jwcarlson

I've got mixed shrimp... blue, yellow, some green ones showed up, some clear, some brown, some almost black. I think it's pretty cool and I don't think there's anything wrong with just letting them rip. You don't have to cull them. Unless you're going to sell them as something specific. I am not sure shrimp will overpopulate in any meaningful sense of the word. Just think of it in terms of gallons, glass sides are just arbitrary boundaries anyway! So you've got 44 gallons, completely reasonable. I've got 262 gallons and another 244 in reserve. Who cares how many containers it's in? 😄

@mynameisnobody This is highly unscientific, I just have a couple handfuls of pothos and they're all cutting clones of a plant that was in rough shape when I inherited it from someone who inherited it from someone else at my last job. It's done pretty well with limited office lighting and has recovered nicely, though it does occasionally lose a leaf. So maybe it and its clones are just happy to be alive so they don't cause much fuss? 😄

They're so cute! I could easily see coming home with three of them and then six months down the line being like WHAT WAS I THINKING?!

The cool thing is it's limited in it's ability to pull nutrients by lighting (in my experience) or, with ample light, it will basically pull everything out of the water column (within reason). That beats the snot out of my amazon swords that appear to need handfed every few weeks or they melt back half of their progress. The pothos just kind of pauses. The one on my discus tank would probably be enormous if there was anything in the water for it to feed on in excess.

Yes, it will. If you're in a high bioload situation, it's a great nitrogen sponge. I have been able to dose liquid ferts to desired level, but mostly by nature of limiting the light my pothos get. In my discus tank I put it right under the light. My nitrates basically stay at zero. It's just the pothos, a small philodendron, and a wandering... dude that snaked down and dropped a root through the seam between lid and top of the tank... and some anubias. They provide a neat background and something cool to look at in an otherwise kind of boring tank for my discus. Considering how messy I fed these fish, I'm kind of surprised how clean the root are. I usually use my hand to blast water through the roots every week or so. I am doing nightly water changes, though, so consider that. They will grow into the coarse filters if you let them. And I am starting to find some root chunks in my HOB, so I think it occasionally snakes on in there and it gets amputated by the impeller. The one I have in the community tank is a lot less impressive with roots because I basically don't give it any light. Grows very slow, roots not as large. Regarding aqua soil. I have Fluval Stratum in three tanks. The first was just straight stratum. I don't hate it, but I also don't necessarily love it. I never noticed any spike in nutrients or anything. But I also heavily planted it at roughly the same time I put the fish in, maybe a week before... so perhaps they ate all that up. The other two tanks I have stratum capped with something (sand or gravel and then sand)... that's the way to go in my opinion. As a side note, I've liked it so much that the next planted tank I set up will be dirted with a 3" pool filter or play sand cap. It even makes planting the plants easier in my opinion.

We stopped by a reptile show/sales thing a few weeks back, just to see what was there. I was surprised to see a lot of spiders (including black widows), several types of mantis, and quite a few isopods. Anyway... there were also a bunch of sulcata tortoise babies and DANG are those little things cute! (not my picture, source: Sulcata Tortoise – David's Jungle (davidsjungle.com)) I can imagine plenty of these go home without the knowledge that they can live ~100 years and weigh 200 pounds. Though I will say that the one guy selling them was pretty honest about how long they live at least. We didn't ask him how big they get. Of course we are not in the market for such a creature. Though my daughter will eventually get a snake if she gets her math caught up. I could never sell creatures like this, I struggle selling queen bees to people and they're 'just a bug'! If 10,000 people went to this reptile expo, how many would actually be set up to care for one of these things? Of course... that can be said for a lot of pets, honestly.

I know everyone is different, but if you're dealing with an issue like I was (I'm gone from the house during the week longer than my lights are on), means I was running my lights starting late enough to be on when I got home so like 2P-8P. For simple on/off lights, a Kasa smart timer is programmable and you can have it come on for a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening to be on a better mix of the time that you're home. Or if you have some programmable lights like I do, there might be a customizable option if you read through the manual. I just did this a few weeks ago for all of my Hyggers. It works pretty well and I get to see my fish more. If you're home all day and just want to have the lights on more, I don't know what to tell you. Cutting the light in half is probably not necessarily the right thing to do as the lower light might be more usable to undesirable stuff and your plants might not really see it.

I have had an absolute blast with them so far. I could see getting frustrated if they never make fry or whatever, but they've been worth the price of admission so far. 🙂 Interesting dynamics and really fun to watch. I do wish they'd coordinate their actual spawning to MY schedule at least once so I would at least know that the male was in the vacinity of the eggs prior to her turning into the savage pinning him to the opposite half of the tank!

These two appear to be at it again... evidenced by the fish-seeking missile that flew across the tank at her mate when I walked down to the fish room this morning. This is about two weeks from the last spawn. Maybe closer to 11 or 12 days since she kicked the eggs out or ate the wigglers or whatever she did last time. I've been wondering if they were going to get after it again. I watched them a TON yesterday and I'm not decerning much of a difference in behavior leading up to her suddenly being ready to go. Last night I did cold water changes with RO. Dropped temp from 77 down to 72-73 for all pairs. And then fed them after refilling. This was the scene this morning. I'm really wondering if her switching into breeding mode isn't turning him off somehow? He looks totally defeated and really avoids her. She was wafting water at him a bit and rolling over her belly some this AM. But mostly she just darts out and goes hard after him driving him... somewhere. I'm QUITE obviously not an experienced apisto breeder and am probably missing a lot of the behavior. I will say that the last couple days he has seemed less flirtatious with her, but I don't really see any displaying by her at all. Don't see her spending any times in caves or cleaning anything out, she's mostly out and about when I'm watching. I even rearranged some of them a few days ago because of that fact. She's been her normal, light color up until this morning when she's bright yellow. When she was close to him he was doing a full body fin twitch deal. Something I've seen the males and females do since I've had them. I'm starting to see it as a white flag/I mean you no harm gesture. I'm basically trying to figure out if they could have spawned and he did his thing in the roughly 40 minutes of time between lights on and when I got downstairs this morning. Or, perhaps, they'll spawn in the dark. Though it's QUITE dark down there before the lights come on. She's not in one of the artificial caves this time, but in one of the more natural ones created by the driftwood. She's actually wedged in behind the spray of hornwort. She's so fast it took me three of her trips out/in to even figure out where she was going. Crazy little thing. The other two pairs don't seem particularly close to spawning. Which is fine, I'm not in a rush. I've only had them 40 days. I'm not sure how long it can take for non-pairs to eventually figure out that their tankmate is all they've got, though. Knowing someone produced at least one wiggler in my water would go a long way towards boosting my confidence. 😄

Can be tough to tell, looks like ich. But I have had epistylis too, and it sure looked similar. I don't see any on the eyes, but see quite a bit overall, so that's another point towards ich. I do not think it looks like velvet, but I have also never experienced it. What temperature is the tank?

That's good! 🙂

Have done both in my discus (1 tbs each per 10 gallons). So not a very high dose really. But I'm also only doing that for 24 hours and then it's getting a big water change.

There are absolute GOBS of different schedules. I think the main thing is... it's going to take 3-4 treatments. It takes siphoning the bottom really well. And it takes a bit of time and effort to knock the worm load down. I don't know paracleanse is that the metro/prazi compound? I don't think it will hurt anything and it covers some more bases for flukes and tape worms. And hexamita. Good mentioning the light, I'm not sure if I mentioned that above. Some of my tanks in the basement get zero light so I don't bother covering them, but the discus tank always gets double blankets and really blank them out.

Nah, if it's bare bottom you'll be able to get it clean pretty quick. Just whatever it takes to suck everything up. Would recommend not feeding during the bath to help make it easier to clean. Might be harder if it's got substrate. I also do one tablespoon of epsom salt per 10 gallons during the 24 hour levamisole.

I'd intended on posting this here some time ago. And forgot... @kneereminded me with her post about her ram. One of my discus quit eating some time ago and started falling behind. My experience, at least with discus, is that they'll still "eat", but they'll spit a lot of the food out if they're not feeling well. It can be frustrating trying to make sure they're all eating. I'll call this fish "him", though I have no idea what sex it is. This is him before I noticed he'd stopped eating. Here he is after I moved him to isolation. It's kind of tough to tell, but he had lost quite a bit of mass. Still social with the other fish and moved about the tank a bit. But was also kind of hanging back and hiding when the others were eating. One of the most telling things between these two pictures is his shape. He's quite round in the first one, but in the second he's clearly stretched a bit longer, but not grown taller (round). A bit more football shaped. In any event, I isolated him, cranked the heat to 93 and got some poop to come out of him. This is a common discus tactic to get their metabolism going. 93 for a couple weeks... salt... try to get them eating. I just wanted to see some of his poop. I'd never seen this fish poop, but blue diamond discus are known for huge poops (more on that later) and one of the things that tipped me off is his massive poops were missing when I did water changes. The first night he passed this... I've got an ancient microscope that I bought off of a friend some years ago, I don't use it often, but it's fun to bust out and look at stuff occasionally. Unfortunately, I didn't see it until it was too late. Once it touches the bottom it's useless as a sample because there's always something living in the tank that invades and can make it impossible to diagnose. I looked anyway and found a detritus worm (I think). I got lucky and got a good sample soon after. This is an example of what I'm told is a textbook "internal parasite" poop, the yellow/green is possibly from a secondary infection. Here are some examples of worm eggs in his poop. I'm told these were capillaria eggs by the person who supplied the discus, he's been doing this "forever" and is well respected, so I have no reason to doubt his diagnosis. 🙂 These are at different zoom levels. So... armed with the knowledge that he did, in fact, have a worm infestation. I cooled him back down and put him back into the main tank with his buddies because I needed to treat everyone, including the dither fish. I treated with pure levamisole at about 2.5 ppm on day 1, 5, and 13 based on some discus breeder recommendations. It's a 24 hour bath with a full tank wipe down and water change after 24 hours to get rid of any worms that are passed. Levamisole just paralyzes the worms, it does not kill them. So vacuuming is crucial. I already do 90% changes and have a bare bottom, so this wasn't that big of a deal for me. I've also done this with new fish in quarantine as well, some on substrate... just doing as good of a job as I can with the cleaning. During the 24 hour treatments I also was adding one tablespoon of epsom salt per 10 gallons to help them pass the worms. Again at the recommendation of a respected discus breeder. So after his three treatments, he perked up and started eating. He was (and remains) absolutely ravenous, has gained his weight back, and is absolutely growing again. The deworming happened around the middle and into late November. So he has been back to eating for awhile now. With some of his renewed eating came some of his renewed... well... pooping. The first one I witnessed was very scary. This is normal blue diamond poop size, by the way. The thready worms are not normal. I netted him and took a sample of the poop. There were a lot of worms in the poop, but they were all dead. They were basically kind of... empty looking. I checked as much of the poop as I could and found no eggs. So I was pretty satisfied that this must have been some sort of a worm pile that was kind of lodged in his intestines and that's what I saw coming out! I don't have a great picture of it, but there were several worms all twisted and braided together. You can kind of see it in the next pictures. This was about two weeks after the last levamisole dose, so that makes me wonder why they're dead? I'm only speculating here, but the lady who recommended treatments on 1, 5, and 13 days might suggest that because it paralyzes them enough to starve them? Or weaken them enough to kill them? Pure speculation here, but I have no other way of explaining a big mass of expelled worms two weeks after treatment. Here he is a couple of days ago, going strong now: Well, that's it... hopefully it helps someone. You don't need a particularly special microscope, either. I think most of the ones available for kids would do the trick.

I'm unaware if there's other options. I just have pure levamisole powder and a tiny gram scale so I can measure the dose. I believe Odd Duck uses a cattle wormer, let me see if I can find that thread for you. Farm store might have it near you. I've got gobs of the stuff, but I doubt you live in Iowa. 😄 Odd Duck starts posting somewhere here on the first page:

You could do a smaller container, the issue would be measuring the dose. I think the Expel P packets are for 10 gallons. I would set something up that he can stay in for the two weeks, personally. And you should also treat any other fish that are with him. I've used levamisole with shrimp and snails, it's not a problem if that's an issue. It's good that he's eating. Levamisole can sometimes knock them off food for a bit. But I've only ever experienced that with discus. Everything else seems to want to keep on eating. I do cover the tank for the 24 hours as well. And kill any tank lights. If it's easier to treat him in-tank that's perfectly OK as well. It might just be harder to shake the worms. In my experience the fish bounce back really quickly. In truth, fish probably mostly always have parasites, but stress can cause a disruption and they can start losing the battle. So it's more about getting the parasitic load down to a manageable level for the fish vs. complete elimination which is probably impossible.

I'd worm him with levamisole (in a bare bottom if possible). I think Expel P is levamisole. For my discus I do day 1, 5, and 13 (24 hour bath) with wiping sides/bottoms and through cleaning after each 24 hour treatment. For my community tanks with substrate I just do as good of a job as I can doing vacuum 24 hours after treatment. The levamisole just paralyzes the worms, in theory the fish will pass them, and you suck them up off the bottom. It doesn't effect eggs, so you need to do a few treatments to cover the life cycle. I've started worming all of my new fish, it's not worth the risk and sometimes the effects don't show for months if you're introducing them to your existing tanks. Is he eating?

It should be more-or-less the same either way.

What's your pH if you aerate the water for 24 hours?

I didn't mean that I was doubting your experience (if it came off that way)! 🙂 Awesome to see shrimplets, they're really fun critters. Just always doing something.

I always find it wild when people struggle with shrimp. I guess it's really water based, I suppose. I do 50-75% water changes on community tanks with shrimp and they don't have any issues at all. And in tanks where they're clearly predated on and they still thrive. While I find tetras can be a bit finnicky until the initial die off occurs. I think I started with 10 cardinals and I'm down to three in a year. It's like every couple of months one of them sprouts some weird thing out of their side or something strange and then dies. But these remaining three seem pretty stout now. 😞

That lobster is going to outgrow the tank pretty quick. Just FYI.

Have you watched the (greatest) films (of all time)?

I love the ACO test strips, but for me, they're useless after nitrate and nitrite. None of the other pads give me usable information. Could just be my water. The pH one is impossible to me. My aged water is 8.2/8.3 and on the strips it looks like 6something. GH is off the charts and KH comes in really low for some reason even though it's like 20 degrees.