nabokovfan87

I would highly encourage you to check out channels like Ohio fish rescue and this video from Cory. Every day people move live fish and there's a billion ways to do it. One nice tip was for sensitive fish, add some carbon to the bottom of the bag or the bottom of the tote with some air. That helps. There's also studies using salt when shipping fish to avoid ammonia burn. Great ideas.

Try using Marine and prefilters. Never had a shrimp in mine. I am going to end up getting a steel one, I recommend just get a sump. Or an insert kit for a mini sump You just glue them into a 10-20g aquarium. Much better in my eyes. Mine too. It's absolutely to get even circulation. I run the filter in one spot and then "add on" a skimmer.

Look up the UNS mini canisters. Steel ones are great in terms of aesthetics, but check into both the series they have. I wish I had gone that route with mine as opposed to fluval. Basically, you get a lot more for what you pay for, less design issues.

I would suggest a few things to make life really easy for you. 1. Have your family setup totes. Just get the ones that are sterilite from target or home Depot and set those up somewhere. Right now in Cali, you don't need a heater, thankfully. You want to have your family setup the tubs with air stones and lids just to get things "moving" 2. Take your filtration media and keep it wet. Put that into an ice chest in bags or however you need to do it to keep it cycled. You can also get a big bottle of something like seachem stability for pretty cheap and use that on hand when you get to those tubs. 3. Bag up your fish, they go in the ice chest as well. 4. Regardless of moving anything else that is all you need to have for your fish themselves to move. You can take your hardscape and you can take plants and that stuff too, but it's not a priority so to speak. 5. You ship the fish or drive them, then you would acclimate them like anything else when they arrive in California. Add in your filter media to the bottom of each of the totes and then just let the fish have the "pond life" for a few weeks. 6. Break down and setup the tanks and move everything you need to. This is where you can replace tanks, merge tanks, and so on if you need to as well. Getting a uhaul or something like that for moving all your stuff would be very helpful and the fish can make that journey with you as well. It's a trek for sure, but it is absolutely possible. If it was me in that scenario, I would ship the fish and have totes like that setup as holding tubs.

I think the 407 is "rated for" something like a 90gallon aquarium and there's no way I would use it for anything larger than a 3 foot tank. In the 55/75g it struggles to move water that distance. It just is specific to setup sometimes. There's also preference too. I tend to run a particular setup and higher flow demanding fish, but that comment and recommendation is something that was posted elsewhere and made a lot of sense to me after trying to understand the filter I have and some of the quirks on that filter. I wish the spraybar just came in the box!!!

It's definitely not a 1:1 scenario. There are people that think that if you test GH, KH, and TDS when you're keeping shrimp.... That TDS = GH+KH. It's just hard to really grasp it on some level without having a chemistry set and using solutions. Water isn't just water a lot of the times. There's a lot of "stuff" that skews results and it's just what it is. I would recommend using GH and KH liquid tests. I don't think anyone should be making tank decisions based on TDS. Basically, TDS is useful only for mixing water. Each time the meter is used it has to be calibrated, it's a hassle.

TDS is just "stuff" but GH is very specific minerals.

Are you on the west coast? So the long and short of it is that there's a lot of confusion out there because a lot of people really don't understand what the shrimp need. Things happen in the water, deaths happen, and it might be a nutritional issue, but they test water and see GH is of a certain number and blame that. Personally I've kept amano shrimp in a massive array of parameters. When pH gets too high, then you run into issues. I do keep Neocaridina shrimp and the main thing there is to have some KH, and to have GH within a range that makes sense. (more than 6 degrees, less than 14 or so) The rivers in Taiwan is a place you can research and get water test results to compare values to. From my research, their GH is around 12 degrees naturally. I've also been told many times that it MUST BE 6 or else you will run into issues. I keep my tanks in the 8-10 range. All this is a roundabout way of saying that I encourage you to absolutely keep shrimp! However, please go grab a liquid GH+KH test kit and start there. Test the tap water where you would get your water change water from and then test your tank. Let us know those values.

Yes, it's absolutely fine to cover the tank up and do a blackout. I use 2-3 towels for this. One on the back of the tank, one on the front, and potentially one across the top if you need it. Definitely try to scrape whatever you need to and adjust the lighting a little bit.

As far as the x07 series.... 107 = 10g 207 = 20g 307 = 30g 407 = 40g (definitely ignore what the box says because I can tell you it's dramatically under powered.) I have done extensive testing on a ton of filters including the ones that you're mentioning. I would recommend something different for shrimp. The intake strainer on the x07 series isn't great. It's bulky, it's sharp, and there isn't a prefilter that works well with it. Especially with neo shrimp. It's perfectly fine for fish, but for shrimp, I don't recommend it. The tidal is not great at all unless you dedicate the time to modify it for fish/shrimp. You need to use silicone or other materials to close off a variety of sections, all of this is out of warranty and is detailed in my tidal thread. The pump on the tidal is great, but the filter itself isn't something I would encourage for fish or shrimp. It killed a tank for me one by one and I spent years "fixing it" and researching methods to use the items I had on hand to alleviate the situation of sleeping fish being sucked in. Please feel free to ask any questions. I do have filters I like, but setup is extremely critical. In my shrimp tank I only run hikari sponge filters. I use the plastics/internals from an ACO filter just so I don't have to modify it to run an air stone. Either setup is perfectly fine, the key is that the finer sponge works well with neo shrimp.

Hopefully they are soft enough! Feel better little fishy.

Maybe jumped into the lid? Spine is a little bent and curving downward. I would just check to verify that against the other fish. I'm very sorry for that issue! It's always been one I have struggled to really ever fix and reminds me of Cory dealing with Hank.

Basically you want to make sure it doesn't turn into secondary infection, redness turns into more normal pinkish color.

Keep an eye on that one for secondary issues, consider some salt / moving that fish to let them recover.

Understood @Colu! Thank you. I am trying to make a "first aid kit" so to speak. Right now it was used because I absolutely don't have much of an idea of what this disease is or what I'm dealing with. At this point it is a necessary step and I am not sure if it makes sense in future to use preemptively (something I am very comfortable doing with salt+ich-x for things like external protozoan diseases), but it might be something that has a use and is something we may actually want to keep on hand? That's sort of my logic. It's actually "cheap" considering what you get out of it, but I appreciate the words of caution. I don't like to use meds unless absolutely necessary. I am working at getting a better understanding of certain key diseases, like I have with shrimp, but what I'm finding out is that it's not as simple as reading the box/website and matching things up to a photo. There is often very misleading directions or very misleading information because a lot of people just don't know what a certain thing really is.

@Colua and @Odd Duck I wanted to ask for the sake of all of us understanding, can we briefly discuss the merits and risks of a product like seachem polyguard? It is affordable, seems to do a key job, and seems to do it well from what I can tell. Can you speak to us as far as the nitrofur..... Bacterial medication and what it is good for? In terms of things I am trying to have on hand at all times.... I think this needs to be on my list, but I want to hear some more experienced and knowledgeable thoughts! Thank you.

Lost a black Cory to some unknown thing. I didn't see any major issues, woke up to it belly up and it looked like maybe it ran into the lid. (This was about a week ago) I checked on the fish themselves, pulled a mass of plants, noticed a few of them showing issues of fin rot setting in and some other things happening with slime coat, external protozoans, or some sort of bacterial issue. I moved them to the side tank with the WCMM from the shrimp tank that are also needing meds. Fast forward 24 hours, salt + kanaplex for a day, and they are missing tails at this point. I let it soak for another 24 hours to finish the dose of meds and did a big water change, readded salt so I knew I had enough in there and then checked on everything. Heater was hot, cut the cord on that so I didn't mistakenly used it and looked for my spare.... Which wasn't there. We had snow 48 hours prior, but it was a balmy mid 70s, not an issue, and I spent the entire day calling the LSS (local saltwater store) to try to get some neoplex. either the corydoras or the white clouds need it and I'm not sure which. Heater ordered online because I had given away my backup. Thankfully it arrived ok, in a paper envelope, and I set that up so I could get things warmed back up. Temp was low 60s, so I am thankful it got here. Meds arrived today.... (4-6 days late because USPS mislead me) and I realized I ordered the wrong size siphon. Apparently small is a nano and nano is a small with a short tube. Oops. So here's the just of where we are. Fish are seemingly ok and the second salt does helped a bit. I do not know if this is some sort of issue where they had an external parasite and it was killed off, but it looked like white powder all over the bottom of the tank. That also makes me think Ich, but it's not ich. I don't think it's Epi either. I am monitoring them, trying to see how they recover. I have one in the big tank that I am monitoring, but I am treating both tanks with meds and there is no need to move this fish at this time. 75% of them seem to be unscathed. I can only assume that the rescue fish has something that got through QT or that there was something from the SAE that was added. The SAE looks happy and healthy, but you just never know when you're adding germs to a tank. There is always something, apart from water that was "plop and dropped". This also happened within days of the white clouds having their issues as well. Separate symptoms, but seems to be related to just the facts of not having new fish in a very, very long time from elsewhere. The fish I have added (swords and rescue fish) we're all local and similar water. The SAE wasn't. I do have a more poignant question, but I will follow up so it's a clear and concise question.

You might enjoy this (or some of the other species they've done)!

Yay! That's awesome. I didn't realize it at first but that plant can handle a lot more light than I had originally thought. 100%. I love watching the lights come on or go out and sneaking the night lights on to watch the bottom of the tank sneak around.

Hm.... Never heard of anything like this. Might be indicating some predation? I had the same thing happen and I couldn't figure out what I was doing. It's really awkward because you see them being saddled and then you see them have everything they need, but you don't see the baby shrimp or eggs. It lasted about 3ish months. I would recommend just verify everything is ok and hold course. Don't worry about powdered food unless you have baby shrimp. Let the plants develop, clean filtration and all that while it's a bit easier to do so. After that little pause in breeding was when my tank exploded and it's been busting at the seams ever since. I will have to go back through my notes and see if there was something I did in particular to try to perk them back into dropping eggs, but from memory I think it was just a matter of waiting them out and checking for losses. Such deep color. Beautiful and seemingly really strong quality. That line and your shadow blue, black rili is really special!

Seems fine. Keep an eye out if the temp is consistently below 70, but it shouldn't be too much of a concern. I would recommend getting a liquid GH+KH test kit as well to be able to track that. (pH gets too high, can lead to other issues and stress signs with corydoras) So yeah, I think what you witnessed is very likely typical, normal behavior. Even a content and happy corydoras will purge up to the surface to gulp air. This is just part of what they do for a variety of reasons. I imagine on some level it's a corydoras "checking" to see if there are predators around and at other times they do it just to signify a little bit of breeding behavior. High stress activities like that can lead them to have some rapid breathing and gulp air. If you watch the fish on the bottom of the tank and they seem frantic and always breathing extremely quickly, rapid gill movement, then you would want to try to add some air stones.

Trim it... Probably dip it / treat for algae as well with peroxide. Cannot wait for it!

There is a multitude or barbs that mimic or have different variations in pattern from the normal tiger barb we all know and love. Seriously fish has some articles on this topic as well as other online resources. Tiger barbs can be considered something like rainbowfish where locations may have slight changes in pattern and or behavior due to where they grew up. This is the same thing Darwin studied on the Galapagos islands. The barb you are discussing above is not a tiger barb, but it is a different species. There is a 5-band barb, 6-band barb, 7 band barb, snakeskin barb. Barbs are awesome! I am familiar with the video you mentioned and anxiously awaiting some wild caught tiger barbs as well.

What are the water parameters, including temperature? Add an air stone (or two) or bubble wall.

You would want to QT them if possible. There are newly found parasites that can go from one group/species to another (neocaridina to caridina even). You would want to research what to look for and then observe them. As things like Australian vs Japanese amano shrimp have found there way into the hobby there is sourcing concerns and parasites that are being found in hobbyist tanks as a result. The link above is the best resource we have when it comes to shrimp diseases that I know of apart from literature available in Europe, mainly Germany. They have good photos and research studies that you can find as well. Get that magnifying glass out!