Rube_Goldfish

If your nitrates are at 30 ppm, your lighting at 60%, and your algae at near zero, try increasing the lighting intensity. Maybe bump up to 80% for two weeks and see what happens; maybe 80 is too high or still too low, but you'll need time and growth (or melting/die off) to really know. @Seattle_Aquarist? Any ideas?

That's great news! Thanks for the update!

IT WORKED! I ended up cleaning out my Ziss hatchery with paper towels (for the flat surfaces), a pipe cleaner and the hose cleaner I have for my filter (a substitute bottle brush, but for now it worked), and then plugged it back up to splash/wipe some hydrogen peroxide around, per @Guppysnail, then a last rinse. The other thing I did was to remove the air diffuser and add about an inch of flexible airline tubing, per @jwcarlson. I was reluctant to make two changes at once because it seemed unscientific, but I couldn't figure out any way to really clean the diffuser, so I figured it would be a confounding variable either way. Thanks to everyone who helped out, from me and some grateful fish!

Well, in that case, I guess all I can say is to give it a shot and see what you get, and have a Plan B if possible (maybe flake food ground up with a mortar and pestle?). Good luck, though, and in the meantime I'll have to look into those magnetic eggs, because that sounds very cool!

I can't answer the second question. What temperature is your brine shrimp hatchery? Early Friday morning to Sunday afternoon is about 50-55 hours? I guess I'd want to hatchery to be as cool as possible while still allowing hatching. All the quick web searching I just did was oriented around "optimal hatching temperature", but it looks like you could go as low as 21°C (~70°F) without killing off the brine shrimp. After that, maybe just run a smaller batch? So that they foul the water slower?

Doesn't Hygrophila pinnatifida grow pretty fast for an epiphyte? I've never tried it myself, though.

By the way, @DBam I'm sorry I took over your thread, that wasn't my intention. I just try to see if there are existing threads on the topic of my question before starting a new one. Anyway, I'll report back here Friday and let everyone know how it went!

I guess the bigger bubbles are better, or it's just one less potential place for contamination? And how do you connect the rigid airline tubing and the... floppy? Regular? Airline tubing? They seem to be the same inner diameter. Do I use a straight airline connector?

Thanks, I'll try that! Just a splash of straight peroxide? I've been "scrubbing" using hot water and my hands, but I guess that wasn't cutting it. My Ziss didn't come with an airstone, per se, but what with Ziss calls an "air diffuser", which seems similar enough. Other than shooting water down the rigid tubing through the diffuser, though, I haven't really figured out a good way to clean the diffuser.

I wish I could say it was patience, or scientific caution or something, but it's been 20% circumstance and 80% discouragement. But I do agree with your broader point of patience and observation in this hobby! Anyway, I was searching for any tutorials on properly cleaning the Ziss hatchery when I re-found this ACO set of instructions. It says that if "you have soft water, you can add to ¼ to ½ teaspoon of baking soda to raise the pH or add 1 teaspoon of Epsom salt to raise the GH (for 2 liters of water)." My tap water runs through a household water softener and comes out of the tap at close to 0 dGH. I hadn't considered that as a problem, because until I started having this problem, I was getting very nice hatch rates, but I have some Epsom salt, so that's my next plan: 1.75 L tap water, 2 Tbsp kosher salt, 1 tsp Epsom salt, 81°F, 2/3 tsp eggs, gentle bubbling. I'll set up the water tonight, put the eggs in tomorrow morning, them harvest them 24 hours later and see how we do. In the meantime, I haven't found any cleaning procedure beyond what I've been doing, so I'll set that idea aside for the time being.

I think it was Fishtory (formerly known as Secret History Living in Your Aquarium) on YouTube, but I remember hearing someone say that the best way to get emergent growth from anubias was to place it submerged but just under the water line, which would let the plant naturally grow out of the water with the proper emersed leaves. I've never tried it myself, though. I can try to find the video, if you'd like.

Yeah, I've had Amano shrimp make it a surprisingly far distance from the tank, though I was never 100% sure the cat didn't help them cover some of that distance...

It looks like a baby ramshorn to me. I've always seen mini ramshorn with horizontally oriented shells (relative to whatever the snail is walking on) and the regular ramshorn as vertically oriented. But we've got some snail experts here, so hopefully if I'm wrong someone will correct me.

What's your lighting, and will you run CO2 or not? I don't know the dimensions of a 9.1 long, but an Amazon sword might get too tall for it. I'm not saying don't do it, just think ahead to have a Plan B in place. Actually, can swords grow emerged? I'd have to do some research. I'm a big fan of Cryptocorynes of all kinds. I can personally vouch for C. undulata, C. lutea, C. wendtii, and, especially in a smaller tank, C. parva. Just remember that they'll likely melt, so you'll have to be patient enough to wait for them to bounce back. Also, especially if you've got hardscape, epiphytes like Anubias (my favorite is A. nana var. 'petite'), Java fern, and Bucephalandra can really make it pop, plus they're all very easy plants. Just don't bury the rhizome and put some fertilizer in the water column. Lastly, with what I'm guessing is a shallow tank, a nice foreground of Monte Carlo or my latest favorite, Littorella uniflora, could work, even in low tech (CO2 injection allows even more possibilities).

Yeah, @sairving, depending on how big the tank is, you might be able to find solid wood furniture at a second-hand store or on Facebook Marketplace or its equivalent. Maybe an old solid wood TV cabinet from back when TVs weighed more than aquariums!

If I may suggest, if you can manually remove* as much hair algae as possible, enough to clear a planting area in the substrate and enough to allow sufficient light to come through to the stems, don't wait to plant those stems. I've planted lightly and I've planted heavily, and the more total plant biomass you've got, especially fast growing plants like stems (generalizing here), the less likely you'll have the algae come back. *I found twirling with a toothbrush like spaghetti works pretty well.

I got sick last week, so my experimentation was a little delayed and a little un-science-y because of that. That said, my most recent batch* was the same: rough 2:1 dead:alive (though the fish mostly happily ate the dead ones, too). So at this point, the only real logical conclusion is that my Ziss hatchery isn't adequately cleaned. I'll try to disassemble the air diffuser to see if I can clean that out, and run a brush through the rigid airline. Can I use vinegar, either straight or diluted, to clean the hatchery walls and/or the airline and/or the diffuser? If so, would I soak them in vinegar or just a quick rinse? If soak, how long? * 2 liters of tap water, 2 Tbsp kosher salt, gentle agitation with the Ziss air diffuser that came with the hatchery, about 2/3 tsp ACO eggs, heater keeping the water at 81°F, harvesting at about 24 hours. No baking soda this time. Because I had a cold, the Ziss ran with everything except the eggs for about 48 hours before I put the eggs in.

I've never bred rams, but given that (I think) they spend most of their time in the bottom third of the tank, something up near the surface might be the safest choice. Hatchets, clown killifish, pencilfish, something like that?

I've never kept Caridina shrimp, but yes, Easy Green is shrimp-safe.

Sorry they all died on you. I hope you have more luck with the next batch!

If it were me, I'd pretend I didn't notice and walk in the other direction!

The idea of the baking soda was to increase the KH more than the pH; my tap water has a 24-hour off-gas pH of about 8.2, but now that I'm typing it all out, I think the carbonate hardness is probably fine. I think I was just thinking that their exoskeletons would need the carbonates. My initial few hatches, when I wad first learning how to do it, I'd end up with a lot of dead, but hatched BBS, so I decided that the bubbling was too strong and was injuring the new nauplii. I turned it down and my survival rate went up. Then toward the end of my last can of eggs, I started getting what I photographed above; hatched but dead shrimp. I thought maybe it was just from the end of the can, but the new one did it, too. Which is what lead to all this tinkering and frustration. I don't expect 100% or 100% survival, and I can only eyeball it, but it looks like I'm getting 1:1 or 2:1 dead:alive, so I feel like I'm going to a lot of expense and trouble to just flush dead shrimp down the drain. (Side question: can you feed out dead BBS? I know people feed out frozen BBS, but that seems safer than 'died of unknown causes' dead BBS.) Maybe my estimations are wrong and I'm just getting normal dying off, but either way, it's still a lot more than I'm used to, so that's frustrating, too. Okay, so I'll try my normal recipe but omit the baking soda, and we'll see what happens. Thanks!

My two-and-a-half week old 20 long is overdue for a water change. The nitrates are low still, but the wood ("Black Forest driftwood" is the label my LFS used) has given off a lot of tannins. While I don't hate the look, it's not quite what I had in mind, and in any case I'm worried about light penetration for the plants. (I think it's darker in real life than in the photo.) Anyway, do I have to worry about the new water not having any tannins, provided the other parameters match? Or can I just make a normal 10% or 20% water change? I have some plant trimming* and planting I'd like to do during the water change, so a larger change would just be a little more convenient for working in the tank. *Anacharis seems to love my water! How have I never tried that one before?!

As @nabokovfan87 said, surface agitation is probably your best bet, long term, of getting rid of it and preventing recurrence. But you should also know that it can be pretty common, especially in new, still-stabilizing tanks. And in the short term, you can use a cup or a water bottle to skim it off, like you see at about the 0:40 mark of this video:

Hmm, then we're pretty quickly getting out of my knowledge base. @Seattle_Aquarist? In the meantime, can you post photos? And take a look at this chart: (From here: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/plant-nutrient-deficiencies) Does it look like any of those?