jwcarlson

Added IchX this morning. I am not sure he will survive the day. Pic might better show how it's raised and fuzzy. Hard to get a good picture.

Darn, @Lennie, that stinks. 😞 Glad the female seems to be OK now, but obviously that doesn't make up for things. Discus seem to be pretty touchy. I have two that have some sort of bacterial infection in their heads (not HITH), but something that developed inside and ruptured. One just got a small ooze of pus and the other a pencil eraser sized hole near his nostril. I guess the lesson is sometimes it doesn't matter how much you do or how hard you try. 😞

Well, this may have started as a sparing injury, but it is certainly beyond that now. This poor guy has been reclusive and hiding in a cave since isolating him, but today he was out and I got a better look. It's fuzzy and I am not sure how well the pics will show that it is quite raised. Looking over tankmate from this pair it also has a small white spot. Played with some things on the best picture to show what looks almost like little threads coming out. Hard to see. In isolation with Maracyn now. Maracyn in tank with the other fish as well. Been a brutal few weeks with my fish, like someone went around putting stuff in my tanks trying to start outbreaks.

@Lennie, how have your discus been?

I'm not sure if we're heading anywhere. This is my last week of work and then I'm off for 17 days. Hoping to get a deer during late muzzleloader season as well as finishing some additional work on two bedrooms I'm adding to our basement. As well as doing some work on my fish room. I want to reseal a 125 that I have and hope to eventually move my discus into. I've got fry coming along that will need some additional work/space coming up and I have tanks, but not exactly the best plan at the moment. If I could get my discus into the 125 while I'm off, that would be good. But I'd settle for just getting the tank resealed, to be honest. I did a test reseal on a 29 and it went OK. I figure a 125 might actually be easier as it's quite a bit more open. The 29 was tough to get into in a lot of ways. I also want to setup some sort of central draining point for my tanks and/or setting up some PVC overflows that would allow me to do some manual, but kind of automatic, water changes. I don't think I need a totally automatic system, but if I'm changing water on one tank it would be nice to be changing water on a few at the same time. Unfortunately, the floor drain is fairly slow, though. So that's something I probably need to troubleshoot.

The only fish in the tank with him are a few CPDs? Something (to me) isn't adding up between nitrates and water changes. I've got a planted 10 gallon with about 10 CPDs , a small pleco (for now), and shrimp/snails and I almost cannot keep nitrates in the tank. Obviously not everything is directly comparable. But if you did a 60% WC and then measured 25 PPM it was >50 PPM prior to that. Additionally, the nitrite is a concern as it would have been over 2 PPM before the water change. Do you have ammonia test strips? Or do you notice bubbles/foaming on top of the water? Edit to add: I wouldn't expect there to be as big of discrepancy between GH/KH on your tap vs the tank water after water change. Not sure what to make of that.

How big of water changes and how often are you doing them? Nitrite being at 1 ppm is of concern, are you sure of that number? Could you use a test strip on your tap water and let us know what that looks like?

It's on the transformer/power unit that sits outside of the tank.

There's also interaction between certain dechlorinators and test kits showing them as ammonia. So maybe that's it as well.

Where's the salt coming from? Also, I'd test your tap water for ammonia. Not sure how there'd be that much from a piece of wood breaking down for two days unless a dog was peeing on it for a couple years. 😄

Maybe I should read the manual. 😄

It might, it has a little LED on the control box outside the tank, but that's really just power indication, I would guess.

They're all free swimming. I can see their bellies a bit better from above against the white.

Giving a different male a whack at this head case female. They've been in caves together a bunch and it's been five minutes.

I put in a central loop for my fish room with 1" PVC header around the outside of my fish room. I ran out of valves, but I'm also going to put a small header in my other room where there's a couple tanks and aging/preheat barrels. I haven't glued it all up yet, I'll do that after I'm sure I've got it where I want it. I've never had anything like this before. It's quite nice.

I ended up buying a 9W GKM, impressed with the packaging quality, seems like I could have driven a car over the box and it would have been fine. I don't know that I've ever seen a plastic bubble pack that was so thick. I wish I could see the light somehow so that I "knew" it was working. 😄

How many had died before you went so hard on the salt?

Well shoot. Noticed some scales damaged/missing on the male abacaxis a couple of days ago. Nothing major, but certainly something to watch. It was worse that afternoon, so I netted him out into a hang on box with a cave for him to chill out in for a bit. When netting him out, I noticed that the female looked a lot like a male and every time I observe "her" now since removing the male she looks more like a he. I'm hoping that I'm just gun-shy from having 5 of 6 Hongsloi being males, but I don't think it's looking good! haha Now, I know that this apisto isn't wildly popular, but I cannot find a picture of a female with a purple chin like this one is sporting. Also added a couple spixi snails to the tank... how in the world does one combat hydra in a tank fed with lots of BBS. "female" today: The male some months ago: I am fairly confident that I haven't confused them for each other. I've checked the male in the box a few times and he is absolutely bigger than the one in the main tank. He's not colored up at all because he's stressed out, but the coloring doesn't look female at all.

That's excellent, @Gliderzz! This forum has helped me tremendously with fry rearing.

Can confirm that spixis will eat lots of hydra.

Mostly to populate new tanks with plants. Or when cleaning out QT the plants can go in the bucket for awhile if there's any concern about disease. At times there are no fish in QT, the whole bucket might end up in the QT tank. I also feed trimmings or throw away pieces to our chickens.

Here's the oldest group of sterbai. There's 14 left. Was over feeding early on. I have a second group from a smaller spawn of 10 or so that are on BBS now and looking good. They're SO orange. The CPDs are mostly to the wall clinging stage. There's about 30 of them. Jacked with all sorts of picture settings so you can kind of make them out.

I have found that the stinking nitrite->nitrate part of the cycle hangs on for a long time. You're doing a good job getting things squared away, well done! For the bulk changing of water you can buy lengths of vinyl tube from a home improvement type store that might get you to the point of being able to at least drain without hauling buckets. You're right though. Bucket brigade isn't very fun!

Well it should be able to power a whole fishroom or two! I wonder if you're seeing water flow rates through an uplift setup?