jwcarlson

They're awesome. The individual cubes and the strips if you have several things you want to switch in the same general area.

To be honest, I'm not sure that I ever took pH readings when I was using straight RO in the tanks. If I recall, the KH in my apisto tanks was either 1 or 2 degrees and I really struggle to understand how that little of KH could such a big affect, but I'll confess to being ignorant in these regards. I suppose there's probably some little residual KH after my RO unit, but would A. hongsloi have an issue with that? Additionally... the ram eggs hatch just fine in "0" TDS RO water, but do not hatch in 15 TDS mostly RO water in the tank. Rhetorical question as I don't expect you to know, but just thinking. I've heard that they're pretty tolerant for spawning, not as tolerant as cacatoidies (or however it's spelled). Maybe I eventually get a pair of those and see if they'll spawn successfully. I think I need to capture a set of eggs from them and get them in RO. That at least gives me a good apisto datapoint. This was one of the big reasons I wanted rams because I'd be able to know exactly when the spawned and troubleshoot from there. I have a really difficult time knowing when my hongsloi spawn. I know they've done it plenty of times, but I only "know know" that they've spawned like 3-4 times.

Bypass your softener to the cold water in your "fish sink". You'll need to store water most likely, but that doesn't need to be very complicated. I paid $20-30 for my food safe 63 gallon pickle barrels. Does take a bit more space. You could roll the dice and see if your softened water causes a problem, but I don't have a good feel for how likely it is that it will be a problem. I know some people use it without issue and some people who swear it's terrible. My tap water pH shifts so much that I have to age my water either way, so it's not a big deal to have those setups. Someone mentioned this above, but if you have to go play around with 2-3 valves and purge some water and hold your mouth just right in order to get your water for a water change... you will eventually NOT do water changes because of this. And it will be a problem at some point. If you're going to undertake something that requires a lot of water changes you should really think as far ahead as you can to make water changes as easily as possible. For my discus, for example, I have a permanently plumbed line with a Python siphon on the end. I can start a siphon, clean the bottom in a couple of minutes tops. And then I let it drain all the way down. I do not stand there and watch it drain because I've done like 500+ water changes on this tank. It drains down until all the fish are laying on their side and leaves maybe an inch or a bit more water in the tank. Then I add my Prime to the tank, go downstairs, flip two valves, and pump the water back up. This takes about 17 minutes. I set a timer for 15 minutes to remind me to go back to the tank. But it's impossible to overfill the tank this way because I always pump all the water out and that fills the tank to about 1/2" from the top. So worse case I run my pump dry. I have all the stuff on Kasa WiFi switches, so I can kill the pump from my phone. Then I go down and drop the fill line from my fish sink into the aging barrel and fill it. It takes about 22 minutes to fill, so I set my timer for 20 minutes and walk away. Total "hand time" for a 90% water change on my 75 gallon discus tank is 5-10 minutes. I do wipe down all the glass once a week or so, so that one takes a little bit longer. It's not quite an automated water change, but it's fairly close.

The problem is that's not consistent water, it might be consistent enough for guppies or even for most other fish, but it might send your discus into a spiral. My water in the winter comes out of the tap in the upper 40s. In the summer it might be... 65, maybe? That's a whole lot different mix of water. If the water coming in is always fairly similar I'd still highly suggest that you don't get discus, but hey... do whatever makes you happy! I wanted discus for 20+ years and have had them for two years. Kind of wishing I never got them, if I'm being honest, but have done so much work and care for them that I hate the idea of rehoming them. I don't care how pretty they are, I don't think they're worth the work and there are PLENTY of other fish just as beautiful. AND I find them to be basically the most boring fish I have behaviorally... by a huge margin. I think a lot of people (myself included) like the idea of discus more than the actual fish. If mine spawned or something maybe I'd think differently. But they just slowly swim back/forth... eat... poop... and get sick/die for seemingly no reason. Mine haven't ever really even had any sort of aggression at all. For a few days one of them was staring at the sponge filter lift pipe and then chased the others away gently except one other and I thought they might spawn. But that stopped after a little bit. That is the most exciting thing that they've done. Every other fish I have has more redeeming qualities. I never find myself losing minutes watching my discus, but I can kind of zone out in front of any of my other fish and not realize how long I've been there.

I've used caves he can and cannot fit in. And two different males. And when I actively watched them spawn it was in a hole in the driftwood and he was able to get in there for sure. Re: water, I've run it down to 15 TDS for both the rams and the apistos and I just talked to someone yesterday that says his spawn and hatch in his tap water at 200 TDS. I know TDS isn't a great measure, but simply stating that there's not 'much' left in the water I'm using. For awhile I was changing straight RO only into the apistos just to try to get a baseline from which to start. But that's still in the main tank and all of the possible pathogens that could be causing an issue. I do not screw around with pH, but the RO mixes usually are in the 7.4 range. The other breeders I've talked to suggested straight RO because they've experienced similar issues and were unable to resolve them outside of that. I had ~10 failed ram spawns and every single one that I have moved to straight RO has hatched just fine. It's something that happens fairly close to hatch because the eggs look good for a few days and then suddenly fungus over. This has happened in tanks with bare bottoms, tanks with sand/plants, etc. I don't know if it's just me moving it to the more sterile environment that does it or what. I do bleach my hang-on containers and use fresh RO so it doesn't really touch any tank or anything except for whatever transfers over when I pull the eggs. I'd LOVE to figure out the actual issue, but I feel like it's beyond me. Three of the people who have this same issue have been breeding discus and rams for 20-30+ years each and this is all that they've found that works. When it comes down to it, I'm really just interested in successfully raising some fry. I'm not planning to start an apisto farm. Perhaps most interested just to prove that I haven't been "doing it wrong" for the last year and a half or however long it has been.

Takes about 5 minutes, a $15 Shark Bite fitting from Home Depot, and a short piece of Pex tubing or maybe just another fitting depending on how your sink is plumbed currently. I didn't address this earlier, but I do not think you should get discus. If I'm understanding this correctly, this is your first aquarium? Discus shouldn't be your first fish. Get the basics down for a few years before you jump in over your head.

That is awesome! They've already got decent color on them too.

Thanks, @tolstoy21! My issue is that the eggs simply won't hatch. I don't know what demon lives in my water even with nearly pure RO in the spawning tanks... but it just doesn't work. I'm curious as to if I'll be able to reintroduce wigglers to apisto parents. I've tried to avoid shining a light in the caves, but at this point what's the difference if I scare her into eating them or they don't hatch anyway? The male always seems flirty and I have watched them spawn once for sure. The truth is that I do not observe my fish as much as I might like to. The apistos in particular I had just given up on and figured I would let them live out their days or had considered rehoming them. But now that I've seen moving eggs to RO work with rams I think I want to give the apistos a bit yet.

I do not know if this is a legitimate concern or not, but the standard ion exchange softeners strip out minerals and replace them with, on average, two sodium ions. Some people claim that "TDS" makes a difference. I don't know if that's true or not. But my tap water is like 300 TDS and my softened water is 600+ TDS. @Tony s is correct. There is often a bypass valve built into a softener. The issue is if you're going to use straight tap water, you also have to factor in the time it's going to take to get that water into your water heater and up to temp. And how much do you purge from your water heater before you have purged the softened stuff? I would suggest putting in a full-time bypass if it's a hose bibb or a connection to one specific sink you use for your fish water. But you're going to have to use straight cold tap water for that as the hot water supply will be softened water. All of that monkeying around creates a good chance of providing inconsistent water to your fish, which if you take nothing else away from this thread... that's what you want to avoid. I have a cold tap supply in my utility sink where I fill my 63 gallon aging/preheating barrels from. I have a >1.0 pH shift (something like 1.2 or 1.3 shift up), so I age my water. When I need straight RO water for my breeding setups, I have a long 1/4" line that I unwind and run over to one of the barrels and fill it up. My RO Buddie unit takes quite awhile to fill the 63 gallon barrel about 14 hours or more. Someday I'm going to get around to installing a float valve so that I can not have to worry so much about accidently leaving the RO on. Each barrel has it's own heat controller and aeration setup so that I can do more than one water change at a time. Though I basically either have 82 degree water or 76 degree water, so they're not terribly far off. But I don't want to do a 90% water change with water that different in most cases. So having some flexibility is nice. It's an ion exchanging resin bed in the tank.

That's about all I can think of. I'd done it awhile back with some black static cling stuff. But I didn't give it enough time. And it was before I switched males. This male she's with now has been extremely chill and doesn't seem like he's going to beat her up like the other one did as soon as I switched some caves around.

Yep, and like noted many people already have one. We have one for our kitchen cold water. I cut into that line and supply the cold for my utility sink in the basement where all my fish water comes from. If you do go with RO, you will want to use the softened water for that as the membrane will last longer. I age and preheat all of my water as I have a very big pH shift when my water is aerated for 24 hours. That's another important thing to check as well.

I'd put a bypass around your water softener and just use tap water for your fish, unless you're breeding something that needs very soft water. I'm not convinced that hard water cannot work for most fish. I've kept a bunch of different "soft water" fish over my years in the hobby including discus, apistos, and rams (rams are fairly recent addition) and I don't think it causes any issues as long as you maintain your tank.

Algae is just another way of planting your aquarium. And, frankly, it is the one that I'm most successful at growing.

I've been incredibly frustrated for over a year now with multiple failed spawns from my apistos. I'm down to a single pair now (actually only ever had a single pair since of the four pairs I received 7 males and 1 female). I need to be able to see when they spawn. I'll explain why. I believe that I have figured out why they have not had a successful hatch and I wish I could say that I know exactly why, but I don't. But here's what I do know. As part of troubleshooting this issue, I bought a number of pairs of pitch black rams. They've spawned multiple times and have never once had any eggs hatch. Eggs look good, are clearly developing, and then eventually turn white. The TDS of the tanks is under 90 and has been down to 15. I know that TDS isn't a perfect indicator, but just leaving that here to say that it's quite soft water. Nearly straight RO. I talked with a few discus breeders who also breed rams and a some of them cannot get eggs to hatch without pulling the eggs to straight RO shortly after they spawn. They accomplish this by putting them in a pitcher or hang-on box. Most of the time these people then artificially raise the fry. I do not have a lot of interest in that route. So, I have been re-introducing the fry once they start hatching and wiggling a bit. I've pulled eggs three times now and they have hatched successfully all three times when moving to RO. No successfully raised fry, as I think the parents kind of slowly pecked them up. But this last batch as of this morning the parents have not eaten any of the fry in the few days they've had them and I think they're getting pretty close to going free-swimming. They're starting to "hop" a bit in the dish and are constantly moving around on the dish surface. But that's not the focus here, just showing that I think I've pinpointed the issue. The people who I have talked to with this issue don't have a great idea of why it's this way for them (or for me), but it's clearly "water". The issue I have with my apistos is they never spawn "obviously"... at least for me, but I think they do sometimes spawn because she'll disappear for a couple of days and then show back up. I have a terracotta pot or two that I could place against the front or side of the tank so that I could see into it, but I feel like she would be hesitant to lay in there since it would be "open" on the big end. I'd like to hatch them in RO and then move the babies back with the parents. I have no idea if apistos will take to it like the rams seem to have. But I think it's worth a shot. The reason I want to spawn these fish is entirely to be able to observe the parental behavior. I could play parent and raise them in a fry tray in my "Dean-Style Fry System", but I don't really have a desire to do that. Has anyone done this? Should I get some sort of a one-way film so she can't see out? Am I overlooking something more obvious? I'll clearly have to pull the other caves, but maybe if I can give them a couple options that I can see into I will be able to get a shot at spawning them. I know Lowell's Fish Lab had a video where he captured his apistos spawning on camera, so maybe I can glean some information from that video. Thanks for your help in my quest to make Sushi the one-pectoral-finned wonder fish a successful mom. The kids named her. 😄 The male is either Rice or Iorek, I can't recall which is which.

You listed a basically fully stocked 40 gallon in the original post, you're wanting to add more after adding the discus? Regarding 50% water changes, you might be OK for awhile, but with substrate you'll probably eventually have issues. As pointed out above... you've got a lot of fish with conflicting temperature profiles as well as keeping shoaling fish in much too small of groups/singles. It's usually best to keep discus pretty warm, 82 for adults, but when growing them up 85 is better. You'll inevitably end up in a situation where your discus stops eating and the first course of action there is to run the temperature up to 93 for a couple of weeks. How big is the discus you got? How are you quarantining it before putting it in the community tank? Do you have a picture of the discus? Particularly one look at it from the front so you can see the profile of the forehead and belly? I've kept discus with lemon tetras, rummynose tetras, and bristlenose. The only ones I still keep with them are bristlenose. But eventually I'll move mine into the 125 I have setup for them and they'll be with bristlenose and sterbai corys. Sterbai are a popular discus tankmate. At discus temperatures, I think you'll find that a lot of what you have in the tank currently is going to be blown through pretty quickly (short lived). The forum you linked earlier (Simply Discus) would be a great place to go ask for advice on what you're doing, by the way! Best of luck! Not sure about hairgrass or wisteria, but I think java fern is OK that warm. I'd be more worried about the fish than the plants, personally. Amazon swords and anubias are pretty popular discus plants. Also emerged grown plants like pothos and peace lily don't really care what the water temp is.

It really doesn't have so much to do with the nitrates, though I do keep them very low. But with my really hard water, basically zero nitrates, AND the warm temps discus need the plants just don't do well. Anubias tolerate it pretty well and I have emergent pothos and philadendron. Even when I have left for a week on vacation my nitrates when I get back are no greater than 10 and usually <5. Of course they're not being fed, so that's a big part. But even if I skip a few days of water change, the nitrates are still almost nil. But that goes for most of my tanks. I think people get very hung up on water for most fish. It doesn't matter too much in my experience. I've got discus (2+ years) rams and apistos who are living in my tap water and have been for more than a year (well, the rams haven't been that long) and they're perfectly fine. But I don't run tanks with 40+ nitrate and total neglect of water changes. I have a 40 gallon community tank that I do let go about a month before changing water. It's a jungle of all sorts of plants. Most tanks with the more sensitive fish get fairly frequent water changes as I'm usually attempting to breed them. And in fry rearing tanks I try to do at least 2 or more big 75-90% water changes every week. I've gotten a lot more into water changes for my fry and it very clearly makes a huge difference. For big batches at least. If you've got two cory babies that appeared in a community tank it's probably not a big deal. But if you've got 100+ baby corys or plecos or CPDs or whatever in one tank... you better be changing water. Another thing to consider is the overall genetics of a given fish of animal in general. Some animals just have better genetics to be raised in domestic circumstances. There's a reason they just about give away most of your standard strains of guppies, platys, swordtails, etc. This is also an issue with other domestic stocks. Honey bees are an example. I've been keeping honey bees for ten years and bred all my own queens for 8 of those years (have all but quit beekeeping now, though). But there's an introduced pest that jumped bee species called the varroa mite and European honey bees just do not have the right genetic makeup to deal with them. Varroa is the cause of the entire bee panic that has been occurring for the last... 25 or so years since they were introduced. There's some bees that have been selected and bred for resistance, but we're talking about artificial insemination, importing bee semen from all over the world to try to get the right mix of genes, and of course very heavy selection. There's also genetic bottleneck issues because a HUGE percentage of the queens in the entire country are born and bred in about a one month period when nearly every commercial beehive in the country is in a relatively small area in California for almond pollination. But I'm getting really off track... 🙂

Probably depends on the angelfish you're talking about. I know there's plenty of people doing very similar with their altums and certain wild caughts. Discus have a "different slime coat" for one. I can't tell you what this means biologically. But in practice, it means they're more sensitive. They're also from an area so devoid of microscopic life that their young have evolved to eat their parents' slime coat. If you happen to live in an area where nearly Amazon River water comes out of your tap, I suspect that you can get away with significantly less maintenance. I keep mine in rock hard tap water, so that does create some additional issues which have certainly contributed to the overall challenge of discus. I haven't kept every fish under the sun in my time in the hobby (about 25 years mostly on, but some off), but I've not kept a fish so sensitive. But there's also no fish that wears the owner's care so boldly when you look at them. You can quite seriously see the amount of work someone has done with their discus. And once you know what good discus look like (shape and appropriate size/proportion), it's tough to imagine purposely doing less work and having something that's basically an advertisement that you didn't do enough for it to reach its potential. TLDR version: you can keep ANY fish like a discus and it will thrive, but you cannot keep discus like just any fish and expect it to thrive. They're not in a planted tank (for me, at least). I've tried and the plants don't survive, planted tanks also offer issues because they usually accumulate quite a bit of bacterial load due to (usually) less substrate cleaning. Mine are in a bare bottom tank and I wipe all the sides and bottom down once a week. If I skip a wipe down, they start getting "discus pimples" which are bacterial nodules. I wipe down and change water and they're gone almost immediately. Even with all this care I've still had plenty of issues in the two+ years I have had them. Disclaimer: To be 100% honest, I do not think discus are worth the effort. If you've got the right water out of the tap, you might be one of the few who can get away with less stringent maintenance.

I don't think they should be jumped into lightly. Some people get, in my opinion, very lucky and get away with "murder" keeping their discus. At least temporarily.

You can't really reliably sex discus without them being fully mature and truthfully, you have to see their breeding apparatus. As far as one discus being alone... it's certainly not ideal. If money is an issue, I'd steer very clear of discus. A single fully grown discus from a reputable source might "work" in this situation, at least temporarily. But the odds are slim. And that fish is going to run you something in the $250 neighborhood. You could conceivably do 5-6 in the 55, but speaking as someone who has 7 in a 75. It takes a boatload of water changes to keep them in good shape. I average 5x90% water changes per week and for the first 18 months or so it was every day.

How often are you changing water? 25 nitrates is pretty high for fry raising (at least in my opinion).

As stated above, there's no reason to keep using Stability or anything like that routinely once you're cycled. I would suggest that you're never really cycled until there's fish in the tank, but that's a different discussion. You should have a great head start at this point. Regarding water changes and prime. I change 90% of water in my discus tank, dump the prime into the little bit of water left over, and then pump the water into the tank and they're completely fine. There's no need to dechlorinate and wait for it to act. Chlorine at tap water levels isn't something that just instantly kills anything. When I have forgotten to dechlorinate the fish usually seem a bit off over 20-30 minute timeframe and then will be gasping at the surface within the hour.

If you can isolate him that can help diagnose and see if he's pooping. Is he passing any poop at all? If so, is it white or stringy?

If you have another tank you could move the corys there to grow up some. I've put pretty small cories in with my full grown rams and they haven't bothered them. I've not had EBA ever, but I will say that fish that "grow up" together seem to be pretty tolerant of each other in my experience. If you get a small EBA and it's not big enough to bother the corys initiallly, it might just accept them. Of course with cichlids, every day is a roll of the dice for some behaviors, so take that with the grain of salt.

I'd just monitor it and see. What's important to understand is that the sponge filter you moved in doesn't know how big of a tank it's in. It just "knows" how much fish waste it normally processed and will be able to process that much now. The good news is that an established filter can increase in size pretty quickly. I've only added Stability when using some existing media if I'm trying to seed new filters and know that what I moved over is not sufficient enough to quickly bring everything up to "cycled". If I'm squeezing a cycled sponge or two into a new tank, I wouldn't bother with the Stability as it seems like the sponge squeezings really do a good job of cycling things. You can easily avoid cycling issues (high ammonia/nitrites) with water changes in the interim. In a big enough tank with reasonable stocking you can probably get away with a change every 2-3 days. You'd want to dose the Stability after a water change. I also avoid wiping down sides while cycling as I think a decent amount of bacteria covers those surfaces at least initially.