Rube_Goldfish

I use a turkey baster all the time, usually for quickly siphoning some small thing or for target feeding. I also recommend these plastic trays from Ikea. They're waterproof, obviously, and I use them whenever I set anything wet down, when I'm trimming and planting or replanting things, or when I'm otherwise going to make a mess.

I did something similar. I used cheap hardware store lava rock as a retaining wall to divide the sandy area from the gravelly area. I then covered up the lava rocks with the sand and gravel, so it's a sort of "fuzzy border" between the two, which I think is more natural looking. I also irregularly planted the border with dwarf sagittaria.

I see colors just fine* and I still poll everyone in the house when doing parameter testing! "Yeah, but which shade of orange is that...?" *This weirdly feels like I'm bragging

If you can post a photo that would help, but "cloudy and tinted green" sure sounds like green water, which is single-celled algae suspended in the water column. A UV light would kill that as the algae pass by (along with any other free-floating single-celled organisms). Tank blackouts should help, too. Actually, so would daphnia and some other small creatures that would eat the green water algae, but fish would likely predate on the daphnia too fast for them to make much difference. It's worth noting that green water might not look good, and it can be a threat to plants by just shading them out, but it's no harm to fish at all. I am unfamiliar with liquid magnesium, but I do use Seachem Equilibrium (a powder) to dissolve calcium and magnesium into the water that I use for water changes. So while I can vouch for the liquid stuff (maybe it's better?) I know the Equilibrium works great for what I need it for.

I just pulled two tiny bladder snails out of the coffee filter basket. They were each only slightly larger than the eggs themselves. The basket floats, but the snails walk along the water's surface using surface tension, so there's only so much I can do! For now, I'm just going to check every couple of hours and manually remove snails, if necessary. If this ends up not working, next time, I'll try tightly lashing cheesecloth over the top, or maybe using a rubber band to hold a second basket inverted on top, to make what would look like a tiny shark cage. But hopefully the eggs will hatch soon enough!

Here are some photos:

That all makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining all that!

I know this is an old thread, but this is exactly what I just did with about a dozen Corydoras sterbai eggs I just rolled off of my glass. I didn't use glue, though; I used a straight airline connector to make a loop of some airline tubing, such that the coffee filter basket sits in it like an inner tube. I threw in some small bits of stem plants I've been floating until I get around to plant them, a couple clumps of hair algae, and a bit of water lettuce or two, all carefully checked to make sure no snails made it into the basket (I think snails have been eating my cory eggs). I'll see if I can get a picture tomorrow after the lights turn on.

So then do you alternate days: live BBS on even days and commercial food on odd days? That sort of thing?

Before I bought the Ziss* I considered buying this no air pump, hatchery disk (featured in this video: It hatches the brine shrimp more slowly but also more spread out in terms of time. In my case I was worried about too small a harvest at a time, and adult fish hogging all the BBS, but if you're just trying to feed a single pea puffer, it might do the trick. *I ended up buying the Ziss instead because I basically knew I would eventually, because I knew I wouldn't be able to resist it, so I just jumped right to it!

@TOtrees, @MattyM, @AllFishNoBrakes, @Ali, @tolstoy21, @Jeff: Thanks so much! This has all inspired a new question, though: I know some people will hatch and feed live BBS every day, and I know that Don't Overfeed and Feed a Variety of Foods are two of the commonly cited guidelines, and I'm having a hard time reconciling all that. Are the daily-hatch people mostly feeding fry, or feeding so many tanks that each tank only gets a little bit of BBS and then a little bit of something else, too? In my case, I've got a small amount of fry in a community tank but I'm not seriously trying to breed anything, so BBS is mostly just a supplement to commercial foods and a sort of enrichment for the adults, as well as a fry food. And while freezing leftovers is a great idea, that's not an option for me at the moment; brine shrimp and all other live critters are barred from the shared refrigerator and freezer, which is fair. So I guess I'll just start very small (1/8 teaspoon? 1/16th?) and work up from there, feed live BBS for a day or two each week, and commercial food the rest of the time. (I hope that ramble all made sense!)

I bought a cup each of Alternanthera reinickii, Crypocoryne wendtii, and Rotala H'ra, planted them all into a new 55 gallon with small gravel and some sand, planted a few bits of each into a well established ten gallon with coarser gravel, lit with Finnex Planted+ 24/7 lights on both tanks, with no CO2, and all of it melted away and never came back. Maybe they need CO2, maybe they need aquasoil, I don't know, but I've had much more success with pots and clippings.

The way I've seen it explained is that, generally, the higher the wavelength, the deeper into the water the light can penetrate, assuming that the brightness is held constant. So blue light is brighter deeper than red light would be. But light of any color (well, in the visible spectrum, anyway) can be photosynthesized. @Seattle_Aquarist addressed this in a different thread: In it, he wrote (among other things): "Plant utilize all spectrum of light. Some light spectrum (mostly in the violet/blue) produce more photosynthesis and growth, other light spectrum (orange/red) promote flowering and leaf size even the green spectrum promotes certain chemical processes in plants and leaves. That is why 'red light' is typically used in hydroponic farming facilities." So if I'm following @Seattle_Aquarist and @Mmiller2001 correctly, there are minor differences between colors but not enough to make a difference for the hobbyist, who should just choose a color palette for aesthetic reasons.

I also love gifting and trading plants with friends. It's like trading baseball cards except you can just make more of them.

@Seattle_Aquarist gives a list of plant recommendations for hard water in this thread:

I just got a Ziss brine shrimp hatchery and will soon try my first ever brine shrimp hatching. I have two questions for the Ziss and DIY veterans here, though. 1) Do you use an airstone or just an airline at the end, inside the hatchery? (My Ziss came with an "air diffuser" rather than an airstone, but I figure it would be a horse apiece.) 2) Does your sequence go: air pump-check valve-air valve-hatchery, or pump-air valve-check valve-hatchery? Does it matter at all? Thanks in advance!

Hide them under moss! How have I never thought of that?! I've just been either leaving my corydoras eggs to their fate moving them to a tank with too many snails and hoping - in vain, apparently - that they'd hatch before the snails found them. Thanks for the idea!

That's so exciting! Even if, as you say, nothing comes from them, it means the fish are giving you a good "approval rating"!

With a KH of 6 degrees, you could try adding peat to your filter or even just tucked away in a bag somewhere in the tank, or add botanicals like leaf litter (Indian almond leaf is a popular option) and/or alder cones, or enough driftwood that the tannins can affect the pH. But 6 dKH isn't that low, and any acids you add will have to wear down that KH buffer first, and every water change would replenish it. So if you really want to bring your pH down (and just how high is "off the charts really high" exactly; the chart goes pretty high!), your best bet might be to mix your tap water with reverse osmosis (RO) water. You can buy a reasonably affordable system nowadays, or maybe buy some from your LFS. Maybe @Seattle_Aquarist or @Mmiller2001 have better (or cheaper!) suggestions.

@Cinnebuns I understood and agree with what you have to say here and the conversation you are trying to have. Actually, the "many paths up the mountain" aspect of fish and aquarium keeping is something I love about it, and also a source of frustration, during those times when I'm feeling lost or overwhelmed, and I just want someone to tell me the answer already, but there is no one answer. So I get it, I understood you, and I'm right there with you. But all that said, if you want to stop getting notifications for this thread (you know, like this one!), you can. Here's a (mobile) screenshot on a thread I started; I assume it's similar on a desktop:

I have been very jealous of many of the fish I've seen people keep, on here and elsewhere on the internet, but this is the first time I've been jealous of someone's (long!) dead fish!

I've heard there are thriving feral populations of oscars in Florida, though I don't remember where I heard that. I did a search for "capybara fish" and learned that the Vatican declared capybara (and beavers, apparently) as fish for purposes of Lent!

Thanks for the detailed description and photos!

Maybe. Those bulb plants are sometimes duds. Any change in the almost-week since you wrote this? Does the bulb feel sort of squishy if you gently squeeze it? It might also be upside down, so if you've still had no luck and it still feels firm, you could try rotating it 180 degrees.

In The Ecology of the Planted Aquarium, Diana Walstad says that plants preferentially take up ammonia over nitrate as a nitrogen source (free excerpt from her website [PDF]), but also that ammonia becomes toxic even to vascular plants above 3 ppm. Unfortunately, the copy I read was from the library, so I can't cite it by page or chapter. Maybe someone else can help out? But you're right, that at reasonable levels plants will happily consume ammonia. This makes me wonder if the underlying reason for your success with plants in a microbially cycled tank versus an uncycled tank has more to do with stability of the water chemistry than the actual ammonia levels. That is, maybe spikes generally are just bad for plants. I like this because it provides post hoc rationalization for my spending!