nabokovfan87

I've got one I can take apart and so on and take photos or video for you. Just let me know. The bottom most piece looks like it goes to the actual faucet side (the cone looking piece) and that is what usually comes loose and causes leaks and stuff. The piece with the white valve is usually on the end with the siphon tube by the tank. The center black pieces are your host connections. Purple = the hose connection pieces Circled piece labelled "3" is one of your hose fittings (barb style end) The other black piece also has a barb style fitting.

Easiest ways: Someone who is currently cycling a tank Someone who has one tank only Someone who has a 20G tank or smaller only. (Not saying this negatively) Someone with only one fish in the tank, glofish, or a Betta Someone who only keeps plants Someone who only keeps shrimp Etc. Making things like trivia multiple choice is also a good way. Who wants to be a millionaire style game where you get some easier questions and can still have some fun!

Cory had his talk and they played some fun games to give things away, might be worth a watch. The fun one for someone who might not know a lot of fish stuff was the game where Cory asked "have you ever" questions and if you had then you keep standing. Last one standing gets the prize. Let's hope there is a classic, "toss a ping pong ball into a glass thing" game. One idea we had on the forums was a fish store scavenger hunt. Might be an idea, especially if the event has a variety of shops. Prices or something like photos of each one, that would be fun!

Honestly, just prune the leaf.

3 amanos might not do much and very likely are eating whatever flake or other food is left over. If you hold back food for a few days, maybe they'll go after it. It looks like staghorn to me. Common stuff I've been dealing with. A form of hair algae that can come in a variety of colors based on whatever one you happen to have. The stuff I have tends to focus on dead leaves. Biofilm would be a white film common on new wood surfaces. There is also surface film at the top of the water made from a variety of things like proteins and oils from other foods and other sources. It would look a bit like a puddle of oil in water on an overcast day (rainbow colors, etc). I'm sure the two terms are used interchangeably at some level. The wood variety is usually a fungus and/or a bacterial growth that is a white growth and can flake off. It can also be found on plastics in the tank, commonly on airline tubing.

Very sad to see. First thing I thought when I saw it was how dude bought fish and put it somewhere to make a video. Click bait is literally someone lying in the title to get you to click. This is basically just fraud on some level. Considering all the content creators out there.... "Good food takes time" Just focus on good videos and enjoy and support good content.

Any chance it would help to have a "beginner help" section as a highlight on the forum? General tips and tricks and stuff like that? Places to ask the more common things and we can have some key pins to threads there to help with passing common blog articles and stuff like that to newcomers here? Mobile site works well. Some forums do support general apps. I just use Firefox.

If need be add a sponge baffle on the end of the HoB. The behavior doesn't look like them getting thrown around, but there might be some indicators. The pandas are towards the front of the tank, which is not the side of the tank that has the most current from the output of the HoB. Otos getting thrown around generally means they need a place to go that isn't too strong or that there is a need to baffle things. The pandas are trying to swim up, but there is some pretty good current at the top of the tank (or they just were surfing the glass). Because yours are long fin, they do likely need more care when it comes to flow. Hillstream loaches definitely don't mind and won't mind at all. Can you do another video showing the otos and / or dropping in some flake food? Because of what's in the tank, I'd try to baffle it.

I think you'll be alright. Especially grouping them by the same type of plant in an area is beneficial to stop the chemical wars that plants do to one another to try and survive. The plants are trying to adapt to your water and the new surroundings and I think they are almost always going to be in fight or flight mode. My QT tank is a bucket with water and an airstone for however long I need to. If it's for 3+ days then they get a light or set next to a window or something. Plants can handle a week or so of pretty poor conditions, but the urgency after shipping is to get them wet, let them recover a little bit, and then get them in a place where they can grow and thrive without struggling to do so. Whenever that place is ready for them, after you're done with dips and everything else, you're usually ok. I've been there, and definitely struggled with plants. I feel your pain, and best of luck with these ones!

As far as technical data, I just am not the one to provide that and be able to have some sort of scientific research for this one... When it comes to my own experience with foods I do have a bit of history with food sitting and picky fish that straight up ignore the foods I feed them for a variety of reasons. Algae wafers, spirulina wafers, etc. can sit in the tank for x amount of time based on what binders are in the wafer itself to keep it together. If you have high flow, it'll break down a lot quicker as well. Something like a hikari wafer, I generally don't pay too much attention to, but they can sit in the tank for about half a day up to around 12 hours before they turn to mush in some cases. Extreme wafers break apart a bit sooner as well as the newer version of the sera wafers. The pellets are a similar story. I have had xtreme pellets float on the top of a tank for a solid 2 days and they didn't sink or break down. The ones that sink, they can sit and hold there shape for a very, very long time. But.... to your question about "how long until food in the tank affects water quality?" I would argue it's pretty quick. Food usually has phosphates and depending how much you're feeding and how often, just the amount of food that is left uneated after 15-30 minutes and will sit and float around the tank, you're encouraging phosphates which encourages algae. Yes, that turns into ammonia, nitrite, and nitrates on some level and your plants do eat that waste, but I think all of us here have started a new tank using a pinch of flake food. If you're having issues with the food itself being eaten, feed less. If you're having issues with the fish rejecting food, give them time to want to eat it, feed less, and try other food to find out what they do like to eat. Hopefully that helps.

A few days later and now we have moss showing issues and signs of not enjoying that spot treatment. I do see new growth but what was green is now very pale and turning into goop of sorts. We'll see how it progresses. I might have to rotate around where the spot treatment goes if this is going to be the norm and this moss is sensitive to the treatments. I believe this is Taiwan moss. Edit: Adding this here if it might help someone. It also explains a lot of the struggle with this stuff.

I'm guessing those are pest snail eggs. Hopefully someone can confirm. I would just get some paper towel and remove them if you want.

I tend to lean towards reds in my tank to highlight the reds of the fish. This is a visual thing and it's something you'll see a few places where they want to highlight a warmer or cooler spectrum of color based on the fish that is the focal point for that tank. Grey, blue, blacks and cooler tones being where you'd bump up the "cool white" as opposed to the "warm white" coloration. On some of the presets there is a few of them for lake and amazon tones which also correlates to these setups. Depending on what you specifically are looking for, those are the two settings I play with as well as the pink/red spectrum. Generally speaking, I have the "pure white" as my value that guides all of the other settings at a ratio. -Pure white (for this example let's say it's at 100%, but that would generally lead to algae) Reddish color highlights: -Cool white at 30-50% -Warm white at 60-90% -Red/pink at 70-90% Blue color highlights: -Cool white at 60-90% -Warm white at 30-50% -Red/pink at 15-40%

Understood. I was asking just in the instance that potentially you can run the tank at 76 as opposed to 78 and that might help with some of the fish that prefer cooler temps and are slightly stressed at the current temp. I think the angels and tetras mean it's going to lean towards a 77-78 degree setup.

I highly recommend the blades if you've never used them. I take the half of the mag-float and just scrape it by hand with the blade and that seems to be very effective. There are also blade style manual scrapers with telescopic or long arms that might work for what you're looking at too. 🙂

I would toss those around the crypt and then the grasses and stuff will spread out looking for nutrients 😉 They (the grass-like plants) usually do well enough with just the easy green for me.

Yeah it's pretty cold. Maybe you have a tub you can just run a heater in for an hour or two and then do the big change? I do about.... 40-60% changes in a tank with heaters without issues (colder water), but once you get water that cold it's something where I just try to limit it to 30-40% changes. Hopefully everyone recovers. It sounds like water changes and maybe some salt (?) might be the best method to help them out. As always, drop in extra air just to help everyone too, especially with corydoras that usually, really helps. Are you thinking at all that you need to run any bacterial meds or just WCs and monitor? I wonder what on earth happened. It got really cold, really fast here.

SAE's are pretty awesome. I really miss mine. They literally acted like beached whales. I think I had Grace the shark (female) and 3 female SAEs and then one male SAE. In the 75 there were some "moods" and some aggression when the SAEs would irritate the RTBS, but yeah.... I had BBA in that tank, just wasn't as prevalent. Locally, those ones are hard to find, and I recommend you absolutely MUST have a plan for when they get big. Those fish jump, they like to swim and basque and just hang out. When lights or noises spook a fish, SAEs are known to be the ones to hit the floor. It could be another fish or others, and so you really need a 4' tank, preferably something like a 40b or 75G at a minimum. The necessity being, you absolutely have to have a plan if you get a few of them and you need to re-home one or two of them. It's the same rules as shrimp, if you don't feed them heavily they will graze. RTBS, Rainbow sharks, SAEs, Flying fox, those fish all have a similar mouth structure and you can see that in similar species. It's good to know about their background because all of those fish will not tolerate, typically, having others of the same "family" in the tank. Especially if they are similar in coloration. This family of fish specifically. Similar in origin to carp / koi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprinidae I appreciate the tag, let's dive in! There are a few reasons for this stuff. One of the most common is going to be your standard level of nitrates in combination with other factors. Specifically Light power (and time) and CO2 stability. Another very common reason for this stuff is flow issues and circulation issues. As you can see..... we need to take a step back and break everything down and then plan on things going forward. There are "simple" fixes, but I would highly encourage you to head to my experiments thread as well as my journal for my photos and logs of trying to do exactly what you're doing without completely trashing everything apart from the fish. (and yeah, I'm at the point where removing the filter and all equipment that has ever touched the tank and the tank itself all potentially might get filled with bleach to eradicate this stuff) First, please test your water for everything you can and report back those numbers. Please also run an off-gas test on your tap water so we can get an idea of the parameters. (take a sample from the tap and aerate that sample for 24 hours with an airstone and then test everything you can) Second, I need to see the tank, the setup, and all of your equipment layout. I need to understand your lighting schedule (and settings for that schedule) as well as anything to do with pumps, dosing, circulation, substrate, stocking, etc. Is this a tank with any sensitive issues like shrimp and snails? Have you ever dosed this tank with salt before? Third, what is your specific maintenance schedule for this tank? How much volume of water do you change when you do maintenance? Are you getting into the substrate and trying to get rid of as much waste as possible or is that sitting in the tank for the plants? I am of two minds of this, but I can tell you from experience, when you see the algae on the plastics and glass, remove it as often and quickly as possible. This means it's floating in the water, which absolutely leads to issues. Scuffing the surface of plastics means that you can create microscratches and that very likely helps the algae to get onto the surfaces. But..... I have had this stuff grow on literally everything, and it doesn't care.... if it wants to grow, it will. This is part of the "red algae" family and it absolutely sucks to fight, especially when it's this bad. Manual removal, scraping, scrubbing, etc. is one of the best ways and only ways to get ahead of this stuff. You need to keep pushing yourself to fight it and following those efforts do a big siphon and remove as much as you can from the tank with a big volume of water change. Please make sure you verify all equipment is functioning, especially the pumps and the impellers aren't getting coated with this stuff. It breaks off from surfaces, coats the inside and outside of everything and grows like nothing else. Keeping the media clean gives your tank the ability to fight off the ammonia and other issues. Removing that stuff from the water removes decaying matter which in turn helps with phosphate levels and generally helps you to fight algae. If you don't have one, try to track down a phosphate test kit and use that weekly (if possible) to go ahead and track how much organics are causing issues for you. Pulling everything, cleaning it as best you can, cleaning out every single dead leaf and dead plants will help, but you need to fix the issue that is causing it to thrive. You will get there and I have had plants fight through this stuff and keep growing, but it isn't easy. Let's take a step back, go through everything, and formulate a method to get through this stuff. While this isn't the exact situation, it's similar enough and from the same family of algae to be helpful. This is essentially the goal.... to get your tank to a point where you can treat it in this fashion.

@Stella what else is in the tank as far as stocking?

I also found some ceramic soy sauce style ones, black. but not sure if that's "fish safe". There is some ceramics with heavy metal issues in the enamel.

Trying to get a spraybar in there would be optimal. Some sort of pumphead might be necessary.

Mine was on sand with just CO2 injection and easy green. I definitely didn't add enough root tabs, but I did use them. Nothing too crazy and it went alright. Stems can sort of go nuts if you just have good CO2, light, and mid-water nutrients. Having a good size tank / bioload as a result does help. That's probably what you're seeing with the anachris, and you'll typically notice other plants struggle if you don't keep it trimmed and stuff. That's what the mulch pile and compost is for! I've even heard some people feed plants to chickens and stuff.

@Odd Duck Do you think temp getting too hot could do this to moss?

for snails I'd definitely do terra cotta. For shrimp I am eyeballing some glass petri dishes. They aren't cheap because they come in large packs, but I did find one that was "ok".

I have fed it before, but this is the first time in forever where I've been able to feed mysis without issues. I've always, or almost always, had HoBs on the tank and some frozen foods don't do well with that, especially if they have skimmers and suck all the food in too fast. So.... I removed the HoB a few days ago, replaced the rear trim with the full length piece and I finally was able to feed some frozen mysis and I'm sitting here watching things as I type. I cut my finger pretty deep cooking, slipped on a tomato with a knife I had literally just sharpened and wasn't paying full attention. It is day 2 of healing, but just have been taking things easy and doing everything one handed. WOAH! Grace the shark just came and took a huge bite! She almost never eats for me. She always grazes. The cubes floated straight down and didn't really push much into the water. It sunk to the bottom and the pandas are having at it. The black swordtails are doing just fine getting in there and getting some food too 🙂 Definitely small enough for the fry to eat and it looks like all is happy with tonight's offerings. Grace's big bite meant a little of the food is up and around everywhere, so it's easy for the little ones to get some food. ......and now the Corys are laying eggs.