Shrimp Doggy Dogg

I'm starting to worry that my shrimp were able to reach through the mesh of the breeder basket and reach most of the eggs. I'm pretty sure that every egg I left on the trimmed leaves turned to fungus. I probably could have seen that coming. There may only be a half dozen babies that make it past egg-status from this spawn. It's probably for the best since I don't have the space for 100 more corys. Just things to consider if I do have the space in the future. I could be wrong, though! Wigglers are very difficult to count.

I like to leave my plants in pots for a while so I can move them around for a week or so until I'm ready to commit to a final planting location. I've buried swords in pot and bare root many times and I see no difference, personally. I would definitely use a root tab if you're leaving in the pot. I would definitely use root tabs if you're taking the plant out of the pot and your soil is inert.

My pleasure! Now I just need to make sure I time the bbs hatchery correctly and we're off!

First wigglers spotted about 3:45pm today, so about 52 hours I think? Too small for pics for now, but they look like the tiniest little football players with their yolksac helmets strapped on. I'll be back in a few days with updates!

Yes, you can use vinegar. I keep a 5g bucket nearly full of vinegar for cleaning all kinds of things. I soak my hatchery overnight on off days and the all buildup just rinses right off. Of course you can also just fill the hatchery with vinegar and keep it in there for about 16 hours. I'm guessing after several hundred cleanings with vinegar, the gaskets might start to fail.

In my experience, most small fry will take flake/pellets when crushed to a powder. The issue then becomes easily fowling the water. When I feed Cory fry, if I've skipped a bbs cycle, I'll crush flake and drop it into their breeder basket which hangs in the same tank as the adults. The fry will eat what they can and the adults will feed upsidedown from the bottom of the basket, sucking bits of food through the mesh when they become small enough.

But you mentioned they were doing the T shape right? I could be wrong but I doubt the females would have any instinct to take that posture.

I noticed some rambunctious behavior in my 40g around 11:45am yesterday morning and quickly realized it was my Corys spawning! The first time I witnessed a spawning from these fish I was able to collect about 30 eggs if memory serves. The second time I was only able to collect about 20. To my amazement, the largest albino female continuously spawned from 11:45am (at least that's when I joined the show) all the way till 1:25pm! I was able to collect well over 100 eggs and it seems like most are fertilized! From what I could tell, many of the bronze males attempted to fertilize her eggs, but only one of them was able to keep her attention. As you can hopefully see from the pictures, the aforementioned male would swim in front of the female, arch his body effectively blocking her path, and deposit his stuff. Her once erratic swimming suddenly calmed as if hypnotized. Almost immediately afterword, eggs would start to drop and she held them with her fins. She began depositing the eggs on the leaf of a large Amazon Sword plant and immediately attempted to eat them so I shooed her away. The leaves weren't looking so good so I just trimmed them with eggs attached and dropped them, leaf and all, into a breeder basket. I ended up cutting off 4 sword leaves and she transitioned to spawning directly on the glass where I collected all of the eggs with my insurance services card. There was one albino male who made several attempts to fertilize her eggs, and while I was rooting for him, he couldn't seem to get the technique quite right and she quickly lost interest. After all that work, the large albino female was noticeably exhausted and bumping into things so I decided to feed an o-nip tab. I wish I had a comparison shot of her belly before to emphasize just how sunken in her eggs satchel became! I will return when the fry have grown large enough to see in pictures. I hope you all have the chance to experience this at least once. There's really nothing quite like it. For those of you who like to see parameters, here are a few: Water: 40 gallons Temperature: comfortable Fish: yes

You said all the plants look healthy and your water parameters are good so I guess I don't really understand why you want to change anything. Are you just wanting to change the look?

I keep 135 total gallons of water in a third floor apartment. I use the same net on all my tanks.

Well I'm guessing you wouldn't have a problem with a fine sponge, but if you're set on the coarse one, there are probably a number of ways to service it while being mindful of the babies. I like to age about a gallon of tap water in a 5 gallon bucket for at least 24 hours. Then I gently shake the sponge while dipping it in and out of the water for about 30 seconds. Then I keep the sponge near the surface and start squeezing and shaking gently until I'm satisfied. Then I wait about two weeks for the babies to grow a bit in the bucket. And finally I net them and put them back in the tank with the rest. My process probably sounds unrealistic and over the top. It's just what I like to do. I'm guessing its far more common to either not be aware of the babies in the sponge, or simply to pretend their not there and that works too! Good luck!

Thanks for the tip! Couldn’t quite get 1/2 retail but at least I found a buyer!

Hello everyone! I have two mature Amazon sword plants that are both pumping out quite a few babies and I’m in the process of working out a store credit deal with my LFS. What is a fair asking price for my product? Let’s say I’m selling 30 at a time once per month. Here is a sample of what they would be getting. 2-4 plants per cup. Thanks!

My CO2 journey began with a two bottle diy citric acid/baking soda setup. While it was cheap to start and effective at injecting CO2, I found that the novelty of running a little chemistry lab quickly wore off and I took note of many things I didn’t like about it over time: 1. The low price point on those kits is due to fairly low quality parts. Over time, I found that the needle valve jammed and the system became difficult to dial in. 2. The bottles kit can be a bit volatile. Even when using the magnet as directed, I found the system had a bit of a mind of its own. For example, the last time I used the bottle kit, it gassed off an entire recipe over night and sent me into a panic the following morning. 3. It’s messy and time consuming. 4. Long term cost was going to become an issue even if the system didn’t break down. For my needs, the annual cost was going to be somewhere around $200 iirc. Eventually I purchased a 20oz paintball canister and the Fzone regulator w/solenoid. The total came to just over $100 and I honestly couldn’t be happier with the results. 1. Stable. 2. No mess. 3. No storage of ingredients. 4. Very low annual cost compared to citric acid/baking soda. Maybe even 1/10th the price. 5. Looks better. Or you could just skip the CO2 injection all together! Your plants seem to be doing well without it 🤷‍♂️ Good Luck!

The have their own tank!

Nitrites are lingering in their dedicated tank so I can’t free them just yet. But that day is coming!

They are growing! I’ll get a pic soon from their species specific tank. most appear to be bronze corys, but a few have an unfamiliar pattern to them.

Update! I’ve been wanting to share some photos, but they’re still very small and difficult to photograph without a macro lens. This is the best I could get for now. Photo of Mama P (platy) from the same distance provided for scale.

I’m loving that sequence of words: I use pantyhose, they are really fun. I may have altered the punctuation.

Hello everyone, I got a nice bit of green water going about a month ago for the purpose of feeding Amano shrimp larvae, but I got caught up with something and they only lived about 3 days. Now I have all this green water and I don’t know what else to do with it. Unfortunately most of my google searches yielded information on combating green water, rather than using it. At this point I’m treating it like another one of our pets and my wife is starting to question my judgement. Any ideas, or should I just dump it? Thanks!

Any fish that grabs onto driftwood or a leaf with its pectoral fins and looks around the tank makes me laugh. Like ottos on vallisneria.

They all seem to have stripes atm. I’ll follow up with a pic.

I absolutely adore my Pygmy Corydoras! They are like a wiggly underwater hummingbird. Good luck with the project!

I’d like to add that if you use a coarse sponge filter, most, if not all of the shrimplets will live deep inside the sponge. They will be very safe in there, but you will probably want to be extra careful when you’re servicing your sponge. Good luck!

I have a female albino Cory that has spawned the fertilized eggs of a male bronze Cory. I hatched out about 25 fry in a breeder basket assuming they’d all be either albino or bronze, but they are just getting big enough to show that they are all probably a mix of the two. After further investigation, I was able to dig up a pitchfork-wielding forum post from 2004 saying fry of this type “must be euthanized to protect the hobby!” I struggled to find any recent info on the cross-breed. So I’m wondering, is there really anything wrong with raising these fish? Does anyone here have experience with this cross? Is there anything special I should know about this fish? Side note: baby catfish are adorable when their barbels become noticeable.