jwcarlson

Corys just sometimes breath from the surface. You're probably fine, but if you're worried you can just add a regular air stone and see if that changes their behavior.

Did a water change (from the opposite end of the tank) on these guys today. First day of full free swimming. It's a real treat watching them interact with their fry.

It might be cheaper to buy pure levamisole to treat your 125. You need about one gram per dose in your 125. You can buy DiscusX's WormerX, which is pure levamisole and get 20 grams for ~$25. Multiple options to buy including Ebay, Myrtle Beach Discus, others. I have tons of it, if you live near Eastern Iowa let me know and I'll give you however much you need. Plan for four doses. I treat on days 1, 5, and 13, and then another one at 21 or 28 if it seems like it was heavy. 24 hour bath for each soak and as huge of a water change, wipe down, and massive gravel vac as you can manage after each 24 hour dose. Vacuuming the bottom is crucial as levamisole paralyzes worms, it doesn't kill them directly. For each dose I also put in 1 tablespoon of epsom salt per 10 gallons for the 24 hour soak. I haven't experienced terribly often, but levamisole can knock fish off of food so feed lightly just in case. It is also an immunostimulant, so you might notice fish that were acting sick kind of start feeling a little better. Here's a good dosage calculator for pure levamisole: https://www.geocities.ws/chefkeithallen/Levamisole.html?fbclid=IwAR0aHbTpJsQWrw2LXIYySeh4yVUG3lDHJdXwLT02CVqmHDH7AlTCAdTdDMY

I don't think the cloudiness is an issue, just to be clear. I think it's just important to realize that the most available meds are not pure and in some cases may not hit a therapeutic dose for some animals AND there's A LOT of other solids in that packet, in fact, the vast majority is not the med... and that has to do/go somewhere. Levamisole is a great wormer and Expel P does get to a good dose at 3 PPM. I usually treat at 2.5 PPM for levamisole.

Whoops, you're correct! Paracleanse is a little bit better, it only contains 675 mg per packet of buffer and 325 mg of active ingredient 25% metro 7.5% prazi. So, the point still stands. I'd love to know what the buffer is, honestly.

The cloudiness could have been from whatever buffer is included with the Expel P. It's part of why I try to buy pure meds when possible. A packet of Expel P contains 113 mg of levamisole and 887 mg of... buffer... something...? Not sure as the SDS doesn't say, but the levamisole is only 12% of the packet. The dose is one packet per 38 liters (10 gallons), which puts it at a good dose (3 PPM... 113 mg/38 L). But there's 23 ppm of who knows what that's also going in. Which I suspect contributes to your cloudiness.

I left the algae on for camouflage. 🤥 Took out a couple of caves and rearranged a bit during water change today. She doesn't seem to hate it. I need to borrow my dad's tile saw and cut some of these pots in half. Burying a whole pot in the sand far enough is kind of a pain.

I'd dose for whatever it recommends and dose it for the whole volume of the tank.

Fully agree, I'm doing lots of water changes and wiping everything down. Basically, keeping them like discus, but not *quite* as many water changes. The ones I'm spawning are in mostly RO with a little bit of tap water. Your tap sounds similar to mine. I don't bother cutting it with RO though and it seems habitable. 😄 I think my GH is... 18 degrees which I think is somewhere in that 300 ballpark? I never test it anymore so I forget.

How are you adapting those those long tubes, @dasaltemelosguy? A threaded x barb fitting and a hose clamp?

Without a starter culture might be a little tough. I spawned my sterbai without live food.

I've never owned goldfish and have only had discus shed slimecoat once when I added a bottle of Fitzyme to their tank. I couldn't tell you what caused it, but it ended up killing one of them. The only thing I could think was that it was a pH shift from something in the bottle? It was a near immediate reaction. Bacteria or parasites could cause them to shed it, but I suspect that it's something to do with your water. Have you tested your water today? Maybe you've got something going on that you haven't caught on a test. How much Prime have you been using? When did you last dose it? It might be worth dosing Prime for the volume of the tank if it's been a day or two. I can't comment on stress coat, perhaps someone else can help with that.

I've got rams in my hard tap water. I change a lot of water and keep the tanks very clean and they do just fine. *shrug* Fairly small sample size, but they seem happy as clams as they say. I have been talking to some ram breeders who say they spawn and successfully raise fry in 200 and 400 TDS tap water.

I don't think this is a legitimate concern. Your body can develop or... "undevelop" allergies over the course of time. Allergies aren't as simple as most of us believe. That said, I do think that Cory talked about an employee having an allergic reaction to food when they were packaging their own food some years ago. But I don't know what food that was.

Mine are pretty slow flow as well, @PineSong. I, too, have a 9W and a 24W. The smaller one does seem to have a bit more flow, but neither one of them is blasting anything around the tank.

Doesn't look like ich. Does look like it's shedding slime coat, which can be caused by multiple things. Is your fish breathing heavy? Ich is tiny white spots. Something like this:

My discus lived in a 75 for over a year with nothing but two double stacked, large ACO sponge filters. I eventually added a HOB, but they could have lived indefinitely with sponges so long as the tank is well maintained. I'm not familiar with the tank or filter you're talking about, but just wanted to provide context. A TON of discus are raised from fry to adulthood in tanks with nothing more than air driven sponge filters.

Most corys don't like discus temperatures, but a few do. Sterbai is the most common. Guppies I'm sure would "live" in that temperature, but it's pretty warm for them. And eventually they'll probably be discus food at some point. The shrimp will end up eaten, but they should be OK. I'm not sure about the gourami. Some gourami are OK with discus, I don't think I've heard honey among them, but they are peaceful, so I wouldn't think that would be a problem. In general, though, if it's small enough for them to get a bite of, they're going to eat it. They are cichlids and while they seem less high strung than some others... they have a little violence under the surface like all cichlids do. You're going to need a second tank at some point because inevitably one discus won't eat or will otherwise need special attention that would be cost prohibitive or otherwise difficult to do in your main tank. It's also a really really good idea to start with discus alone in a base bottom tank for a month or so and see how things go, make sure they're all eating, easily observe their poop, worm them for three weeks, etc. Overall, though, if you're looking for more of a community tank-type of vibe... discus are probably a poor choice. They're best done alone for most people as they can also be sensitive to bacteria they're not adapted to. It leads to a phenomenon called amongst discus folks as "cross contamination" which can lead to the death of everything in the tank. In my experience they're also very prone to worms. Any fish going into the tank with them should also be quarantined and at least wormed before introducing them. Even doing that, every single time I have added tankmates with my discus... they end up with a worm issue some time later and I end up needing to worm the whole tank again. It's a good idea to have pure metronidazole and pure levamisole on hand. Common discus tankmates are cardinal tetras, lemon tetras, rummynose tetras, bristlenose plecos, bosemani rainbows, german rams, and sterbai corydoras. You can find some yahoo somewhere who's keeping goldfish, stingrays, and arrowana with them, but that doesn't mean it is the right thing for the fish, which I think is an important distinction.

I was wondering where you went. :D. Glad you're OK!

A mix of tap and RO. I'm only using it for breeding setups and am normally aiming for very low "TDS", so I basically blend trying to hit a TDS. Usually less than 80 TDS. I've been aiming for 15 TDS recently. TDS isn't perfect, but it's a good gauge for what percentage I'm putting in. Because I'm aiming for a TDS instead of a percentage, it's a bit easier to make a smaller batch if I don't need to change water in all the breeding tanks. @Cjbear087 I have absolutely no experience with CO2 injection. "Liquid CO2" is really just an algae inhibitor. In my experience it does jack squat and when dosed higher my fish started to get unhappy. So I quit using it regularly. Though I have a couple jars and sometimes I'll dose a tank. I don't really know why I'm doing it, frankly. 😄

Just once! I do spot check if I have some sort of issue that makes me think I should be concerned. It might be good to test in say August and again in February as water can change seasonally. But once you've done that once there's not a major chance that it changes drastically at any point in the future.

Sounds like a swim bladder. In my experience I haven't noticed anything like a sudden outbreak of fish with swim bladder problems after seeing one have it. But it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

Normal tap water if you can. Otherwise JUST an RO, without the DI (you can get the DI, but it's completely unnecessary for any normal fishkeeping). One other thing that would be good is to know what your water looks like before suggesting that you use it. It's possible that you have ammonia and high nitrates coming out of the tap and if that's the case, everything we're suggesting kind of goes to pot. So do understand we're assuming you have hard, but otherwise safe, tap water. As far as checking pH. Run your tap for a minute or two so you're not getting pipe water that might have been sitting there for a day. Catch a cup or jar of water (any quantity is OK, a quart jar for instance is perfect). Test the pH of that water and write it down. Drop an airstone into it and bubble that water overnight (or 8 hours is fine if you do it in the morning). Then test the pH again and make note. For example, my water comes out of the tap at 7.0. After aging it gets to 8.2 or 8.3. The concern here is that you could shock your fish with a big pH shift (especially with big water changes). If the shift is small say 0.3 or something, it's not a real concern. I think most people suggest that the shift be less than 0.5. If you've ever noticed your fish seeming stressed after a water change, it might be because of this type of inconsistency. The goal being that the water you're for water changes to as exact as the water that remains in the tank as possible most of the time. Again... this applies "always", but at some low level of water changes, it doesn't really matter because you're only adding back a small amount of unmatched water. But big water changes obviously it's a bigger deal. You can certainly compromise, say if your water is 78 instead of 82... that's probably not a problem in most cases. But if the temp is way off AND the pH is way off maybe you cause enough stress with a water change that you do some damage to some fish. Or stress them enough that they can't fight off some pathogen that they otherwise are OK dealing with. Another example of an issue here would be if your water at a low enough pH that ammonia basically isn't toxic, but you do a big water change and pump water in that's got 8.4 pH, you suddenly make that an issue.

For my discus they were always acting totally normal, eating completely fine so I was very confident that wouldn't be any issues stressing them out a bit. I don't know that I would suggest doing it if he's really lethargic or otherwise seems really stressed. But he looks pretty vibrant, so it might be worth a shot. It is a pretty big area, though. So that might be tough. It does certainly look like it's getting worse. Antibiotics might also be beneficial, but I'd see what someone else suggests in the vein... I'm by no means an expert. Is he eating and moving normally?

Yes, but just RO is MORE than sufficient and a little bit cheaper. Other things that might not have been addressed earlier in the thread is that RO takes a long time to make (normal units for this type of application are rated something like 50-100 gallons per day). So that that into consideration. Most of these units also have reject ratios of something like 1:5. Meaning that you get 1 gallon of RO and you reject 5 gallons so for each gallon of water you actually use 6 gallons. For me, water is fairly inexpensive, but do be aware that it could start racking up your bill if you live in an area where water is pricey. And in the long run it's going to be quite a bit more expensive as your RO membrane will eventually need to be replaced and if you're not on a private well, your water is going to cost at least some amount more.