jwcarlson

Is his tank full of your tap water or some sort of bottled water? That's softness and lack of buffering that I have zero experience with. You said he's in a 1.5 gallon hospital tank now, what tank was he in before? Regardless of all that. Take a look into the nitrogen cycle: You can water change your way through cycling, though it's not ideal. Additionally, some of the bottled bacteria works pretty well to help kickstart. Tetra SafeStart is one and Fritz 7 (or Fritzyme 7 maybe it's called) is another. I think Seachem Stability is another. If you can find one of those, buy a bottle. Then do a big water change with water that's the same temperature and source as what he's already in. Add in the starter bacteria after the water change. I was changing 50% of water twice a day to get my tank through whatever upset happened with my newer tank. Took awhile (about three weeks), but didn't lose any fish. And I just monitored daily or twice a day, some days it was only one water change because nitrite levels were registering, but weren't particularly high. It's good that he's eating. If you can do some good, daily water changes (while keeping the temperature and pH pretty stable, he probably has a good chance of recovering).

Just to put a bow on this. No spots the the last three days. Two weeks of Kanaplex food finished yesterday technically. Going to give them the medicated food for a few more days though. Bit of a battle, but seem to be at the end of it now. Thanks for the help!

I've got pothos in my office, that does fine with just the office lights. The stuff at home does OK, I think sometimes I'm just impatient. Honestly, if it grew faster it might frustrate me because there's more growth to deal with 😄 I'd love to put in a decorative grow light system in the living room. I was going to try it this winter thinking the plants wouldn't do as well, but with leaves off the front tree and the sun's lower angle (maybe)... they seem to be doing just fine.

I am exceedingly jealous of people with good window exposures for houseplants. Our home is abysmal. Basically nothing south-facing. The big picture window in the front is east and does get some decent sun for part of the day. I went on a binge June/July '21 buying lots of plants. Nothing is dying, but man are some of them slow. A few are starting to really get traction now, particularly these staghorn ferns. Interestingly, this picture was taken a month ago and the growth since then has been wild. The round sterile frond on the center one has grown probably 3-4x the size in the pic. They'd shown almost no growth since mounted. Perhaps that transition is more difficult than I realize. In any event, they're getting going now. Just last night gave them two pipettes of aquarium water as I've never added any fertilizer to them. Anyone else grown these?

My discus will be here February 15th! 😮 Yours are looking dashing, as always, Fish Folk.

Forgot to mention that mine did seem to "shed" a lot of its leaves and left them floating around the tank like you're observing. The converted plant seems pretty robust, the leaves don't seem to break off easily, I've had them wrapped around the siphon and haven't busted any of them off. But the immerse grown starters seem to lose leaves every time I've brushed them while cleaning. Yours already are sending some converted leaves, I bet in two weeks they barely look like the same plants. 🙂

Before it got moved to the bigger tank, it was in Fluval Stratum. Now it's on a grid (ish) of root tabs and inert Home Depot "all purpose gravel". I'll confess to not knowing if it's more of a root feeder vs water column, but it seems to respond fastest when I give the tank some Easy Green (which hasn't been too often yet getting things settled in. It seems to also grow when it is just floating around if a stem gets loose as well. It's in gravel now and it didn't skip a beat when I transferred it (and I have trimmed it quite a bit at one point in time because there was so much hair algae). It's only been six days and I bet it's grown two inches already. The tank has been in flux with some bacterial infection issues with the fish. Long story short it ended up at least partially re-cycling and last night the nitrites were finally at zero again. Nitrates were also <5 ppm, so I gave the tank five squirts of Easy Green this morning. Hopefully this cycle stuff is behind me and then I can narrow in on the plants growth and fert/light requirements. This one has absolutely been the easiest. There's two more smaller ones that I bought awhile back. Just got them out of the pots when going to new tank six days ago and one of them is already sending lots of new leaves, the other had roots hopelessly packed into the rock wool (how is rock wool the best option for plants, it is terrible). I'm sure it will just be a week behind or so. I'm no expert, but this pogo dude is a real cool looking plant.

Yours look good. The ones I have bought (from the Co-Op) are a bunch of individual stems. They grow quick, it must be a fast/easy grower because I'm new to planted world and this one is by far the best for me. Looks totally different (and cooler) once the leaves convert. This is my first one after about two months. It was in a 10 gallon and now is in a 37 which is much taller and it's going to be to the top within a few days by the looks of it. 😄

All depends on how old they are. Mine are old enough to be reasoned with (9, almost 7, and almost 4). And young enough to accept that we're doing it dad's way. haha I do let them pick out rocks to add to the rock pile that they like and stuff like that. Or driftwood. Just have to keep them within the parameters of reasonably natural looking.

I've got to be honest, I've never wanted a goldfish or much understood the appeal. But then I saw this picture, there's something about it that's just awesome... like he's kinda sad about a bad situation, but he's still grinding it out and putting on a brave face. Hopefully he keeps with the improvement! Rooting for him.

Maybe you're a better dad than me, but I wouldn't let my kid put that in a tank. 😄 Well maybe if it was "their" tank, I guess. I'm getting discus next week Tuesday and my wife wanted to put some Star Wars imperial fighter thing (the long legged robot) in the tank. I cannot express to you how disappointed I was at her suggestion and wouldn't even acknowledge the idea. All the way on the east tip of Iowa here, wonder how many of us are in here... scary to think about maybe. I went to the LFS asking to buy bladder snails and he told me that he'd been actively getting rid of them and there weren't any left. Much to my disappointment. One of my Co-op plants seemed to have had a hitch hiker as there was one in the tank at some point. But unfortunately disappeared and did so without laying eggs, it seems. 😞

Do you have any videos?

There's been a couple nights when I shut the lights off on the rummys that without a lid they might have all been schooling on the floor. Programmable light goes on tonight that auto dims over a half hour or something. So we should be good to go there. I agree, observationally they're absolutely more "jumpy".

I'll second this suggestion. I've only had this Inkbird controller for about a month on my 75 (with two 300W heaters keeping it at 85). But I use a lot of Inkbird controllers for honey bee queen cell incubators, chicken egg incubators, and egg hatching chambers over the years and they're just absolutely awesome. Like Ken says, you'd need two failures to cook fish and any single failure to heat would theoretically be a lot less catastrophic as you're more likely to notice and be able to fix the problem. Basically coming home to lethargic fish vs coming home to nearly boiled ones.

I have (and do) struggle with doing that type of thing. I'm also a beekeeper and I raise/sell queens during the summer and it has been eight years (about six selling queens) and I still have a little mini-emotional melt down when I sell a queen to someone. And I flat-out refuse to sell to some people when I talk with them (if I think she's going to certain doom or if I think they're wasting their money because their colony is already beyond saving). Now three of these cardinals kind of have my sympathy because the rummys brought some plague with them and passed it to the cardinals who took it significantly worse than the rummys. This AM is the first day without they didn't have infection spots and if that holds they're going to get a break before I worm them because a few of the cardinals aren't thriving or packing on the size like the others.

Sculpins are awesome 🙂 Never seen one in person. DNR says that we have mottled and slimy sculpins in the state, but their range seems really small (unsure of accuracy). I know that when we walk the creeks in the summer there's always a lot of stuff darting around... a lot more fish in them than I ever realized when I was a kid. A pretty big part of me struggles with the ethics of catching a native fish and chucking it in a home aquarium. Mostly because I would be very concerned that I don't understand what it needs and will make it suffer. If I could replicate the environment reasonably accurately at home, I could handle it. Out of my own curiosity I'm going to start bringing test strips with when we're creek stomping or when I'm bow hunting. And additionally, not knowing their rarity/endangerment. When I was a kid we had bluegills and bass in a bigger native tank (my dad claims it was a 125, but mom and I think it was smaller because I'm pretty sure my 75 was the biggest tank we'd had) and as I've gotten older I think I've realized we probably weren't great fish keepers. They weren't sick, but were for sure over stocked. Sorry for my part in derailing the thread. 🙂

Pretty fish 🙂 When I maybe, eventually start looking at a native tank I want to collect them myself (again, no idea of legality here, just spitballing). In the past we've seined creeks for trot line bait. And ran minnow traps with cat food to catch creek chubs for walleye fishing. There's all sorts of stuff around to go find. Doesn't get cheaper than that. 😄 Years ago I bought all of the stuff to start "microfishing" and have never done it. Now that my kids are a little older I think they would like to do that, so might start recon work for native tank this summer. I don't know where you live, but our DNR has a list of native fish along with maps where they've been documented as well as ranges they *probably* inhabit. My main concern with natives is the fact that most of them live in (probably) high quality, faster water. And also cool (or cold). Most of our creeks here are quite cool in the summer. We keep our house at 62 in the winter and like 76 in the summer. I'm sure they're fine with the cooler stuff, but not sure about the warmer temps. And then there's the water quality question, can they handle some waste build up that's inherent in a home aquarium? Shiners seem to be just about everywhere around here though, so I think they're pretty hardy. They might be ultra rare in one corner of the state five hours from me for all I know 😄

Oh, the only other word of caution would be that typically bait shop fish aren't particularly healthy. It's usually pretty fast turn over and since that fish is going to be dead *momentarily* there's usually not a lot of consideration for the state that it's in when they dump them in their troughs. That said, I've also bought bait from some smaller shops running out of their garages that have really well cared for bait.

I don't have any experience with them other than seeing them 'in the wild' while fishing or sometimes catching a fish that has one in its mouth. They can get pretty darn big, so be prepared for that. A 6"+ shiner isn't uncommon. I've been mulling over the idea of someday trying a native "creek" tank and @Fish Folk has a couple pretty examples there. 🙂 We have some neat fish in Iowa (and the whole country, really) and I think it would be pretty cool to collect them as well. (unsure of the legality of this or if they would be able to thrive in captivity) Redside Dace Southern Redbelly Dace Now... these are likely in their breeding colors in these pictures and are probably more drab most of the year. But most of them remain pretty small and I think it would be neat to make a higher flow creek-type setup.

They probably are distracted, they should be ashamed of themselves. 😄 The cardinals were like this before the rummys were added, they actually might be a bit better now with the rummys. I think they're just a bit less active fish and they do seem to kind of hang lower in the column and a bit farther towards the back. Kind of under and behind where the rummys like to zip around. It's also a new tank (37 gallon, but from a *very crowded* QT 10 together). Perhaps, there's probably a lot that goes into schooling. Breeding activity, predator pressure (as you noted), seasonal changes, age of the fish, etc etc. I just chuckled this AM when we flipped the lights on one of the rummys had drifted farther away than most of the others while they were sleeping and he certainly seemed panicked when he realized it. So maybe you're on to something, Flumpweesel.

I don't think there is anything wrong with them. After one jumped through a tiny crack in their new tank's lid, I'm down to seven of them. But they're never hanging out all together as a group. It's like a 2-4 together at most. And there's no actual "schooling". Meanwhile my eight rummynose are seemingly tied together. Part of me wishes I had 16 rummynose instead of split between cardinals and rummys. Even the sterbai corys join in with the rummynose in their school, which is really funny to watch. The corys aren't nearly as good as the rummys, but they do give it a good try. Water isn't perfect and the glass is dirty because our nine year old just did a water change, but the fish were sure "having fun". The corys cannot turn nearly as sharply as the rummys so they are usually only get a good pass in about 10% of the time. Makes me wish I had a 10 foot tank with rummys and corys. *hmmmmmmmmmm*

Marci, this may or may not help, but I had something that looked a lot like ich and it ended up being Epistylis. As soon as the food meds and garlic guard got here there was a marked difference after the first feeding for me. This AM I finally saw zero spots on the fish after just short of two weeks of only medicated feed 1-2 times a day. And I've been having to over feed to make sure the sickest looking tetras get enough to be dosed. The spots do seem to come and go a little bit. If the sad looking cardinals bloom some more spots tonight I'm going to net them and put them in a little mesh breeder box thing so that I can target feed them. Colu's suggestion is what I used to treat. I had been (what felt like) pounding them with Ich-X for close to a week and it kept getting worse.

I had an anubis come in awhile back that did the same thing. Not sure what the scoop was there, about half the plant died and was "rotting". I plucked the leaves off and then when I finally went to put it on wood, I sprayed it off with the sprayer function on the kitchen sink. Cleaned it up pretty good. It is sending a new leaf now, so I think it will be just fine. I think it got damaged in shipping and hurt part of the rhizome. Not saying that's what happened to you, but it looks pretty similar.

Shrimp are real good at hiding. Even the bright red ones sometimes I'd see one or two for days on end. I hadn't seen more than three for two or three weeks. Then tore it down and all six were still alive and they'd made about 30 babies. Amanos would be even more difficult to spot.

I am continuing. Still... six more days.