Rube_Goldfish

So while the dish can do some things well, it doesn't necessarily do anything better than what a Ziss or a DIY bottle hatchery can do? That sort of seals the deal for me, I think. So you shine a light for some brief period of time, depending on how big of a harvest you want, draw out the collected BBS, then shut the light off and turn the air back on? That makes sense! Do you notice a difference in body size from different harvest times, or does the natural variation in hatch speed average it all out?

I'm usually talking about species like anubias and Java fern rather than conditions like injected CO2 or not, but I always think "slow to grow means slow to die". Knowing what I know now, I'd build up/slope my substrate higher - it seemed like I was taking up a lot of precious room but every inch closer to the light the background plants are is dramatically more light. I'd remember to stick a whole bunch of root tabs in my inert substrate before anything else: hardscape, plants, water. And I'd more thoughtfully group or bunch same-species stems together for aesthetic reasons instead of just haphazardly jabbing them in somewhere in the back. They can be a little closer to each other than I used to think.

I think I'm ready to try hatching live brine shrimp. Specifically, I've got Apistogramma cacatuoides fry in a community tank that I'd like to feed better. I've been deliberating between buying a dish hatchery like this one: and building a traditional DIY bottle hatchery. With the dish, I like that you can take smaller but more frequent harvests since fry would ideally eat multiple times a day, but in a community tank I worry that the adult fish (EDIT: adult fish in this tank include cardinal tetras, honey gouramis, and sterbai corydoras; I'm not that worried about the parent apistos) would hoard a smaller harvest, and moreover that if I target feed it to where the fry like to hide out, I'd draw the adults over to them. Another advantage is that it doesn't require any air or heat, making it easier and freeing up placement within my house. On the other hand, a traditional DIY bottle hatchery or Ziss hatchery would give me more than enough brine shrimp to work with, but only once every 24 or 36 hours; the fry would have to make due with powdered food the rest of the time. Would that even be worth the trouble? (I know lots of people run two or even three hatcheries on a staggered timeline but I've never done it at all; jumping from zero to three hatcheries seems a bit much!) The other advantage is that is cheaper to do the bottle; the dish kit runs about $25 on Amazon. Any suggestions on which direction you would go? Anything I'm not thinking of?

First, I could have worded my question about Easy Carbon a lot nicer, so sorry about that. I definitely made that mistake, too! Oh, the yellowing is on the new growth? That's a horse of a different color. Take a look, if you would, at this blog article on aquarium plant deficiencies on the ACO blog, and specifically this chart (from here😞 Anyway, with that chart in mind, and your photo showing (it looks like) about 10 ppm nitrates, I think that's the issue, too low levels of nitrate. Your dosage of Easy Green seems appropriate (depending on lighting etc.) unless you're injecting CO2. (Are you injecting CO2?) If you have no plans to change your stocking level (and therefore your nitrate level), then you might want to try increasing (slowly) the Easy Green. Maybe try three pumps a week for a month?

Thanks for explaining that all so clearly and thoroughly!

It probably wouldn't help in @Kelly S's situation, because the wood is already in the tank and you have to move quickly, but you can also sprinkle some sand or rock dust on the still-wet glue to cover up the glue.

Depending on what kind of algae it is and what other tanks/animals you have, I've seen people move rocks/wood/epiphytes to Amano shrimp (or other algae eaters) tanks, give them a day or two to clean it up, then put it back again. Or maybe you could add a nerite snail to your goldfish tank?

Will you have digging animals? Do you like to uproot and replant plants often? If so, you might want to do a cap over the aqua soil. Or like @GoDawgsGo said, just give it time and let the filter do its job. Also, and I might be mixing up my aquasoils here, but many (all?) of them are magnetic, so if some pellets end up where you don't want them on a sand cap, say, you can use a magnet to pick them up.

First, a caveat: I've never kept any of these plants. With that out of the way... For the hornwort with the pink/red tinge, notice how it's the new growth at the top? It's closest to the light. Lots of plants will get a pink or red hue under bright light. I remember hearing that it's basically plant sunscreen to protect themselves from the light. Anthocyanins, I think? Anyway, it's not at all detrimental to the plant and a lot of people try very hard to get some of those colors in their tank. You also said that the tank is recently established, so the hygro may just still be adjusting to it's new parameters, especially as your tank's chemistry stabilizes itself. Do you see any growth? It should be much healthier. You can trim melted leaves or just let them be. I have to say, though, that they don't look too bad to my amatuer eyes. Your parameters, assuming they're stable, look very good for plant growth. Do you know your tap water parameters after the water has had a chance to rest (off-gas) for 24 hours? Why are you doing Easy Carbon? Despite the name, it's not a CO2 thing, it's gluteraldehyde, an algaecide. It can be rough on some plants, too. Unless you're combating algae, I'd shelve it (you can always pull it back out for spot treatments later on).

I wish I had a pond to toss them into or a pea puffer to feed them to!

Could elaborate on this, if you don't mind? I know tanks have a tendency to acidify over time, but I never really understood why. If I'm understanding you correctly, plants and animals (and microbes, I guess) use up the carbonates and bicarbonates that make up KH as part of their growth and/or metabolism, and as the KH gets depleted and organics (humic, formic, and tannic acids) build up, the pH falls? Do I have that about right? And if so, I guess just regular water changes, depending on your parameters from the tap, would prevent that? Thanks in advance!

I remember learning as a kid that Native Americans would use whole fish as fertilizers in their fields, or at least I thought I'd learned that. But I wanted to see what I could see about that first, so I did a quick internet search. All of which is preamble to say that I just accidentally stumbled on this: Using Fish Food as Plant Fertilizer: Is it Worth it? I've never heard of FlourishingPlants.com, so I can't vouch for them, but their conclusions are that old, expired fish food will not directly fertilize plants but will instead boost the microbes in the soil that would in turn help the plant. Which seems to confirm your hunch that it would be an effective soil amendment.

When I was first starting research on A. cacatuoides, I'd heard that the male can be picky about who he breeds with and will reject some females, sometimes aggressively. Based on what you're saying, I wonder if the person who told me that was misinterpreting the male driving out a female not ready or interested in spawning with him rejecting her as a potential mate. Your explanation makes more sense to me, anyway.

Fish are delightfully weird!

I don't do preemptive medicating, just 2-4 weeks of observation, regular water changes, and normal feeding (well, starting on Day 2; nothing on the day they first come home). Maybe I've just been lucky, or maybe my LFS, where I've gotten every single fish I've ever kept, is doing more in-store treating and/or quarantining that I don't know about, but that's worked for me. Caveat: I've only been in the hobby for about a year and a half.

That makes me wonder if temperature has anything to do with growth rate or age of maturation, and the apparent effect in sex ratio is an illusion caused by the actual effect on growth. Maybe their metabolisms speed up in warmer water? It seems to work that way for cherry shrimp. But I've never kept livebearers, so I'm just speculating.

An advertisement in a thing you bought for thousands of dollars!?! I'd be hopping mad and take the thing back if at all possible. Good grief! And while I rely on turning my head around and using the mirrors, the backup camera feels like just one more helpful tool. I've got a lot of little kids in my neighborhood, and a lot of them are short enough that their hard to see through the back window. I wish I had one on my car and can't wait until they're standard on every model.

When I bought a fairly hollow log, the person at my LFS warned that I might want to plug it with filter floss or coarse sponge so that a fish couldn't get stuck in a spot where it couldn't turn around and get back out. As it turns out, I stuck a rock more or less on that spot when I first set the tank up to weigh the wood down. It no longer needs the rock, but I ended up liking the way it looks, and the Amano shrimp have their own hideaway (they can squeeze in the hollow just fine). All that to say, if you want to plug it up, I'd try sponge or filter floss before the Great Stuff; at least you know it won't be buoyant and it would still allow flow.

For what it's worth, the owner of my LFS says one of his suppliers will only ship Apistogramma cacatuoides in 1M:2F trios (the other ships in 1M:1F pairs), so I guess that can work. In my case, I got a trio, but we sexed them incorrectly in the store, so it was a 2M:1F trio. One of the males and the female paired off and tried to kill the other male, so I rescued him from the 55 gallon community tank into an otherwise empty 10 gallon bachelor pad. The pair then immediately spawned, and while the female drives off the sterbai cories and otocinclus from wherever she's supervising the fry, I don't think I'd call it aggression per se. More like assertiveness. It's got a lot of hardscape to break up sightlines and is moderately-to-heavily planted. And the lonesome male in his bachelor pad has only been there a week, but he seems to be doing okay. His tank is right next to my desk, so he watches me push spreadsheets and emails all day. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, maybe I'm projecting, but he seems a little bored. It's only temporary until I can re-home or re-tank him. Anyway, that's my very limited experience (less than two months counting quarantine time) with dwarf cichlids.

I dose Equilibrium to about 6 degrees of general hardness from a starting point just above zero, so we're in the same boat there. Each degree is about 17.9 ppm, so you're starting from 0 to about 1 and a quarter degrees, give or take. Neon tetras like it soft, and (most) plants like their water on the softer side, though usually not as soft as neons, but 3-6 dGH sounds like a pretty good target to me. The safest way to make this adjustment would be to dose the incoming water during water changes to whatever your target is (let's say 6 dGH). Over a couple of water changes, you'll gradually get the tank to where your want it to be. If you use this method, base all your calculations on the new water volume only (that is, scale down the dosage from X teaspoons per 20 gallons to 1/X for a 5 gallon bucket, say). Could you dose the whole tank? Probably, but I don't know. I guess you could also do smaller doses over the course of a couple days or weeks straight into the tank (that is, dose 5 gallons' worth every third day until you've done 65 gallons' worth). But I just got into the "dose the new water" habit and it's worked out for me. By the way, don't be alarmed if the water looks really cloudy for about an hour or so; it'll clear up as it dissolves. Edit: I found Seachem's calculators here: https://www.seachem.com/calculators.php If you want to dose 5 US gallons from 0 to 6 dGH you'll use 1.5 tablespoons (or 24 grams).

I have two males that were supposed to be a M:F pair but we didn't correctly sex them as juveniles in the shop. They don't get along, per se, but they don't really bother each other, either; they mostly just leave each other alone. Part of me wants to get some females for them, but I'd have to get multiple females because there are multiple males, and it's so hard to sex juveniles (for me, anyway), I'd probably just end up with more males anyway!

Is that why people sometimes write their email addresses by spelling out the punctuation? Like this? example dot name at pretendwebsite dot com

That's where I'm at. I'm definitely not planning a career change to fish breeder! I mostly just want to boost the chances of survival for the eggs/fry, see some baby cories, and if I can sell some back to the LFS and pay for food or something, that's just icing on the cake. I just didn't want to pull eggs off the glass in one tank to just end up essentially feeding them to snails in a different tank!

So a DIY hang-on breeder box for eggs, then the fry would be safe in a bare bottom tank with snails?

I'd like to put some corydoras eggs in a tank that only has bladder snails and mini ramshorn snails. Could I put an algae water and some zucchini or something as a distraction/bribe/offering to the snails to leave the eggs alone? Would that work, or would it just grow the snail population?