dangerflower

I use black poster board, and use electrical tape around the edges to attach it, which looks tidy and hides any little cracks of light from less than perfect cutting. I thought I would have issues with the poster board getting wet and needing to be redone a lot but it's working really well

I had a really bad blue green algae bloom in one of my tanks that was getting hit with direct sunlight 😬😬

I appreciate your perspective and I think it's pragmatic. I definitely feel differently about this situation than I did when my betta was sick -- I love my rice fish as groups, but they're not fish you really form individual bonds with. And I am hoping to breed them, so culling for health makes sense. I figure I may as well attempt to cure this fish with the meds that I already have on hand at least. Do you guys think it would be reasonable to wait and observe the rest of the fish for a few days before trying to treat the tank? I have the sick individual quarantined, and none of the others are currently showing any signs of illness. I know the columnaris bacteria is pretty much always present in aquariums and hits stressed individuals first, so is it possible that the others might be safe now that the sick fish has been removed?

Are there any other diseases that this could be? I can't find anything when I google it, but the fact that the area of discoloration is raised rather than flat, and th fact that columnaris likes warner temps and this tank is pretty cold, makes me wonder if it could be a different issue? @Fish Folk that's a fair point about whether or not treatment is worth while in this case. I'm not sure what my options are if I don't try to treat the fish. Euthanasia? I do want to try to prevent the sickness from spreading in the tank if I can though, while also not wanting to jeopardize my shrimp.

@Colu, thank you for the medication info. Is there anything shrimp/snail safe that I can use to treat the whole tank? I'm thinking of moving my snails and dosing a plant safe amount of salt but I don't know how much that would actually help. I have moved the fish to a quarantine tank with aquarium salt in the water. The only medications I have on hand right now are maracyn (1), general cure, and kanaplex. I'll check my lfs for the furan-2 or jungle fungus fizz tomorrow. I'd love to cure this fish if I can, but since it's not even fully grown I wonder what the odds of survival are 😕 My priority is definitely preventing an outbreak in the tank if I can, so I have to figure out what I can do.

I have a group of juvenile medaka that I added to my 10 gallon shrimp tank about a month ago. There are a dozen of them in there, which is too many for the tank size, but they are still small, and I was planning on moving some of them to my outdoor mini pond after they grow a bit more. They've been doing great, active and eating and growing. The tank is just barely heated at 68-70 degrees, planted, ph usually around 7.6-7.8, kh 2-3 dkh, gh between 5-7 dgh, no ammonia or nitrite, and I've been having to dose extra easy green to keep my nitrate levels at around 10 for the plants. This tank is struggling in a lot of ways, lots of algae and it seems generally unbalanced, so I do wonder what bad stuff might be going on in this water. I was checking on the tank this afternoon and noticed a raised white bump on the head of one of the little rice fish. I had vaguely noticed a spot of white coloration on this fish before, but these babies are still growing so their colors have been changing, and quite a few of them have some mottled coloration, so I never thought twice about it... until today when I noticed this spot is definitely raised. 😕 The fish is active and eating well, although it bullies its tank mates quite a bit. No other fish are showing any signs of illness at the moment. I did my best to get some pictures but this fish is little and fast. Are there other diseases that can manifest like this, like maybe a fungal infection? I would love any input about what might be going on and what to do about it. I've started researching how to treat columnaris and it does not seem like it's going to be easy with a planted tank and invertebrates 😫

Thanks everyone for making me feel like this skittles colony is a fun experiment and not just a terrible idea! I'm excited to see what ends up happening with them. I may ultimately end up switching my tanks around. My blue velvets who live with my Betta are really nice, but obviously not living in optimal conditions, so maybe someday I'll move them to the more shrimp friendly tank and put the experimental skittles into the Betta tank. But it seems like shrimp don't love dealing with new water parameters, so maybe not the best idea. Oh wow, purple shrimp! That's incredibly sad that he lost them.

Pajama shrimp!! 😂 I love that. @Odd Duck it's so interesting to see how similar colors came from completely different lines! These little guys have such complicated genetics

If I know for sure there are tiny babies and I feel like I can safely postpone a water change, I'll wait, because they're so hard to find in the bucket when they're so small. I was doing a water change in my betta's tank a couple weeks ago and had no idea that shrimplets had recently hatched in there until I saw a bunch of them zooming around in the dirty water bucket 😅

I've decided to switch gears with my 10 gallon shrimp / rice fish tank. I have some yellow neos in there and I was originally going to do a shrimp only tank and try to get a big colony going but I've decided to add some more color varieties and do a "skittles" tank because I thought it would be fun to have more color in the tank and breeding perfect shrimp isn't my priority right now. I ordered an assorted pack from Aqua Huna that arrived today - I'm currently drip acclimating them 🙂 Here's my question. I know that mixing different colors of neocaridina leads to mostly brown wild-type offspring. But what I'm wondering is, does it make a difference if you only mix similar colors? I have another tank with blue dreams in it, so if I added any dark color shrimp to that tank (other blues, blue rillis, or greens) and then put the reds and oranges in with my yellows, would these two groups both be more likely to breed truer colors? Or does any mixing of genes yield just wild types? I know shrimp genes don't work like color theory 😅 but I was just curious.

Technically cheating because I did this a couple days ago, but I finally moved my tanks from the main room of my apartment into my bedroom! I only have two 10 gallons but even moving small tanks is so stressful so I've been putting this off for weeks! I wanted to move them because there was too much direct sunlight in the other room and it caused some gnarly algae blooms. My bedroom also has an air conditioner so I won't have to float frozen water bottles in my tanks all summer for temperature control 😅 The best part is that I switched the positions of the tanks on the stand, so my betta's tank is on top now, putting him at eye level. He absolutely loves it.

@nabokovfan87 thank you!

@nabokovfan87 okay cool, so it is okay to keep adding easy green until I see nitrates? I wasn't sure if that would cause a catastrophic algae situation. I tend to like to keep a lot of floating plants because they block some light and I can get away with having my lights on for longer... but I'm also realizing that the light on the tank in question is less powerful than the light on my other tank where that system works out well. I'll experiment with taking some away. @HH Morant 😂 there are actually 12 rice fish in this tank, but they are just teeny babies and not doing a significant amount of pooping yet haha. But yeah I did start this tank with the intention of it being a shrimp and snails only set up and then I was like, nope I need some fish in here.

Short version: what is the best way to raise nitrate levels in a low tech tank to support better plant growth and combat nasty algae? I have two 10 gallon planted tanks, one that's been going for a little over a year and another that I set up 4 ish months ago. I've been struggling with low nitrate levels in these tanks the whole time I've had them. I pretty much always get a reading of zero ppm when I test. The tanks are definitely cycled, and it's not a faulty test (I've gotten nitrate readings during cycling) and I do shake the crap out of the bottles before doing the tests. These tanks both have looooots of plants and smaller bioloads (one is just a betta, 2 nerites, and shrimp; the other is shrimp, a mystery snail, and some recently-added juvenile medaka) so I'm assuming that the plants are just using up any nitrate before it can build up. My betta tank, the one that has been set up for a year, seems to have reached an equilibrium where the plants are pretty happy, but the newer tank is a mess. Lots of algae, stagnated plant growth, melty plants. I'm especially sad about my brazilian pennywort, which I thought was going to be an easy plant that would take over everything but instead it keeps melting at the base and all of its leaves are getting really pale. And the curly val, which is just a melty mess at the back of the tank and not growing at all. I use Easy Green fertilizer once or twice a week and root tabs under the root feeders. I don't know if the algae situation and poor plant growth is being caused by the low nitrate or something else, but I'm wondering what the best way is to raise nitrate levels in a low tech tank? Most of the information I can find only talks about high tech tanks, and I see a lot of warnings about not over fertilizing low tech tanks. Should I be adding more easy green? Or doing fewer water changes? I usually do a 10% water change once a week.

I haven't tried this so I can't speak to how well it works, but I have heard of people doing this with spider plants, which are cat safe! But they are also very appealing for kitties to chew on because of the grass-like leaves, so if your cats really like going after house plants it might not work out 😅

Wanted to share some good news about Doctor Sparkles' fin rot situation! I know there are a lot of unresolved/ unhappy endings for sick betta threads so I thought an update might be nice. He's doing so well! I kept him in the hospital tank for 10 days and did a 7 day course of kanaplex mixed in his food. I kept the salt concentration in his water at 1 tablespoon per 2 gallons for the first 5 days, and then bumped it up to 1 tablespoon per 1 gallon for the next 5 days. I did small water changes daily, put several indian almond leaves in there, and kept the water at 81 degrees. I thought he would be so stressed in the hospital tank but he perked up almost immediately when I put him in and he seemed so comfortable in there that by the end of the treatment I was calling it his spa tank 😂 He has now been back home in his 10 gallon for a out a week and a half and there is healthy new fin tissue growing back on his tail! And he seems so much more active and happy now. He cruises around the tank and flares at his snails and is generally back to his spicy betta self. I didn't really appreciate how much his activity levels had declined before. Poor guy was definitely sick. I still don't know how he got such bad fin rot in the first place, so I'm a little paranoid that he could relapse, but for now I'm cautiously optimistic that my little buddy is going to recover, and I've gained a lot of confidence about dealing with sick fish! Thanks fish folks ✨

I never thought a fish could loaf but that's definitely a loaf! What a cute buddy

@Lizzyduff glad you got it cleared up! I literally JUST noticed my shrimp have the start of some fuzz after reading this thread, what timing 😅 I'm just curious, did you end up treating your whole tank with salt or did you remove the infected individuals for treatment? It looks like a lot of mine have it so I was considering treating the whole tank

I've definitely seen this before with my nitrite tests, it's like really subtly more purple-y than the reading for true zero. It's probably not enough to do damage at this stage, but worth monitoring and checking to see if there's anything going on in your tank that could be elevating nitrites

Hey again, hope it's okay to bump my thread back up with updates. I thought that would be better than starting a new topic. My poor buddy's fin condition has worsened quite a bit since I posted this 😞 most of his tail is now missing. I have no idea how he managed to get such bad fin rot since his water parameters have always been great. Before doing anything else, I went ahead with a treatment or Maracyn which I had already been planning to use to combat a blue green algae explosion in the tank. Cleared the BGA up really well, but did not seem to help with the fin rot. Today, I moved him into a 5 gallon hospital tank with aquarium salt at a concentration of 1 tablespoon per 2 gallons (I think that's "level 2" treatment on the Co-op's guide) and have started him on a course of Kanaplex mixed into his food as suggested above. @Colu or anyone else who might know, can you tell me the proper amount of medicated food to feed? I normally feed him 4-6 pellets once or twice a day (I'm trying to get him to gain weight, if that sounds a little high). I'm having trouble finding information in how much medicated food to give him each day, and don't want to accidentally over- or under-dose him.

@Colu good point about the extra stress of catching and moving him. Do you know if the low, plant safe salt concentration you recommend would harm the snails and neocaridina shrimp in the tank? The snails I could move to a different tank easily, the shrimp not so much.

@Colu thank you for this info! I do have inverts in the tank with him so I may need to figure out a hospital tank situation. Can you tell me anything about salt dips versus adding the salt directly to the tank? Would it be effective/safe to do a salt dip in a separate container instead?

Hello from Portland, Oregon! I'm a newbie fish keeper - it's been just about a year since I started my first tank, a 10 gallon planted tank with a betta. I did so much research before setting it up but it's still been a pretty steep learning curve. I kept fish (poorly 😅) as a kid and it's been so gratifying to get back into this hobby and learn how to do things right. I thought it would be nice to join a forum to have a space to nerd out about fish, since honestly I've become kind of obsessed. I have three small tanks (well, two tanks and a pond) right now: my 10 gallon betta tank, a 20 gallon mini pond out on my balcony which is home to a group of white medaka, and another 10 gallon tank that was intended to be for a colony of yellow golden back shrimp but I'm having a tough time with them. I'm probably going to add fish to that tank eventually, maybe more medaka because I love them.

Oh yeah, I've heard that they do nip their own fins sometimes, especially when their fins are so heavy and bothersome. I thought that might be what was going on for a while, but I've never seen him do it, and even though his tail is the most damaged, his other fins are also frayed and I'm not sure he could be doing that to himself?

Hi folks! I'm new to the forum, although I've definitely done some lurking here. I have a lot of questions about some issues I'm having with my betta. He's been suffering from chromic fin loss that doesn't seem to be fin rot. It's been a slow progression but seems to be getting more serious lately. I'm also concerned that he seems underweight, and increasing his feeding has not helped so far. Sorry if this ends up being a long post! The basics about his set up: I've had Doctor Sparkles for just about a year now. He is housed in a heavily planted 10 gallon tank with a sponge filter and a heater with 78-80 degree water. I feed him a rotation of two different kinds of betta pellets (hikari and extreme brands) as well as frozen daphnia. Water parameters are healthy - 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, and pretty much always 0 nitrate which I know is suspicious but I assume it's because the tank has a lot of plants and a small bioload. KH is currently 2 and GH is 4. pH is 7.2 right now but was closer to 7.6-7.8 for a long time. I do a small water change (usually 1 gallon) weekly. I've always used Indian almond leaves in the tank and have recently been adding other botanicals such as alder cones to increase the tannins in hopes that that would be therapeutic for him. His tank mates are two nerite snails and a small colony of blue cherry shrimp. I used to have 5 amano shrimp in the tank as well, but I rehomed them a few months ago because I thought maybe they were nibbling his fins and causing this issues - but it seems that wasn't the case. The first picture is how he looked when I got him. The next 3 are from various times in the past year, showing the way his fins have changed and how the ends frayed and curled, especially his tail. The last 3 are from today. You can also see that he looks noticeably thinner in the recent pictures. Poor buddy looks so bad now 😞 His appetite is good and his energy levels are okay, although swimming seems really hard for him. His fins don't look bloody or blackened or melty like you would expect with fin rot, just shredded to bits. The only weird water quality issue I've had that might have affected him is that for a while my GH was absolutely off the charts. I was adding too much shrimp salt without realizing it, wasn't testing for GH, and didn't notice how bad it had gotten. Once I caught the problem I reduced the GH gradually with lots of small water changes, but I wonder if that could have lasting impacts on his health. Any advice or suggestions about what's going on or how I can help this buddy would be greatly appreciated.