nabokovfan87

everything ok now? @Henry the fish keeper

I wonder which ones.... Interesting. I would imagine sunset gold is about the "right thing".

My guess / gut tells me that there is far more color to grow in.

@Maddiethemooch Welcome to the forums. Happy to have another experienced betta keeeper here to help with questions! 🙂 In terms of feeding the fish flake or pellets, what food(s) do you use?

@Goldie Blue has one 🙂

I am 99.999999999999% salt is salt and it's just the matter of the actual size of the container and the directions on the box. I assume API, I'll grab the details here below for clarity. Aquarium co-op article: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/aquarium-salt-for-sick-fish API Aquarium Salt Directions: Add 1 rounded tablespoon for every 5 gallons or 0.5 teaspoon for every gallon of aquarium water. API POND Salt Directions: Ponds with plants: add 1.25 cups of Pond Salt for each 100 gallons of pond water. Ponds without plants: add 2.5 cups of Pond Salt for each 100 gallons of pond water. It all appears / seems to be the same, just a different package size. The TX-10 is a specific type of salt, higher quality grade. The dosage tools on the API site agree to the same salt dose for the same volume of water. Unfortunately it does happen. The best companies and best shippers can get a bad delivery person and vice versa. Sometimes it's the small/fine details that certain shippers miss and it leads to fish stuck in corners and all kinds of things. I hope all is well, looking forward to seeing how they do for ya! 🙂

There's a few things that you probably could do which would help them with general health and immune response to the stress conditions. I'll note this into two separate categories. If the fish arrive with some DOA: -Open the box from the mail, and determine if there is a massive difference in temp between the bag/box atmosphere and the room with your tanks. The fish will already be highly stressed and in poor conditions. As soon as you open that bag is when you run into issues due to ammonia and PH shift. -Prep everything you need before you open the bag. Have a plan for where the fish are going, make sure it's setup and go ahead and float the bag to acclimate it to that setup. Make sure filtration is working well and consider adding an additional airstone in this situation. -"plop and drop" the fish into the new tank. Take care to ensure the body of any dead fish is not introduced into the tank. This can be difficult. The key is to minimize the time that the fish are in the bag water itself. -If you have them, add aquarium salt and catappa leaves to the tank OR (not both) add carbon to your filtration -Consider adding the med trio right away, especially your anti-bacterial medications in this instance. -hold food right away, give them time in a dark room to oxygenate and recover for at least 12-24 hours. Note: Salt here would be 1 TBSP per 2G (1/3 cup per 10G) If the fish arrive looking very healthy: -Open the box from the mail, let the box sit in your room near the tank for ~30 minutes. Float the back in the tank following that step. -Similar to the above, prep everything. Make sure your filtration is working. If you are putting them into a QT tank, go ahead and add in a light dose of salt and then your botanicals. If you don't have that consider carbon in your filtration, but it should not be required. This is an added "benefit" step to help the fish. -"plop and drop" the fish into the tank, take care to ensure they are all swimming normal and observe them. Keep the lights off to reduce stress. Check on them every couple of hours. -Once it's been a few hours, 6-12 or so, then offer a very light amount of food. Give the fish time to acclimate and reduce stress. 5 days without food is not a major issue, but just ease them into it as opposed to massive meals. Note: Salt here would be 1 TBSP per 3G (1/4 cup per 10G) The main thing is to try to make that transition, especially temperature this time of year, as easy as possible. If the fish came from pretty different water parameters to your own or there was a shipping issue, then it's just a bit of a heightened stress for you and the fish. Small little tweaks, but essentially very similar process to land the fish and get them back into an aquarium to recover. If you don't have catappa leaves you can use something like rooibos organic tea (plain 100% rooibos tea) or alder cones. If you don't have carbon, but have purigen or polyfilter that works well also for this case.

Lower temp also generally boosts the female gender traits. There are some studies on that as well. As it gets colder and colder breeding slows down, so the closer you get to 50's there are changes into the way the colony functions. The interesting and concerning part on the canadian study was how the shrimp reacted to being poked and how they generally couldn't or didn't move as a result of the temperature dropping. Oxygenation plays a role, hand in hand, with temperature when it comes to the shrimp behavior. (studies on this as well)

Look at that tiger + wild pattern. What a shrimp!

Is it worth just removing this penn plax thing long term? It seems like a bit of a lemon.

Ove time, you'll want to try to get another LB of crushed coral in there. The recommendation is typically 1 lb per 10 Gallons. Given the situation, it's important to see it go up just a little bit. Like everything, it's just something to keep an eye on. Try to keep your water changes at about 30% every 2 weeks for shrimp. Too often and it causes issues with the shells and if you're not changing enough volume then it would lead to the GH being a bit high. Ultimately it's all about consistency and the way a lot of people handle that word for shrimp is to simply ignore the tank and not clean it. It's not something I personally recommend due to how that affects your water parameters. The idea here, for this situation, is to try to get your GH below 15. I would give the tank about 3-5 days without any changes, proceed with a normal water change, and then give the tank that 2 weeks window to see what it does. That will give us a great idea of how the KH is behaving and plan accordingly as well as your GH. Thankfully, your tap water is pretty great for Neos.

There's a few studies, like I said a lot of the focus is on temperature due to something like invasive species research. Here is one example that is relevant to the hobby. Growth over time and how temperature impacts that growth. I am trying to locate a bit more information. ........ 19.7 C = 67.5 F This is from a 3 month invasive species map study completed in Japan. Here is one with 5 ranges of temp and it shows the population size in those different ranges. https://edit.elte.hu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10831/50842/Occurrence of non-native red cherry shrimp in European temperate waterbodies a case study from Hungary.pdf This is a study in Canada, very informative. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0380902

I'm not quite sure. It's difficult to see anything in the video. I would suggest trying to replace it to eliminate the issues you're facing. Should be fine to do. Don't use Vaseline. It's petroleum based. You would opt for something like 100% silicone grease.

Once they get "too cold" their muscles start to stop functioning and they die. You'd want to keep them generally as close to 72-76 as you can for general purposes. The lowest I would take them is around 68. I would be ok with 65 as long as it is short term and not an extended period. If you're interested, I can try to find the research paper on this topic. The last time I tried to find it, I do not think I was able to locate it. They have all sorts of low temp studies due to invasive species research.

The main advice is just to make sure it's rinsed well. I will try to look up grain size, but I can't seem to find the images from caribsea in the usual format. With any HoB with sand, the advice is to ensure the tube is as high off the sand substrate as possible. Keep the waterline high enough so that the output is across the tank as opposed to downward forcing the sand up into the water column.

There's a lot to unpack... 25 GH is about double the value that you want it to be. Your last test was 18, now you're up to 25. This is concerning because the trend is going to get worse and it's already going to present issues for the shrimp. What is the GH of your water change water? Let's start there before we get into more complex solutions. Out of curiosity, what is the substrate here?

Those butterflies are amazing. Nice work!

Very cool to hear. Keep us posted!

essentially when you have to be concerned is the "feathery edges". It's normal for a bit or tears and stuff to happen during breeding behaviors. It's unfortunate, but normal. Fin rot is the thing to research and look into as far as the signs and symptoms. If you're having a constant issue, then you can use aquarium salt, botanicals, and a product like kanaplex as part of your toolkit to fight off any issues.

Hm. I would normally think the filter isn't too strong. I would turn it down by ~30% and see if the fish are swimming a little bit easier. This takes your turnover down from 10x to about 6x.

What size is your tank? The flashing is likely unrelated to the filter, but in the video I just noticed the fish struggling.

It looks like the fish is struggling against the current. What is your filtration like?

I think they would do fine together. SAE don't really have the mouth shape for going after shrimp. I would think it's very possible that they may feed on some shrimp, but as long as they are fed normally they should be grazing in algae or other foods. The typical and normal shrimp advice applies. I believe they will do much better in a shrimp only setup and that means the colony can take hold prior to adding any fish. When you're talking SAEs vs a single SAE that's also a distinction here. You're normally talking a 3-4 foot tank for an SAE as optimal due to the size they get. Densely planted as well. These things combined all mean that it's likely going to be easy for shrimp to hide. Having hides for the shrimp, especially the baby shrimp, will mean that they have a better chance of thriving alongside the SAE. In terms of flow and how much is too much, my advice would be to use only air powered filtration in the shrimp tank. Given that setup of 3-4 foot long tanks, I have had anywhere from 3-5 air powered filters and it isn't some ridiculous amount of flow. In my current tank for shrimp I run two air filters per 29G tank. In my 75G with SAE I would have 2 sponge filters 1/3 equidistant inward on the tank as well as a ziss bubble bio on the sidewalls and back center of the tank. (2+3 filters). Ultimately you can likely be fine with just the two large sponge filters as well as 3. If you want to add more oxygenation, then you can always just add an air stone. SAE aren't too demanding in terms of needing a very fast moving tank. The main thing is decent enough oxygenation and the right temperature to keep that oxygenated water. (74 degrees or so) Hopefully this helps, please feel free to ask further questions. As this isn't something anyone would normally try it's difficult to say if it will be a perfect situation. As always, please have a backup plan in case you need to move the fish and run shrimp only.

Awesome news, I'm glad you were able to test and get the information needed for the oxygenation levels. Are the fish doing a little better? Lower the temp / unplug the heater. Assuming it's a goldfish only tank it's the single best thing you can do.

It's difficult to say, but generally speaking it could take a few days for them to be comfortable a bit. I wouldn't overthink it too much!