if/when I get the other ones recovered, I'll include those, too.

That all sounds like a great plan. It's probably a little more conservative or careful than you truly need to be, but we just don't know, do we? And this is a hobby for the patient, isn't it? Can't wait to see everything grow out in the meantime!

You know, I've been thinking more about this. I know you're an MD Fishtanks fan, and I know he has specifically used Tropica soil before and still put fish in straight away, often using an established filter, often using bacteria-in-a-bottle. He's also mentioned that he does daily testing and daily water changes for the first week (two weeks?) on new setups, so that might not be as helpful as I think. Hopefully one of our veterans can weigh in here. Otherwise we'll have to do some research on Tropica's ammonia levels.

That all sounds right. An established, robust filter should be ready to go right away. If you were using an inert substrate I'd say you could transfer the filter and put fish in immediately, but the ammonia-leeching aquasoil is a bit of a wildcard here. I haven't used one, and I just don't know how much or how fast they left ammonia. Maybe it is so little that the plants can handle it, maybe it's so much that it would even overwhelm your filter. Without a test kit/strip or at least some other experience with Tropica's soil, I just don't know. My understanding of the way beneficial bacteria work is that their population grows or dies back according to the amount of ammonia and nitrite available, and that as long as they stay wet, they go into a kind of dormancy and can ramp back up pretty quickly. So the biofilter might "starve" a little but you could toss in a pinch of flake or pellet every third day or so. The thing is, your normal plan (see signs of plant growth, ghost feed new tank, add Stability, slowly increase stocking) is probably fine, but I just don't know aquasoils enough to fully endorse it. It's a real shame testing supplies are so hard for you to find.

First of all, it looks fantastic! Let's see: 1) there are two ways to know when to add fish during a fishless cycle, but it's the same as cycling with inert substrate. Measure the ammonia levels, measure the nitrite, measure the nitrate, add fish when the first two are back down to zero (you might call this the chemical approach). Alternately, closely observe plant and algae growth; when they're visibly noticeable, add fish (the naturalistic approach?). I saw some disagreement on a quick web search of Tropica soil's ammonia leeching, but the safe play is just test the water until the plants and biofilter are converting it faster than the soil is leeching it. 2) Tropica advertises its soil as acidifying. You've got a lot of carbonate hardness, though, so the soil's acid would have to deplete that first, and every water change would "recharge" that KH buffer. So I doubt it would have a big effect at all. 3) Running both filters simultaneously for two weeks is probably longer than you'd need in an established, planted tank, but on the other hand, it's a bit on the overstocked side. Probably a good plan, yeah. 4) I think that the rate of dissolution of minerals from stones goes down proportionately with pH. So low pH dissolves minerals quickly to a certain equilibrium point and then slows and then stops. Your pH is high enough that they might not dissolve at all. I wouldn't worry about it. Good luck, and keep us posted!

I agree with all of the above about keeping a spare sponge filter, then you'd just need to fill an otherwise empty, in-storage tank. But you don't even need a tank, at least not a "real" one. Rubbermaid totes work just as well and maybe be easier to store. @Irene has a good video on it:

This dwarf sagittaria all started from a single sprig in a low tech ten gallon tank, but it's been growing for about fifteen months or so. So yeah, slow growing. The light is a Finnex 24/7 Planted Plus KLC.

Advantages of asking the fish sitter to do it: probably not hard to mess up, keeps consistency for plants with regard to growth/health and lighting schedule, makes algae problems less likely if plants can just keep chugging along. Disadvantages of asking the fish sitter to do it: not impossible to mess up (and overdose could lead to algae problems at the low end and I guess toxicity to the fish if they dumped the whole bottle in at the extremes), plants will keep growing and might become overgrown (could lead to shading problems?) without trimming/maintenance, which you would probably not be asking the sitter to do. Are there fast-growing plants? Broadly speaking, though, I think if you can trust the sitter to feed the fish, you can probably trust that person to do a couple squirts on schedule.

I've never used aquasoils, so I have no first hand experience with this, but the tank has been running for almost 3 1/2 years. Based on what I've read, most aquasoils will give you two to three years before their nutrients are depleted. (I think they mostly have a high cation exchange capacity, so depending on the bioload and feeding of the tank, they can be recharged that way, at least to some degree.) Root tabs would restore those nutrients in the same way that they would add nutrients to an inert substrate in the first place. What's the consistency of the soil? Has it broken down into "mud"? I think your two best choices are: A) extensively root tab the existing soil substrate and probably cap it with sand or gravel (especially if it's muddy or if you're worried about nutrients leeching from the root tabs into the water column); or B) yeah, tear it down and start over, at which point you'd have lots of choice for substrate.

If the cow manure is what I think it is, you can actually order it on Amazon. @JettsPapa , is this the stuff you mean, the Black Kow "composted cow manure"?

I use a similar pump and thought about using a ball valve in this way but I worried it would strain the motor to be pushing water against a closed or narrowed valve. You haven't noticed any issues like that?

If you do this sort of cycling comparison experiment, could you do swabs of the filter media and put them under a microscope? I've seen speculation that different cycling methods (and variables) promote the growth of different cycling microbes, but I don't know if anyone has ever had any real evidence of that, and I'm curious!