zelibeli

@Bonzabar I opened gifts pre-coffee this morning and didn’t realize we were hitting best friends. Lucky Egg as soon as you open PoGo if you care about the bonus exp. I’m sorry. I hope you see this in time.

Just for an update, I have been bringing in water from home and it has solved the issues. Shrimp, snails & guppies are doing great. Guppies greet me like little pups happy to see me in the mornings. My copper test kit is still in the mail, but I'm not as worried about it since the home-water is so successful, I'll just keep doing that regardless of the test results. But curiosity, I will still test to see if that was the issue. Thanks all!

I've been doing 50% weekly water changes for my tank and bowl, but I'm sure I don't have to do that much. I can change less water and haul it in too.

I will not sweat the little buggies then. That's really good news. I will try water from home this week but I tend to change about 3 gallons total, and I honestly can't see myself hauling that in every week. Maybe if I did 1 a day for 3 days 😛 I use Fritz Complete for my water conditioner. Should I switch to Prime? Is it better for metals? I'll bring in my test kit from home and see what is going on in more detail there. As for activity, maybe. It's a pretty chill place but it is slightly busier than my fish/game room at home. I'm a casualty of a declining budget at a library and I work in tech services (not with the public). I'm the only staff person in this room. I have a red Swingline stapler, to complete the picture (office space reference). It's a super quiet gig. Night cleaning staff does come in here, and they sometimes spend their lunch hours in here, but they are not allowed to clean our desks. Because of the danger of harming the paper materials, they aren't supposed to use spray chemicals in here. I have to wipe surfaces down myself with wipes. The only thing they can do is vacuum and take out the garbage cans. They do try and help out by watering our plants sometimes. Maybe they're topping off the tanks? It doesn't seem like it though. I'll post pics of their environment, but the tank is painted black on one side and wall on the other and potted plants on the other. The bowl is more open but still little activity around here. The water is low in the pics because I didn't do any top offs or water change last week to see if that improved the situation and the test strips said things were okay. Maybe the guppy needs a buddy. Maybe 2 guppy guys will perk each other up. I don't want to overdue it though, since it's only a 5 gallon. I certainly have enough guppies at home to choose from though. I will check the metals. That seems most likely now. And I'll bring in water from home for this week to see if that helps. And thank you for all of your suggestions!

Bowl is 70 F and tank with guppy is 74 F

I wasn't sure where to post this. This isn't a disease but it is harming my aquarium fish, snails and shrimp so this seemed like the place to post. To clarify, this only happens at my office tanks. My home tanks do not have this issue. This is the second time I've tried to have tanks at work. The water tests fine (attached pic of test strips) and I do weekly water changes of 50%. And keep in mind this is the same water source for all of our water needs in the office - drinking water, dishes, coffee, etc. What happens: Last time, I brought in a 10 gallon tank that had established substrate and filter media. I kept it in about an inch of water for the trip to the office. Things seem fine for a couple of days and then the fish get weird... Fish that are normally giddy at the top of the tank for feedings begin hiding in the back of the tank and stop coming to the surface to eat. The snails die almost immediately, with only 1 or 2 survivors that seem to struggle. Shrimp have a similar fate as the fish. Most die almost immediately with only 2-3 survivors. I gave up after about 2 months and, not wanting to spread whatever it is I had in this tank, I threw everything out... the tank, filter, heater, everything. I took the surviving fish home and ran them through meds and they returned to their normal behavior. I lost the shrimp and snails in the meds. Assuming that I must have had a fish with a disease last time, I tried again. This time, I brought a filterless 3 gallon bowl and a 5 gallon tank (with filter & heater). Both were running in my fish room at home for 3-4 months before I brought them in. Life was fine. My son helped me set up and we were careful to keep the plants and substrate wet in the transition. Again, the next morning, almost all snails and shrimp are dead. I brought 1 guppy for the 5 gallon. He was always like a puppy begging for food at the top of the tank at home and now he hides and allows food to sink to the bottom without touching it. My only conclusion is that it's the water at the office. See attached image for test strip results for both. The other day, I was taking a pic of my surviving shrimp in the bowl. I zoomed in to about 6x and I noticed little critters. Can anyone tell me what these are? Where they could have come from? Are these hurting the fish, snails, & shrimp or is it just a coincidence? I went home and check my home aquariums and I did not find these little critters in my tanks there. I tested a glass of water from the office faucet on my desk overnight but it does not have these critters. So, although it seems like these critters are introduced at the office, it does not seem to be from the water. I do have a lot of plants... sometimes there are little flies. Could this be their larva? I have no idea and my google search is not giving me any results that look like these things. I found info on copepods but these don't look like the images I see on google image search. I just cannot figure out how I can be so successful at home and fail so miserably at fishkeeping at work. Any ideas? I'm about to dose with a bunch of meds but I know it'll hurt the surviving ramshorn and shrimp so I'm hoping that maybe someone here will have better information. Okay, trying to upload the vid but it's not an acceptable file type and you can't really see the critters in a still image so here's a youtube link:

It wasn't taken and then it stuck. It's my game handle pretty much everywhere. A long long time ago, I made a character in Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) around 2002 (came it at the first expansion) and I wanted something short but the game required game names be unique and 4 letters long (IIRC) so I randomly typed in letters that included vowels and "Zeli" was the first one that wasn't taken. When Twitter launched, Zeli was already taken so I added on the "Beli" part and it was available... That was around 2009. I've been Zeli or Zelibeli on any online community ever since. Because it had no meaning, it is rarely taken and if it is, it's usually because I already made an account and forgot about it.

I recently rescaped one of my 20 gallon long tanks. See below for before and after. The log has been moved to my garage storage for now. It's decaying, but not at a super fast rate, but just a bit too much for 20 gallons. This tank is home to rice fish and panda corydoras. There is 1 old amano shrimp in here and she seems to be the queen bee of the tank. There are also a couple of black cherry shrimp I've pulled from my red population. I added different/less wood, dragon stone and went more with orange tones and bronze crypts. The substrate is a very thin layer of organic soil, like less than 1/4", and then capped with inches of sand and gravel of various sizes. I'm really happy with it so far. I did rinse everything but the dragon stone was a bit more dusty than I realized and choked the Tidal 35. I went back to a cheapy Top Fin that I had in the basement. I did manage to clean the Tidal 35 out and it's running again now, but I'll put it in storage rather than switching again. Using the established filter media. I gotta get a new prefilter for the intake still. It's just a tad dusty still but that will clear up. It's been set up for about a week and I've done one water change already and doing another tonight. Testing strips say all is well, but I want the dust to clear up.

lol, found pics of the evolution of the room. March 2013: den April 2020: study/gaming And then the one above was today. I've totally gone from a proper adult to a child! 😄

I might over-project my feelings onto them... but that's fine. About to start my water changes today and thought I'd add a pic of my fish room. Fish room is not accurate. It's probably not really enough tanks to call it a legit fish room. For journaling purposes, I present, the history of the room: Originally this was the cat's litterbox room with random furniture to disguise it as a den or something. Then I started a Master's degree so needed to move my gaming PC from my hubs office (where we gamed together a ton) to a place where I could concentrate for study and writing papers and terrible things like that. The litterbox was promptly moved to the basement. Luckily the cat complied with this move. Then flippin' Covid happened and we are all home a million percent of the day and I now had to work and game and study all in the same space and I decided to maximize every nook and cranny of our home/garage/yard for gym and fun space so we didn't all go nuts. This caused my son to realize he would like his gaming PC in his room, which meant the fish tank had to come out (which was fine, he was basically in maintenance mode out of responsibility to his fish). I told him I'd take his tank in my "office" and take over the maintenance. This was April 2020. Today, the degree is done and I'm back to at-work work about 80% so now I have a... Gaming Offish? It's my favorite place to be.

Hijack away! There's no denying that they look good. Lidless allows you to get some elements that extend beyond the surface of the tank too. Lots of potential!

Some can but mine could not. Princess was the only friendly one. Nebula, you can see in the 36. She was great in that tank with the community there because the other fish were just as fast or faster than her. When I tried to put her in the 20 gallon with the dividers, she got... depressed for a lack of any other way to put it. She went from owning 36 gallons to being completely lethargic in 6. I think it was too dull for her. I didn't have the 36 anymore so I made some adjustments and put her into a 20-long community tank where she did regain some energy again, but she was never the same and she indulged on the sinking wafers for the corydoras... I never found a solution for how to feed the corys and not have her notice their food before dropsey happened and she passed. I did move her to a 5 gallon, but she was too far gone. Same with another veil tail, Ruby. She had a 10 gallon to herself for 2 years. She was always an angry fish. When I got rid of her 10 gallon and tried the dividers, she could see just enough of something through those holes and it drove her insane. She was running herself ragged with stress. Adjustments were made, first an attempt at community, she overate too, then got her to a 20 gallon solo, but by then she was already bloated. I tried some remedies but by then Ruby was set on overeating. She took to eating ramshorn snails, sucking them right out of their shells whenever I tried fasting her. I moved her to a 5 gallon I freshly set up for her to avoid the snail snacks, but by then it was already too late. I think I was changing fish that were already happy where they were. I really think that bettas are unique little fish. They have tendencies based on their species but really you you have to learn their individual personalities. Redesigning my fish room cost me 2 of my bettas because they were set in their ways and I couldn't readjust in time. To add to the terrible ordeal, I was journaling my experience on youtube at the time and now I get a never ending stream of commenters of what a terrible person I am for overfeeding my bettas to death.

I actually have those! My original plan was to have my 3 betta girls divided in 1 20 gallon tank. The dividers are now are in my basement storage. I can see that they'd be useful perhaps with other fish down the road, but my ladies that I had at the time were not tolerating any of that divider nonsense.

Thank you! I generally have my hands in the water for some reason or another so I really like that I can access the whole floorspace of a 20 gallon long without having to ruin my shirt sleeves. I got rid of a 36 gallon bowfront because of height. It was beautiful but I hated getting into it because I always had to get the step stool out. I also don't have a ton of space in my little gamer-room turned fish room so a few 20 longs allow me to satisfy just enough of my MTS. I still get that "if I had one more tank" voice in my head but I know that voice will always say that same thing and not help me with water changes. Edit: found a pic... sometimes I regret giving it away when I remember that Amazon sword, but I replaced it with two 20-gallon longs.

Totally. My first betta was given to me by a friend in high school. They were tired of taking care of him. He was a bright red veil tail and they had him for a couple years in a bowl, but he was "boring" and they were tired of the maintenance. My instructions from them were to keep him in a bowl, and I must change his water daily. I ended up keeping him for another 4 years before he passed and I got somewhat experimental with him. They gave him to me in about a gallon sized fish bowl. I didn't think he was boring so much as I thought he was bored. I moved him from the bowl, to a 4 gallon glass container that I did daily water changes on, then to a 10 gallon community aquarium with a filter and a heater, but the flow was too much for him, so I tried to put in a divider so that he was on the other side of the that... then as he got old and couldn't swim well, he ended up in a breeder box inside the aquarium so that he could have heated water but swimming to the surface had become too difficult for him towards the end. He mostly lived on betta pellets but once I got an African Dwarf Frog, I started sharing the frozen brine shrimp with him. Mistakes were made and he was a trooper, but I did try and pay attention to what he was showing me and I learned a lot from him. My current betta has a much better set up, but she, herself has poor health. Princess is a crowntail betta. I've had her for about a year now. She had a slight curve to her spine when I got her, but it wasn't super noticeable. After a year, it's become a bit more pronounced but she gets around fairly well. I have a very low flow on her 20 gallon long tank. She eats extreme betta pellets, frozen daphnia, frozen spirulina brine shrimp, and occasionally some krill flakes, although that's not very often because she gulps air when she eats flakes and then tends to float at the top of the tank for a day afterwards. And rarely she gets a frozen blood worm treat which are her fav. She's extremely peaceful. I had her in a community tank with guppies and she seemed to enjoy them but she overate. I lost 2 bettas the same way (unable to control their diet from the other fish in the tanks) so now she's a solo fish and although I envy people who have community tank bettas, I seem to find all the piggies. I think I'm a better betta keeper when I can focus tank care on them individually. She tolerates snails and shrimp in her tank so this is one of my tanks that gets my cherry shrimp kulls. I just rescaped this tank in July so the plants are just starting to decide if they like it. The red dwarf lily decided to have a complete meltdown with the move, but it seems to be bouncing back now.