Rube_Goldfish

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!

Did you ever add any liquid fertilizers or root tabs in, maybe after you notice growth slowing? Heavy feeding might have provided a lot of the relevant nutrients, but fertilizers are tailor-made for plants. And I believe crypts are on the root-feeding side of things, so if the soils were depleted they might have needed more targeted nutrition. Did the plants slowly fade or was it more abrupt? Did the leaves show yellowing or holes or anything like that?

Depending on the form factor of your light maybe you can raise it up away from the tank, either suspending it from the ceiling or propping it up on risers. That would effectively dim it.

Does anyone recognize this plant (to the right of the )? I got some trimmings from a friend's tank but he didn't know what kind of plant it is. Thanks in advance!

I have Apistogramma cacatuoides babies! I've never seen fry of anything before (well, bladder snails...), so this is very exciting! Mom and babies: Babies! And a shot of Dad for good measure:

If you want to use the trimmings and hitchhikers are a concern, you can use reverse respiration for the trimmings after clipping from the 29 but before planting in the 50 cm cube: You should read the whole thing, but the short version is that ordinary seltzer water will kill algae, snails, worms, basically everything but vascular plants, which actually get a little boost. It's nothing short of amazing.

With stem plants and carpeting plants, root tabs would help, for sure, especially with an inert substrate, but they may not be strictly necessary. Stem plants and carpeting plants (most of them? all of them? Now I'm not sure) draw nutrients through their roots but also draw a lot of nutrients through their leaves and stems directly from the water column. By all means, root tab away, but your principal form of fertilization should be a liquid water column fertilizer like Easy Green. Not to mention epiphytes like anubias will exclusively pull nutrients from the water column. You can absolutely mix sand and gravel, yes. You shouldn't need to do anything to lower your pH; 7.0 is good for most plants and most animals. As a sort of guideline, but not rule, aquatic plants tend to prefer slightly acidic and slightly soft water, but they should grow just fine in 7.0. You mentioned that your KH is at or near zero. That's not necessarily a problem, but keep a close eye on your pH; a tank with no or low KH can easily drift to lower pH over time as organics build up. Crushed coral or Wonder Shell can counteract that if you find your tank acidifying. Here is the "glossary" that @Birdsnstuff mentioned.

If you just planted it a week ago it could just be adjusting itself to your tank's parameters.

Well, it turns out that my 1M:2F A. cacatuoides trio is actually 2M:1F. The good news is it looks like the female and one of the males have paired up pretty well; the bad news is that they started relentlessly chasing the other male. Moreover, other fish were getting caught in the crossfire. Anyway, rejected male was rescued out of the 55 gallon community tank and is now by himself in an established-but-empty planted 10 gallon. (I'm planning on making it a shrimp tank, but I guess I'll have to shelve that idea for the time being.) Bachelor Number 1: Bachelor Number 2, now in his own bachelor pad while I figure out what to do with him:

I didn't know the bit from the first article about the extra hydrogen ion from the nitrification process contributing to the gradual acidification of aquariums. It all reinforces the importance of stability, though, huh? Thanks for finding and posting it!

The closest I've come to rehoming is when it turned out that my male:female pair of honey gouramis whoops, were both males. One of them matured and grew a little faster than the other, but as the smaller one caught up, they eventually worked out some kind of division of space for themselves. But I did give serious consideration to bringing one of them back to the LFS. I only had one tank at the time, but I'd even gotten to the point of setting up a Rubbermaid tote as a "fish jail" for the bully when they mostly stopped bothering each other. Anyway, I get it. It takes what's supposed to be a relaxing, enjoyable hobby and suddenly has you worrying that some of the animals under your care are stressing out the others. You're right that catching him out every feeding time is impractical. If moving him to another tank won't work (not everyone has MTS...), could you feed a little on one side of the tank, to draw him over, then feed everyone else on the other side while he's distracted? Ultimately, if you're not enjoying his presence, and if you can find a good home for him somewhere else, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Hopefully some of our veterans here have some ideas.

If you loved that ten gallon scape, you could always re-do it, but if it's just too much maintenance now, that's okay, too. You love crypts, right? There is enough variety of size, color, texture, and leaf shape to do just crypts and still have a beautiful tank. C. lucens in the midground, off-center, set off by a midground C. wendtii brown or maybe a pink flamingo, for color. Two C. spiralis in one back corner and a third in the other, and some little C. parva up front. Pothos and floating plants can handle nitrates if the crypts are growing too slowly to outcompete algae. Or maybe you have an epiphyte tank: anubias and Java fern and bolbitis, oh my! Toss in a bucephalandra or two if you're feeling fancy. Maybe you go hardscape only. That might actually increase your maintenance, but still, you could get a beautiful, healthy tank without plants. It looks like you might have enough blackwater-loving species of fish that you could do hardscape and botanicals; leaf litter, seed pods, and alder cones seem like a lot less work than trimming and replanting, if that's started to feel more like a chore. The best part is, if you try something out and don't end up liking it, just try something different instead. But as long as you're still looking after the animals' wellbeing, don't drive yourself nuts doing it. Ultimately, and truth be told I need this reminder as much as anyone, this is supposed to be a relaxing or at least enjoyable hobby!

I want to start a shrimp tank, and while I haven't even started to research it yet, I'd like to start a live food culture project. I'll have a ten gallon tank to work with. I've never so much as hatched brine shrimp (also on my 2023 list of things to try) so it will all be new ground for me. What's on your 2023 agenda?

Honestly, it probably doesn't matter. Mine (planted into inert gravel with Easy Root Tabs) melted for a couple weeks but has since bounced back strong (under a Finnex Planted+ 24/7 but no CO2). I expect that they'll do fine either way, whether the root tabs are buried in rock will or sand.

If I may be so presumptuous: if you're not going to put a lid on it, you should have a scape with wood sticking out above the water's surface. Because I have lids but I think that looks cool and I want to live vicariously through your tank!

If you keep a second sponge filter tucked away somewhere in your tank and keep a Rubbermaid (or equivalent) tote clean in storage, you've basically got a hospital/quarantine/fry rescue tank at a moment's notice. But it could also be either a fish asylum or fish jail, if you need to separate some of them from some others. It wouldn't be a long term solution, but would buy you time to figure out what to do.

Full disclosure: I've never had celestial pearl danios, but I've read that they're very active swimmers. So that's (at best) third hand advice. Shell dwellers would work, as another option. I've never kept African cichlids, but the ACO blog recommends them for smaller tanks. You could still do a beautiful aquascape, you'd just have yo adapt it to them. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/shell-dwellers Can't wait to see what you end up doing!

Crustacean blood is copper-based hemocyanin rather than iron-based hemoglobin: "There are three components that can be present in crustacean blood, including (1) hemolymph – ‘colorless’ blood that is nutrient carrier component of blood; it also may carry some oxygen, and is involved in clotting; (2) hemocyanin – a true copper-based pigment that carries oxygen found in developed Crustacea; (3) and hemoglobin – a true iron-based pigment found in underdeveloped Crustacea. Most species have hemocyanin in their blood (Joel, 2013; Urich, 1994)." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/crustacea So I guess it's one of those "the dose makes the poison" things.

That seems like a sound hypothesis to me. Isn't it funny how the questions at the beginning are "this isn't working, why not?" and then they evolve over time to "this is working, but why?"

It looks a little like Riccia fluitans, but I have never seen that in person (I think...), only internet photos.

Reverse respiration? It couldn't hurt.

If I'm remembering what @Seattle_Aquarist had to say on the matter, light color doesn't matter except that, all else being equal, blue light with its shorter wavelength will penetrate deeper water, but otherwise all light in the visible spectrum will contribute equally to photosynthesis. (Roy, do I have that right?)

So the biofilter in your tank is smaller or non-existent in a way that makes a big difference, but it doesn't matter quite so much because the fish waste is in the safer ammonium form rather than free ammonia, because the pH is so low? That makes sense, though I guess the ammonium would build up over time, too; I guess that's where the notification process for ammonium in a low pH environment comes in. I wonder if it's microbial or chemical. Thanks so much for following up on this and diving into it! I'm no chemist or scientist either, just a curious layman. I really appreciate you doing the heavy lifting!

Sorry I'm late for the party! Unfortunately, I have no experience with rabbit snails, so I can't help there. That size tank should be fine for a lot of species, and even though I don't have any cube tanks myself, I've seen a lot of fantastic looking cubic aquascapes, so it really is nice aesthetically. The depth of perception really helps bring the eye in. The benefits of long tanks are mostly to do with increasing the surface area-to-volume ratio for improved gas exchange, with bringing plants closer to the light (because light intensity falls dramatically with water depth), and because most fish spend more time swimming horizontally than vertically. But you can work around all that. As for stocking ideas, I agree with @Remi de Groot that you'll need to really connect with whatever species you select, but because thinking about stocking aquariums is fun, you might go for small schooling/shoaling species like chili rasboras or ember tetras, or small anabantoids like a betta or a small gourami (I have and love honey gouramis!). Otocinclus and bristlenose plecos would fit just fine, and small corydoras should be good, too. I'm still pretty new to Apistogramma but a pair of those should work, or maybe scarlet badis. I'll defer to those with more experience here, but I think as long as you avoid active horizontal swimmers like rummynose, zebra danios, or celestial pearl danios, you should have a lot of options.

For me, the pond pump was less about not having to haul buckets, because I still do that anyway, but was about being able to put new water in the tank in a controlled way. The old way had me pouring water from a five gallon bucket over my hand and then inevitably annoying the fish, making a mess, and kicking stuff up off the substrate. With the pump, I can set the flow rate and direct the water where I want it to go.