Rube_Goldfish

Clubs are a great idea, and ACO has a club finder on their site: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/apps/store-locator

@Sarina , specifically. She's great!

Thanks for your time and expertise!

Oh no, I've never tried a dirted tank. Truth be told, I've only even dabbled with aquasoil. But I realized that I was talking about carpeting plants and thought that I ought to give the caveat that I've never successfully done it myself. ACO has a club finder thing on their website, so maybe that'll work for you? https://www.aquariumcoop.com/apps/store-locator

Do you have any fish clubs near you? My local club has a monthly meeting with an auction, and it can be a great place to get plants at great prices. Alternately, if you have any other local hobbyists, you might be able to buy or trade with them, too. I've never successfully grown a carpet, truth be told. One of these days!

The ACO nutrient deficiency guide would suggest that it needs more potassium: @Seattle_Aquarist , what do you think? Those holes aren't ringed with yellow or brown, but the leaves look pale overall to me.

The easy answer is more of what's working, so more rotala and dwarf lily, and it sounds like swords and vallisneria are doing well, too. The tightwad in me likes stems of all kinds because they are so easy to trim and replant. With a shallow tank like that 40 breeder you might have luck with some kind of easy carpet, even without injected carbon dioxide. And there are so many kinds of crypts, and they're so low maintenance, toss a whole bunch in.

That's a great start, and a nice looking hardscape. I will say that, in my limited experience, that lots of plants thrive better than a few plants. That is, planting heavy right from the start seems to make the plants more likely to succeed in terms of outcompeting algae. Plants can be expensive, but I had a harder time planting a pot or two over time than I did just biting the bullet and planting a whole bunch all at once. Good luck!

I've never tried this, but I've heard of people using a flat-ish rock, putting it in a shallow cup or bowl full of tank water, then putting it outside in the sun (weather permitting) for a few days to let it build up some algae, then moving the rock into the tank for algae eaters to clean off. Depending on how fast the rock develops algae, you could rotate a handful of rocks this way to always have some ready to go.

Unfortunately I think the dirt from the 20 gallon tank's filter is a confounding variable. But more data are always welcome!

I am looking to buy a grindal worm culture from a local vendor, so hopefully that's close enough! I've wanted to culture daphnia for ages but I just don't think I've got the space for it at the moment. So the melamine wipe gets the bulk of them, and the hydrogen peroxide gets whatever bits I may have missed/broken? Makes sense! Wish me luck!

I didn't think that siphoning/scraping them off would work, but why not give it a try? Thanks! I have honey gourami in another tank that probably gets even more BBS per gallon than this one, so I suspect that they (or something!) is eating hydra in there, but I've never actually seen them do it. Hydra, or at least the ones in my tanks, are so small! And while I've heard that No Planaria works well, I'm shying away from chemical solutions since the hydra are more of an eyesore than a real problem, and I've got a ton of snails in this tank. And I use a hotel room key card I forgot to give back on check-out (along with the ACO algae scraper melamine sponge). And I'm trying to condition a pair of Apistogramma cacatuoides to spawn in this tank, so I've been giving them BBS, and getting hydra as a side effect. But I'll try @AllFishNoBrakes 's idea with the siphon, and report back with the results.

I have a 20 gallon long that I've been feeding freshly hatched brine shrimp into and now I've got a lot of hydra in there. That's okay, because they're not harming any of the inhabitants and while I don't love the look of them, they're pretty interesting little creatures in their own right, so whatever. But a lot of them are on the front pane of glass, and that's recently developed a lot of what I think is diatom algae. Normally, I'd just scrape it off with a razor blade or a melamine sponge, do a quick water change, and that would be that. But I know that damaging the bodies of hydra just makes more hydra. So what can I do?

@Cory has a great video demonstration of this technique: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=58l5R5OZRsE

On December 7th, I got a tissue culture cup of Cryptocoryne axelrodi, intending it for a planned tank that just hasn't happened yet (December was definitely too busy of a month for me to start a new tank!). I put it in my refrigerator as soon as I got home, and it's been there ever since. It still looks pretty good, but I don't know how much longer it can just sit in limbo like that. I know that crypts don't like to be moved once planted, or I would have grown it out in some kind of tank, even if temporarily, but I decided that it would be less stressful to the plants to just leave them in the cup in the fridge until I was really ready for them. What's the point where I'd be better off planting and moving them versus just leaving them in the refrigerator? Thanks in advance!

My automatic response when I see "Java fern" and "nutrient deficiency" is to think potassium, since they're are potassium hogs. I admit u don't know the compositions of Flourish and Trace, so you may already be dosing enough potassium, but my ferns got a lot better when I started adding a little API Leaf Zone to my liquid Easy Green regimen.

The other thing I'd say is that they seem to be heavy root feeders, so if you don't have aquasoil, you'll want to spoil them with root tabs. If you never got past the bulb-with-no-roots-or-leaves stage, you may have just had the bulb upside-down.

We have two; one of them is pretty enthusiastic about frozen bloodworms and the other completely uninterested. Interestingly, the one who likes frozen bloodworms is a pretty avid hunter of baby brine shrimp, and the other more tepid, but they will both eat them. Mostly it's been snails, though. (I finally got the green light from Mrs. Goldfish to start up a grindal worm culture, though, so they'll get some more variety soon!)

If I can figure out how to do that, I will attach the video, yes. Thanks again! Not to make this sound too much like a commercial or anything, but that's why I buy with confidence from Aquarium Co-op, because I know the products are good and the customer service is second to none.

Thanks! I'll send an email as soon as I can.

I bought two ACO heaters for a 55 gallon tank in October of 2022 and have been running both at 78°F since flooding the tank in mid-November. Starting yesterday, I saw that one (but not the other) started flashing weird codes that don't match any of the error codes on the instruction sheet. I unplugged it, let it stay off overnight (the other heater seems to be handling the whole tank just fine on its own for now), and now plugged it back in, and it started displaying the weird codes again. In order, the heater displayed: 77, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 9.9, 77, AO, 60 [very quickly], 67 [blinking], 68 [blinking], AO, 60, CO, d1, 68 [blinking], 69 [blinking], 70 [blinking], AO, 71 [blinking], 72 [blinking], AO, 60, CO, d1, 73 [blinking], AO, 74 And then so on. The change from one to the next is quick enough that I had to shoot a quick video in order to write them down; all that was displayed in 26 seconds. I don't know if it loops; I didn't wait long enough to find out. Has anyone else had any similar experience with the ACO heater? Other than this confusion, these things are great, and the other one is running like a champ.

It's actually in Mrs. Goldfish's tank (journal to come when I get some time), and the S. natans and their cabbage-y look are really something she fell in love with (not that I don't like it!), so she found a cookie cutter to try to fence them in and see if she can't squish them a little.

Interesting. Maybe I can pin it in a small area or something to make it go up.

I ordered in some Salvinia natans. The leaves looked a little rough - floating plants often suffer in shipping - but the roots were healthy, and soon enough I was getting some great new growth. But where the original bunches were tight and more or less vertically oriented, the new growth seems more spread out and, while concave, quite different from the original plants. (Original plants in the upper left; new growth bottom center.) Does anyone else have any experience with this plant? Will the new leaves bunch up over time, or is there something I'd have to do to promote that? Or is this just they way they are sometimes?

I have Corydoras sterbai on a mix of this exact gravel and pool filter sand, and they root around got food in both parts of the tank and are healthy and breeding, with full barbels.