jwcarlson

That's a cichlid thing, friend. 🙂

No pictures of fry rack, but there are still about 60 CPDs and recently the sterbai have been spawning frequently and there's maybe close to 50 fry going. The first batch of sterbai now in a ten gallon I was wondering if they'd grown much since I moved them. This is yesterday, I have been trying to get them to eat freeze dried tubifex like the parents. They're doing well and have certainly grown a bunch. Sad to see them lose all that orange from full BBS diet, but tough to do that much BBS forever! I am really considering moving them and the parents into my 125 together. I'm rotating through a variety of foods with them. FDTW, Extreme Nano, some discus pellets that my discus won't eat, rarely some frozen Hikari blood worms, they still get some BBS twice a day, earthworm sticks, and blackworm sticks. They're basically a garbage pail and seem like they'll eat anything. The parents are fairly picky.

50% water changes twice a day in a 10 gallon tank is easy to do. Tough to let anything build up to the point of causing an issue when you're doing that. That's what I would suggest.

I just add them on separate sides of the bowl, usually. I think there's a lot of extra steps on this particular video... things that I don't necessarily do anymore or only occasionally (autolyze and stretching for instance). I think the biggest thing is figuring out something that works and that at least gives you a baseline. I'm sure there's some sourdough purist that thinks this video is garbage, but it's worked fine for me. 😄

After losing my mind over a year ago trying to figure out how to get plants attached, I made this thread. And I learned a ton. I think it's worth a read. I now put glue on the plant and glue it underwater. It's 100x faster and so much easier.

This is a rough approximation of what I normally do for an overnight loaf.

I hope Pod bounces back for you, @PluckyD!

I've never punched my sourdough down, sometimes do "no knead" same day bake and sometimes a sequence of folding the dough before putting it in a basket for a fridge rise overnight, but I'm not sure punching it down after proving overnight is a good idea. But I'm a big dummy, so who knows. 😄

Ok, @Guppysnail, how do you go about counting 196 little GBR fry?

The only issue with doing a water change in your situation would be lowering the amount of food for the bacteria and possibly retarding the growth of those bacteria (taking away nitrite before the colony has grown to the "right" size, for example). That said, I don't think that's probably too big of a concern for you. Either change water or don't. There's nothing to be harmed by the nitrates, so there's no necessity at this point. The amount of water to change, in this circumstance, is also pretty unimportant. Your colonies exist, it will be OK. I don't bother trying to cycle anything without livestock. I understand the reasoning behind it, but I think it overly complicates the hobby well in advance of really actively participating in it. I think you'd be safe doing a 100% water change today and putting fish in it once you fill it back up. You can continue to monitor the water, but my approach is just to do a daily 50% water change for at least two weeks. In a 10 gallon it's easy as pie on account of how small it is.

How hard is your water, @Robert K?

Good luck playing hide-and-seek, @Schuyler!

Do yourself a favor and don't just plop one discus into a community tank, you're unlikely to have a good outcome. Discus can handle down to 82, but they do seem happier warmer and will even take up to 93 without batting an eye, I grew mine out at 85 but have dropped them down to 82 now that they're adults. If you think of a fish's ability to adapt as a boat and every little tick against their ideal circumstances is a hole in the boat. Eventually it sinks if you don't compensate somehow, it just limits your sweet spot drastically. There's people who basically have perfect discus water coming out of their tap and they can "get away with murder" (in my opinion) compared to my circumstances (very hard water, high pH). To compensate, I change A LOT of water on them. I've isolated a discus temporarily a few times and it's very stressful for them.

Unfortunately, it looks like a tumor.

I think you're right, could have probably sprayed a can of compressed air into it and got the same cycle time. 😄 In my experience if you squeeze a filter sponge that hasn't been squeezed for awhile into a new aquarium and let the new filter pick up all that mulm, it's basically cycled at that point. Or close enough so that just normal maintenance gets you through the period where it's adjusting. People seem to get really hung up on cycling this and that and I've just never seen all that big of an issue doing it with fish, even with high bioloads, if you're paying attention and doing maintenance.

Can you define what you mean by water parameters are perfect? Isn't this the same tank?

Do you find that they stay gone even if feeding BBS regularly?

Does No Planaria kill snails for a long period of time after application, as well? Hydra seemingly appeared overnight in my CPD tank which was weird after a year+ of twice a day BBS without Hydra. Maybe they were eating them before and I should starve them for a couple days and they'll graze on them. My apisto tanks are absolutely overrun with hydra and while it's not a "problem", how do I know that it isn't a problem? Additionally, I feel like it's just going to come back. I went 2-3 months without feeding BBS in my apisto tanks and the minute I started feeding them BBS again, the whole tank is overrun. Spixi snails have been the only reasonable method I've found to keep them moderately in check, but some of my apistos snap and turn into spixi killers apparently and one of them killed 8 of my 11 snails over the course of about 12 hours a month or so ago. So I'm down to just a few. Hydra might not be completely gone when I've got spixi snails, but they absolutely do a great job of keeping them in check.

I keep my CPDs at 75-76 degrees, but I have heard of others keeping them at 80. So maybe it's not super critical.

I've not had much success with them passively breeding. At best I've had one survive and it was an absolute jungle at the time (more dense then picture below, this is cleaned up). 10 CPDs pictured here. When I bought the CPDs, there was a random forktail rainbow with them and he is HUGE compared to the CPDs, so it's possible he picks off any babies. But CPDs fry are just a pair of eyeballs and it seems like they go so long before free swimming, it's not hard to imagine that something picks them off. Maybe others have had better luck, but I haven't. That could be a totally different situation if you've got 20 or 30 of them, I started with six. Bought 8 from AquaHuna. One had a bad swim bladder issue and one was a furcatta rainbow. Of the six, one one was a female. So it hasn't been a great sex ratio, but it's a bit better now as of the ~4 I've raised, I think at least two or maybe three have been female. At some point I'll have the 60 that I am raising in a larger tank and I'll be curious to see if their behavior is vastly different compared to a small group.

Yellow lab males get black fins as they mature. That 55 octagon is a really oddball footprint with very little "floor space", I don't know how well a colony of labs would be in there longterm. I wonder if they would use more vertical space if there was a cragy rock structure going up the middle with various hides.

I don't know, I only have about 10 adults. 30 or 40, maybe? Here's 60 fry in about a quart of water...

It depends on what you're doing, if you're breeding (some species get aggressive and you could end up with wounds/secondary infections), what you're keeping, etc. I've been back in a hobby a couple of years and have put quite a lot of meds through my fish. My discus in particular, but I've lost fish during a breeding fight (due to secondary infection/fungus), and from a seemingly random corydora puncture of a pencilfish's swim bladder. I also worm new fish, so use quite a bit of levamisole. Know that there is a bias for fish problems to seem more prevalent than they are because you don't have people post "my fish are fine today" all the time. In other words, you're more likely to post about a fish you're having trouble with than one you aren't. So it just makes it seem like a bigger deal.

I likely comes down to your maintenance routine, but I don't think there would be an issue with a bristlenose pleco in there. I don't know about a snowball. Regarding adding more nano fish, I think I'd suggest you just get a bigger 'school' of CPDs. But it's probably more of a personal preference thing. 10 CPDs in a 55 will basically disappear. I've got 10 in a 10 gallon and just this morning I thought they'd all died because I couldn't see any 😄

Mine aren't even wagging their tails at each other anymore. But I did add six pencilfish a few weeks ago, so maybe that's got them a common enemy so they're just ignoring each other. I feel like I've got their diet pretty well dialed in and the female is, significantly chunkier than she ever has been. They're actually not aggressive at all, it's kind of neat that the male will referee for you. That's a good trait. 😄