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Kiefer

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  1. Anabantoids can breathe air which is probably why your betta was relatively unaffected. Nitrite's toxic because it binds to hemoglobin in their blood which makes it unable to bind to oxygen. Longer term you'd still see it hurt the fish but on the short term bettas are capable of breathing more air to keep their oxygen levels up. I find that nitrite actually takes awhile to start causing problems though unless you're already dealing with a tank that's short on oxygen.
  2. Livebearers can be very rough on each other, especially if the male to female ratio gets imbalanced, both male competition between each other and male harassment of females cause a lot of stress. And personality can definitely be a big factor. My guppy tank has been claimed by one orange guppy, he has nipped every other male introduced to death, he has to be part betta or something. After he KO'd my last $5 fancy guppy I decided no more, he gets to be king of the castle.
  3. That behavior is a pretty clear sign of stress/insecurity, tiger barbs are schooling fish and require a decent sized group to feel safe, when they don't feel safe they will swim frantically, hide, or attack other fish that make them feel unsafe depending on species and individual personality. Tiger barbs are kind of infamous for being 'aggressive' in those situations.
  4. Depends how we define highly. 0.5ppm free ammonia is where most aquaculture studies I've read say you start seeing hazards from chronic exposure. So if your aquarium spikes to 0.5 and you do something about it quickly there's not that much of a problem with it, if it was from a one-off event like a fish dying or a kid dumping a container of food in. If you're sitting at 0.5 for days or weeks on end you are going to start seeing damage build up. But if your aquarium spikes to 1, or 2ppm, you need to do something or you could wake up to dying fish. But that varies quite a bit based on species. Pond/lake dwelling species can be a lot hardier, one study I vaguely recall showed that for tilapia, the king of garbage water fish, chronic damage didn't start until almost 2ppm free ammonia which is acutely toxic to many other fish, and I am all sure we have seen of or heard about a goldfish living for 5 or 10 years in a toxic nitrogen soup. Then you have fish that mostly live in acidic riparian systems where free ammonia basically can't exist like cardinal tetras who start showing chronic damage at 0.1ppm, and the same is true for many saltwater fish (and exacerbated by the fact that saltwater pH is inherently high so you don't get much help from ionization). I guess it also depends how you interpret "caution." Me? I see caution and read "Do something." For other people, especially if you're busy with kids or whatever I can totally see people reading that caution as "Do something about it this weekend." Which probably wouldn't kill most fish at 0.5ppm, but could easily kill fish at 1 or 2ppm. ANY ammonia level should be 'caution' in terms of your filter not being sufficient/stocking too high, even though it might not be acutely or even chronically hazardous to the fish at persistent but low levels. But it's hard to put all of that information on the back of a bottle especially when you can't get most people to read one or two lines these days.
  5. I was under the impression that it was known that ACO test strips only measured NH3 and not total ammonia, for whatever reason I recall this being mentioned on a stream at some point, I discovered it on my own in my adventures with ADA aquasoils. I think there is a reasonable argument for strips that do that (and I personally prefer that to the API total ammonia test for practical reasons), though it would be good to have messaging on or associated with the product that explains this. If you're measuring total ammonia you need to provide a pH chart and have the user test pH to give good guidance on what is actively harmful. But that entire discussion veers off into nerd territory that most people don't need to care about. For all it really matters IMO the strips could say "+" or "-" and the utility would be about the same at least for me.
  6. I think what I would recommend has mostly been posted already, but I actually have the same all in one that I bought for my desk since the profile fit an empty space I had pretty much perfectly. To summarize -Betta/Honey Gourami/Dwarf Gourami -Pea puffer -Shrimp only tank -Male Endler frat tank -Some kind of tiny rasbora The profile isn't super favorable for most freshwater fish, but the glass is nice and thick and I really do like the internal sump setup, provided you throw out the cartridge garbage and just stuff it with a bunch of coarse sponge or other biofiltration. And honestly it's a pretty good tank for a lazy betta, wouldn't put a plakat in there but something with flowier fins will do well when you turn down the pump a little and get some floating plants to diffuse some of the flow. Mine is always building a bubble nest so I can only assume he's happy.
  7. They're more sensitive to water parameters. And that varies quite a bit depending on species (keeping in mind, amano shrimp are technically caridina shrimp) and morph, many of the bee shrimp morphs are very heavily inbred, some of the newer to the hobby Indonesian species like Sulawesi shrimp are noted to be more sensitive as well. I think the same general idea regarding pellet food vs biofilm should be applicable though obviously more biofilm is better for shrimp.
  8. If you're reading ammonia and nitrite there is no need to do anything. Just wait for your tank to process it. if there are no fish or shrimp in there that ammonia and nitrite are just great fertilizer which will help the plants recover from the initial melt phase. I find with a planted cycle you don't need to add ammonia or food, the plants melting back and snail waste will provide enough waste to establish nitrifying bacteria. Once you start seeing algae grow in you're probably pretty close if not ready to add fish.
  9. I find the idea that neocaridina need a 'mature' tank to flourish is kind of overrated. Start off a small colony and feed them supplemental food, any sinking pellet or honestly any fish food will work, specialized shrimp foods are even better. Over the course of a year or so you will end up with a well seasoned tank and will barely need to feed anymore. I just took about 70-80% of the shrimp out of a 10 gallon I started less than a year ago with 6 or 7 founding shrimp, I ended up with over 100 in there and I feed a few sinking shrimp pellets every week, i still have the one container of food i bought with the tank. If your goal is to shrimpmax at any cost and you're not worried about looks, put 20 hours of light on it to get heavy algae growth. Stuff like water lettuce and frogbit are also great for keeping the water clean and providing decaying plant matter for them to nibble on.
  10. One of mine used to do this, he had swim bladder issues but I'm not sure if that was really why he was the lazy flagfish. I think he just figured out that it was easier to lay around in the plants and nibble on them. I also had one female who would always stay apart from the group, she was runty and got outcompeted for food by other females but managed to survive nibbling on algae and plants on her own. She somehow managed to outlast the other females though, who died during a cold snap and is now social with the male. They have very odd behavior imo, sometimes they feel like a schooling cyprinid, sometimes they act like livebearers and are just scattered all over, when breeding they're kinda like an apisto or some other tiny cichlid. They are a schooling fish though, so a bigger school might help her be more social if she's being isolated by aggression/competition. But I have kept them in groups of 6, 4 and 2 all with general success (ie, they're not showing stress/attacking my other fish) I found that flagfish ended up murdering my water sprite and water wisteria though so be aware of that possibility.
  11. I find that once shrimp get to a very dense concentration you start seeing reduced snail population among egg laying snails. Shrimp are livebearing and can eat snail eggs, and most of the common 'pest' snails you see in North America are egg layers. A lot of the snails from Southeast Asia like Malaysian Trumpet Snails, Assassin Snails and Rabbit Snails are livebearers and won't be vulnerable to shrimp in the same way. But because shrimp are so mobile and cherry shrimp in particular are prolific breeders there will be less resources available for juvenile snails.
  12. Welp, sorry for the necro but I wanted to follow up and tell the story, which is unfortunately over for this lil' guy. So isolated him in a bucket with salt for about a week with zero improvement. His condition wasn't improving and in fact the stress of being isolated had him translucent, I started feeling too bad for him and what was worse, most of the other fish in the tank started showing signs of bacterial infection (busted jaws, popeye, bent spines), at that point I figured there was no point in quarantine and I should treat the tank. I tried antibiotics for gram negative and gram positive bacterial infections both in the food and in the water and neither had any effect. Worse, my paradise fish started having issues, he started having poor coloration and lack of energy. Most things I read on bacterial infections imply that they're measured in days and I had noticed this slow buildup of bacterial symptoms in my fish over the course of several months. He ended up dying in March and a few other fish also died. In April, I figured out what the problem was. My tank has ADA aquasoil substrate, the pH is very low and there are tons of plants. I read an article by Walstad about mycobacteriosis developing in one of her rainbowfish tanks and the way she described the tank was exactly what I had. Apparently they reproduce much more slowly than typical bacteria but are less negatively effected by acidic water conditions. In a 'normal' tank they get outcompeted for resources by faster growing bacteria but in low pH, high organic matter systems they proliferate. Instead of being a rapid infection it progresses slowly due to how slowly they reproduce. And mycobacterium are basically unaffected by antibiotics. She solved her problem by reducing feeding and installing a UV sterilizer, which reduced the bacterial load enough for her fishs' immune systems to fight it off. I did the same and gradually everyone who was alive started being much more active (I did lose one that had an extremely bent spine, just wasn't going to recover), so I think they're as 'cured' as they're going to be, but the long-term damage was still there. This guy's lump stopped growing but was larger than it was in the pic, he later developed a swim bladder problem which might have been related to the stress, no clue. He was struggling to swim, couldn't feed, etc so I decided it was probably time to euthanize yesterday. All in all I lost the paradise fish, and about a third of my white clouds, but learned a lot from the experience. TL;DR In low pH, high organic matter tanks be aware that mycobacteriosis (fish TB) can cause issues even if your parameters are fine on paper.
  13. Anubias and Java Fern have the best chance of surviving a goldfish, another option is putting a cage in there to protect softer stem plants from goldfish, I think you can find purpose built plant cages on the internet or just make one out of chicken wire or something. For floating plants you can use a breeder box with mesh sides/bottoms to protect them.
  14. Broken heater horror stories are the main reason I decided to go as low-tech as possible getting into the hobby. All of my tanks run sponge filters and lights, that's it. The less things that can go wrong, the easier I sleep. I got a 5 gallon for Christmas though so I'm going to need one to put a betta in there. I will say though, during the crazy NW heat wave last summer this no-AC house ended up getting to over 106 inside. I only had one tank running at that time and it was fortunately still cycling with just snails, water hit 102 and was getting into the upper 90s every day for a week. Snails and plants all survived, though the pink ramshorns were starting to turn white. You know it's bad when the snails are stressed.
  15. another vote towards the Endlers are all bark and no bite category. My white clouds beat up on each other harder than the Endlers beat up on each other. The "2:1 ratio" is strictly for the girls' safety.
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