nabokovfan87

10 is a lot..... If you can id recommend a 75G for them. 40B is a lot better for them short term. I don't know what else is in there, but a school of barbs is always fun. Enjoy them. Best of luck! If they were RTBS, no way they ever should've sold 10 of them. Definitely a weird issue at that store you went to. (normally they only have 1 or 2 RTBS in at any one point, not a lot)

Here's another. https://www.seriouslyfish.com/ I also put this together

1&2 fishroom 3&4 dishes. 😂

It took about a week and some change to get things sorted out. I had sand, sponge filter, and pleco caves in the tank as a place for the fish to swim around and get some cover. They did use them, but it wasn't enough in terms of supporting enough bacteria for the cycle. Maybe it's just a matter of time or the sponge filter isn't big enough for the load. Either way, I removed most of the caves, left one, and then I went ahead and added some medium size lava rocks. Took a long time to get a decent photo. There was 3 lights on and this was basically the best I could do.

I use a variety of trusted sources. I'm finding that badfish aquatics has a lot of detailed guides for beginner species. For most catfish I use planetcatfish There is a few others I'll try to post them here.

😂. Yeah I've had this happen.

Generally, shrimp produce the least amount of waste. I can't say anything specific, but this gives you an idea of the capacity of a tank with shrimp (and some snails). I can look up the size and stuff of the tank, but hundreds in a tank is generally normal. Once I have more than 100, I'd start to plan accordingly in my own tanks. Something like floating plants would help a lot when it comes to nitrates in this setup. The rest of his plants are very large in size, and fast growing. The faster a plant grows the more stable it makes the environment because it can respond quicker and use the available resources. Yeah, things might be perfectly fine. This might just be a test at the certain time before the tank had time to process things. I am purely mentioning bioload as a thing of note because it can get out of hand. 100 shrimp in a tank each have 15-30 baby shrimp, it's a big jump. Leeches in there. Snails, they all can do the same thing if there's a lot of food introduced. If there's a lot of food, there's a lot of waste.

Yeah, everything seems to be in order. Just a lot of bioload on that tank.

Whenever you mix up some new water, test that too. I think for clarity we need to see the test results, whatever values you're getting. This might be just indicative of the tank having something and then you're testing it before the bacteria has a chance to process it.

https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/ph-gh-kh "Think of KH like a trash can. The higher the KH, the larger the trash can. If we overflow that trash can, then a pH crash occurs." There's two ways to view this for me and I'd like to hear others opinions. A tank with snails can be a ticking time bomb of sorts when it comes to ammonia spikes. If one dies, or if you have something that causes a few to die, then you have a pretty big ammonia spike until you realize what's going on. This is the same for other species as well, but I think it's harder for us to tell if a snail has passed. This could be what you're seeing in the above. The KH was used up, resulting in the PH drop, causing some issues with something, potentially a snail, that led to a spike of some kind. If your KH is low, say under 40, then it's easy for that KH to go from 40-->20. If your KH is at 20, then it's easy for it to go down to 0. KH can be fickle like that where you have to get it up to a certain level to have enough stability. This could happen with a large colony of snails and/or shrimp and is common when they "crash". The second instance on how I view this is that potentially just the amount of bioload in the tank, feeding repashy, and that might've been "too much" so to speak for the shrimp. From what I know of, they want a small amount of food and it's very easy to overfeed neos. A lot of that estimation can be done based on their activity when you drop food into the tank. If they are swarming, then it's probably the right amount of food going in. A small piece of repashy will probably be ok and it's something I've fed mine, but if you're feeding a bigger cube it could stay in the water too long and then lead to an ammonia spike, which leads to parameter issues, which could affect snails and shrimp. Apart from the water test results, did you see any deaths in the tank in question? Do all of the snails look to be alive and ok? Bad smell at all? A photo or two of everything going on might help. What was the starting KH value, above 50 ppm? When you add the shrimp buffer to your water, what is your optimal parameters you're trying to reach? I don't think there's an issue feeding repashy. I do think there is an ability to overfeed it, pretty easily for a shrimp only tank. (Snails are a different story though)

Yeah. I tried that a bit. It mostly just dried out a little. Probably fine. Whatever the material is on this particular plastic siphon, it likes to grow stuff. It's an opaque blue. Ive always considered running a few chemicals to sanitize things. Bleach would be to go to for me for organic stuff. Works well and easy to dechlor and offgas.

Yeah. Horned nerites @Chick-In-Of-TheSea That one looks like something else, but those might work for you and supposedly eat BBA.

Not at all. The original post game from a place of exactly where I thought everything was perfectly fine. Even in the video Cory had tested and thought everything was fine! Then he tested temperature. I had a nitrite spike despite no issues whatsoever in the tank and this was a random testing moment that led to discovery of an issue. Feel better!

If there's ever a question, I always like to have a second test kit. Even if it's a strip, just to sanity check. I find myself constantly flipping between "it could be 100-150" or "it's clearly way off the scale and 400+" Sometimes the shades are just difficult to tell and the colorscales are slightly difficult to decipher. The backup method is to use a colorblind simulator tool and shift the scale so you can see it in a different range or grayscale. There's a few ways to handle it, but generally speaking one of those may shed some light. I don't think you'd off gas GH like that to alter the results of that particular parameter in question.

Looked at this. Saw the photo. "Uh, that's a shrimp!" 😂 I'm guessing there's another one with a snail somewhere or I am just not awake enough to see it! Anyways, carry on, have a good day everyone, that's my morning laughing at myself here.

Overnight. I tend to check on the fish manually. I'll use a flashlight, blue lights, and just check on them after a couple hours. After that, normal light operation the following day. Shrimp yes, they are light sensitive, especially neos. I tend to turn the lights off because I don't want the other fish bothering them when they are trying to just get into the surroundings and figure out territory.

Rachel O'leary and Pecktec have some fun pond videos with regards to this.

There is a link in my signature with a good amount of testing on mods to the seachem tidal. I worked with the 55 for a bit and I am now testing the 75. Ultimately, if you want it to perform better, there are methods to "fix" the skimmer and any other issues, but there's a bit of steps to that process. Any other HoB will have a lot better intake tube suction because 65-80% of the openings on the tidal are the pump housing and skimmer sections. Unfortunately, it's just the way it's been designed. Close one, yep, the other parts perform a lot better. I do tend to giggle that they put the gate on the intake tube because it basically isn't going to do much of anything the majority of the time.

Looks great! Welcome to the fun. 🙂

Agreed. I tend to do 2-3 50% water changes after meds. I typically want to get the salt / meds out of the water if the fish are showing signs of stress.

For most shrimp the larger the water volume the better and it's easier to keep stable.

That's awesome, congratulations!

There's a very good video by the aquarium co-op on their YouTube channel. Explains it really well and a few ways you can get stuck in that.

They like Oxygen and flow. So don't be afraid of it if there's a concern at all. If other stocking demands "low flow" that's perfectly fine too. During the day, mine sleep on the shade side of the wood and don't move much or at all. Then the lights go out and they dart all over like trying to map the tank out in their brains again.

Noooooooo! That's awesome to hear! Yeah I really appreciate his knowledge and content. He's definitely a maker of sorts for aquarium stuff. That's a cool little trick!