Crow

ymmv with job fish. If my kuhli loaches ate snails when I had them they didn't do it enough to put a dent in the population. They're sooo cuuute though. On the other hand, my electric blue acara absolutely decimates snails. I have 5 tanks and the tank he's in is the only one without any snails at all. Although I don't know if they all eat snails and they don't fit in a 10 gallon. Before I figured out it was him in his tank he took out the entire malaysian trumpet snail, ramshorn, and pond snail populations, several nerites and military helmet snails, and my two older mystery snails. I thought my tank was cursed until I caught him in the act one day. I also have an apisto macmasteri that regularly eats the ramshorns in one of my 20's. It went from a booming population to maybe 3 or 4 adult snails in the week I introduced the fish. I haven't seen any babies in weeks.

Did all of the new leaves turn yellow and melt too? Do you have a picture of the full plant?

A couple of your rainbows and the samolus (?) on the bottom left are still pretty bright, so I'm not having a hard time picturing that mental image. Alright, I think you might have talked me into it 🥳 I appreciate your input and time answering my questions.

I have not seen anymore shrimplets in the cube tank, but are a lot of nooks, crannies, cracks, and plants they could be hiding in. At least I hope that’s what’s going on. Also, would it be unethical to feed my extra snails to my EBA? I have SO MANY and I’m worried they’re competing with my shrimp for food in this tank. ————— I found a red shrimp in my pumpkin shrimp tank. The color on it isn’t great and I don’t want red mixed into what I have, so I caught it and put it in my apisto tank since I don’t have anywhere else to put it. The male apisto ended up running into it and just ignored it. The red shrimp’s been in there a couple days now, so I think he miiiiight end up being ok, at least as long as I keep the apistos fed maybe. Bought my female apisto a couple different kinds of caves. One is the coop apisto cave, the other is a corner cave that goes under the substrate and has a stump entrance that sticks up above the substrate. Hopefully if she lays again she’ll feel more secure. ————— My downstairs tanks as of tonight! Not great, but not bad. I have a nutrient imbalance of some sort. I know there’s calcium in the water, but there are plants showing calcium deficiency. Everything that’s not a rotala hasn’t really grown this week and the rotala isn’t looking good imo. Potassium maybe, over fertilizing perhaps? I used the rotala butterfly calculator for the first time today and made a mix off of that. So I’m going to try dosing off of that for a couple weeks and seeing how that goes!

The color is quite nice on the p series and your tank looks great. I especially like how bright the reds are. And you can actually see what color the fish are... unlike a certain fluval light lol. The week aqua also has more leds in it and higher lumens than the aqz, so I'm starting to lean toward the p. Would one 48" of the p series be enough to grow high light plants in a standard 75 gallon?

How long have you had the sword? Those look like the round emersed leaves. If it is a new plant it's nothing to worry about. Just the plant losing its old leaves to grow its water leaves.

I'm looking into replacing the fluvals on my 75 because I'm just over the yellow and I've narrowed it down to either an ledstar aqz or a week aqua p. also, does anyone have any experience ordering from aquatic motiv?

I’m pretty excited, I saw my first red rili shrimplet this afternoon! It was so tiny! And thank you so much Nabokov!

I really like your tank, but your pink crypt looks amazing!

Valentino is such a handsome guy!

Little bit of progress update on the 5g! Trimmed and replanted a few of the rotala and s repens tops, cut the remaining stems to just above substrate. Added another crypt and a lagenandra meeboldi (pretty sure I spelled that wrong, but I’m on mobile and not going to tab over 😉). Now I get to watch them melt and hope they come back. I think they will because the roots I can see look healthy still. Rotala is filling in pretty well. I don’t know if the kit light will be strong enough to turn the rotala pink, but it’s at least strong enough to send it running sideways and turning into a bush. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy with a light that comes in a kit before. The limnophila hippuridoides is starting to recover from the stems melting and have new, healthy growth since swapping from easy green to the dry ferts. There’s nothing wrong with easy green and I like it, I’m just more consistent with dosing with the dry ferts since I’m already at it with the other tanks. Jan 30 today, Feb 12 I also swapped out the filter because a very curious and determined killi pushed her way through the current to swim through the output slot and burrowed through the polyfil floss I had stuffed the box with and was swimming around in the filter 🤦‍♀️. She’s fine, but I don’t want to keep having to rescue her lol. And you can see the orange shrimpies have been doing a great job of cleaning the sand of diatoms. I am going to have to hit the tank with some chemiclean to take care of that BGA though.

A bit late on the update cause I was layed up in bed For a few days with some ick the little one brought home from daycare. Regarding the eggs I guess mama got hungry for a midnight snack coz they were mostly gone by the next morning and completely gone by the evening 🫠 Or maybe dad got them, who knows. I’m not particularly fussed about it though because I have my hands full at the moment with other small projects.

I have one of these. Comes with everything but the heater and timer and I love it. The filter is gentle enough for my tiny rocket killis, light is plenty adequate for plants.

I use these in my aquariums that don’t have heaters in the canister filter. My oldest one is going on two years strong! I love these things. Slim, easy to hide, auto shutoff if water gets low or you forget to unplug during water change, and the temp display is on the controller on the cord.

Oh my gosh, that puffer is just too cute 🤩

Aaaay, look what I found this morning! Dunno if you can see them, but the little miss is marinating some eggs there in the corner of the tank. On a separate note, I got one of those fluval breeder boxes on a whim to replace the pennplax mesh one that I had that was just… ugh… this thing is amazing. I used it to acclimate a group of new glowlight danios into my other 20 and I’m able to leave the one with swimbladder issues in there without worrying.

Aw thank you, I appreciate your kind words! ————— well, I was gonna pull up the star grass when the new plants got here, but the apistos decided to rent the basement apartment, so I guess I’m keeping it after all 🤷🏻‍♀️

I've determined to post even boring stuff if that's what keeps me from forgetting to come back for months! Did a little trim and a replant/clean-up in the 5 gallon. Decided I'm going to swap over from ez green to dosing my GLA dry fert mix every day like I do in the other tanks. Lost the bottoms of the limnophila hippuridoides and the s. repens lower leaves, which I believe MIGHT be from lack of enough nutrients. B&A trimerino/cleaning ---------- Also trimmed and replanted a bunch of tops in the 20L. I acquired some massive dish washing tubs for like 3$ each and some soil so I'll be pulling a bunch of the plants I don't really like in this tank and starting to grow them in the tubs using my old nicrews as grow lights. I think I'll probably start by removing the Persicaria(?), water wisteria, green rotala, polysperma sunset, and stargrass. I did a thing I don't normally do and bought some flourish root tabs for my pink crypts and a couple other plants that were struggling. I don't usually use root tabs, but I wanted to see if they would help. Also starting to see some diatoms. Could be because I bought a lids for all of my aquariums which caused me to have to take the light off of its stand and placed onto the lid to avoid the shadow caused by the hinge without reducing the brightness. I'm going to bump the light intensity down a bit and reduce phosphates in my fert mix. Also, no more ramshorns in this tank. I did not know apistos ate snails! I either somehow glossed over that information or it wasn't really mentioned in the few articles I read. My EBA also eats snails, so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. Looks like I'll be picking up some otos soon, I guess? B&A trim. I forgot to turn the light down womp The faces of hardened criminals! --------- Thanks for looking, hope you're having a great day!

Eep, sorry I keep poofing! I get distracted very easily! 😖 I hope everyone had good holidays and that the new year has brought good things! ---------- Me: I think I'm getting this growing aquatic plants thing down! Also me: 🤡 ----------- I have a pretty good idea of what's wrong and how to fix it, I honestly just don't care at this point. (But for the curious, I believe the co2 was up too high, the lights were down too low, and I wasn't fertilizing enough). There was a, what we'll call babysitting, incident about a month ago and wiped out everything in a couple tanks with the exception of the EBA and the cories in the 75. I'm over it now, everything is fine and looking up! I've finally decided on pulling everything (that's not a fish) and redoing the 75. I've hated this tank for well over a year, so it's a bit of a bittersweet moment. Just gonna do plants now that my pleco is gone because I'm not really interested in going through the effort to acquire and play with hardscape at the moment. I'd rather put the money into equipment, fish, and plants. Also, there are still some plants I want to be able to grow successfully first. Like s repens haha. Just trying to decide if I want to throw the cash at aquasoil or not, although I'm leaning towards not. I'll be salvaging what's left of the hygro cory, mexican oakleaf, rotalas, crypt jacobsenii, pink miracle sword, and samolus parviflorous, and tossing everything else. And I just got some new baby angels for the 75 too. They're so cute, they school around together and follow the EBA around wherever he goes 🥰 angels are so precious when they're little lol. --------- Shrimps are shrimping! The orange guys are a real hoot. They're always buzzing around and getting into something. The guys in the little rainbow tank aren't out a whole lot unless there's snacks though haha. I haven't seen any shrimplets yet, but I've seen a few berried mamas. We ride! Onward, Buttercup! ---------- The red ramshorn got an upgrade from their jar. It's about a month old. Going through that new tank diatom bloom. It's a 5g kit tank from one of the big pet box stores and it came with filter, light, lid, and the dark pebble substrate. Finally decided to try out the sand pit in the pebbles thing I see other peeps doing. Needs a good trimming/replanting sesh and a water change. The light it came with paired with a nicrew controller is decent, the filter it came with is ok. The light so far is strong enough to grow any of the plants you can pick off their shelves, even the alternanthera. I mean, the alternanthera isn't jumping up, but it's not died and melted either and has new growth. Great little kit all around for 60$, wished I'd been able to start with one of these instead of the Fluval Chi I had years ago haha. Looks like it! They're going along pretty well with very little intervention on my end 🙂 ---------- Thanks for reading! 🙂 Also wow, they weren't masterpieces to begin with, but the color in my photos is so washed out after being transferred from my phone to my computer. The 20 long especially is so much more vibrant in person.

I really like pearlweed in tanks of all sizes. You can let it grow tall in the background or trim it at medium height into a bush in the midground, you can trim it almost to the substrate and carpet it, or you can just let it float and form a mat. Grows quick and isn't exactly picky about light or nutrients so it's great for beginners. Spreads readily too, but is easy to control. And pretty much anything else you can get on ACO would work fine in a small tank if you keep up on trimming, except maybe the amazon sword and ammania gracilis. The latter would be fine if you have a good light. Since I live in the middle of nowhere I buy most of my plants online. There are a couple of specific businesses I don't think I can mention, but the other 75% of my purchases I get from small vendors/individuals on etsy. I think I can say that since the guidelines allow amazon and ebay and the same people tend to have shops on both ebay and etsy? Prices and shipping are usually pretty reasonable or free and they (usually) have better customer service than the big plant businesses (aco has the best cs imo tho). Plus most of the vendors are really nice and tend to include extra plants/species and coupons for next time 😊

So about a month or so ago I noticed ONE blue with spots ramshorn snail in my small army of brown ramshorn snails. I pulled it out and tossed it in my other low tech tank. It wasn’t long before it got busy laying eggs and almost all of them have been blue! So now I have a tank full of blue ramshorns! Every once in awhile I see a brown one, and I just pull it out and toss it back in the cube. All that to say earlier today while I was trimming the blue snail tank I noticed a ramshorn with a very red body and a white shell. And in my other two tanks I managed to find three more of the same colored snails. So I set up a jar, pulled all four, and got them set up with some plants and wafers. Hopefully I’ll have a similar situation with these guys as with the blues and I can get another little colony going! I’ve been wanting red/pink ramshorns for a couple years now so I’m pretty excited. This will also be a great opportunity to see just how much I can abuse pearlweed haha. The jar is only getting spill-over light from my emmersed plant experiment and ambient light from the kitchen window. These guys also glow under the blue light, so I thought that was pretty cool.

They seem pretty great, but I can’t order from aqua huna because I live in the east side of wa state 🫠 ——- Although I did do a thing this morning and ordered a shrimp starter kit from a different vendor! I didn’t get amano, but I got other shrimp I’ve been wanting for awhile. Paid less for the actual shrimp than if I bought them at the closest actual fish store and shipping was less than a tank of gas & lunch and dinner. It’s about a 5-6 hour round trip if I’m not in a hurry.

So it was recently my birthday and my husband got me a second light for my 75. I’m pretty excited because that opened up more options for planting the back and front of the tank! Other than that not a whole lot going on. I have an algae problem in the Monte Carlo in my cube. I want to try treating it with peroxide and shrimp, but I can never seem to make it to the shops when they have amano in stock. Might have to order them online. Also gave the cube a slight trim and replant. I’m pretty blown away by how red the rotala oj is getting in this tank. I’m also kind of stumped by how low the lily is staying. It’s been like that for a couple months now, wondering if it will ever get tall again. Before trim: Behold, my army of snails! after trim: And a cute little kuhli coming out ready for food!😃

So many baby plecos! 😍

Did some major work in one my 20 gallons. Removed all of the Java ferns, anubias, and buce. They’re in bowls right now, but they’ll go into my low tech 20 eventually. I gave this 20 a deep haircut. Trimmed the new tops off of almost every plant and pulled the old bottoms. I spread and rearranged all of the remaining plants in such a way that hopefully they’ll be getting adequate light. Tank looks worse now than it did before, but hopefully it will look much better in a few weeks when everything grows back in! before: after: baby hillstreams are doing great! Parents must be one happy couple cause I keep seeing babies of varying sizes creeping around. Dunno if you’ll be able to make them out in this pic, but here’s one of the bolder babies hanging out near one of the parents. On a somewhat related note, here’s the full tank. What started out as two crypt wendtiis turned into a whole bunch of crypt wendtiis and they’ve taken over the corner of the tank. I want to take them out, but the Cories love hiding in them.