jwcarlson

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.

Employee seems a bit misinformed and out of line, really. I tend to be fairly understocked in my tanks unless they're growout tanks with lots of fry in them getting lots of water changes, but 12 pygmy corys shouldn't be an issue I wouldn't think, though I have not kept them. It's not all bad staggering the loading, but water changes solve any concerns of ammonia or nitrite spikes.

It's a good word. I like nincompoopery. As in, "I apologize in advance for my nincompoopery."

What percentage of the time are they colored up like that? They're absolutely beautiful!

Personally, I'd focus on keeping fish successfully for awhile before I started thinking about setting up a couple dozen 40 gallon tanks and hoping to make a business out of it. You could be the best fishkeeper ever and still fail miserably at running a fish business. A lot of hobbies have this euphoric initial period when you can't get enough of it and you feel like you know everything. Then a year or two down the road you get beaten to oblivion and give away all your stuff swearing it off for the rest of your life. I don't know how to necessarily estimate how much it would cost to start a store as there are a near infinite amount of variables. The number is certainly in the 10s of thousands of dollars at least. And then monthly you're going to have to deal with all of the basic bills/costs associated with the business and fish. Electricity, rent, water, gas, renovations for the space, paying for new stock, filters, air system... The "selling out of your garage" route has a lot less overhead. Most cities are littered with failed fish stores, I live in a city of about 25k people and there's AT LEAST 4-5 LFSs that used to be around at various points over the years, but are now lost to time.

Unfortunately, I'm on the complete other side of Iowa. However, floaters seem to grow pretty quick. The problem I've had is that they need to constantly be managed or they'll choke out all the light for your other plants. They do not ship very well, but as long as you can get some to survive, they'll usually grow and make it worth buying in short order. They seem to slurp up nitrates like crazy as well. I've bought from a few different shops on Etsy.

You can go down some DEEP rabbit holes regarding silicone and silicone curing. Especially on the reef forums which is where I ended up when I was doing some research. I don't think it's rocket science, but I am not exaggerating much when I say that some reefers think it is. 😄

Hornwort. It seems to have won the Hunger Games that are my planted aquariums. Runner up is dwarf water lettuce. Third place elodea. Guppy grass did OK for awhile, but randomly died.