nabokovfan87

We can talk in DM or in the thread in my signature. It has a timelapse of my staghorn / BBA issues. You can add 2-3 without issue I would think. I have 4 in mine.

I'll trade your my algae issue in a heartbeat! Staghorn algae is THE WORST. I would start with doing a manual removal with a toothbrush and see how easy it is to get it into the WC. Try to let it settle, gravel vac. then stir everything up and do a good 50% WC to try to remove it as much as humanly possible. Just manual removal is the easiest way. It's a nightmare, but it's a lot easier than other forms. Make sure you're dosing enough to keep the plants growing, keep an eye that you DO see new growth and that's the focus. This was the last video I took of mine. What a mess.

Awesome stuff. Thank you very much for all the details and explanation. Very cool to learn about that setup!

I just use two buckets. 1 for fish (with an airstone) and one with the rocks and hardscape and plants. Remove the hardscape, plants, etc. Then use the tank water for the fish, let them relax in a bucket with an airstone, covered preferably. Then you just clean out the substrate, rinse / add your new substrate, and then reverse it. Add your hardscape and plants, clean everything you want to, then go ahead and drip acclimate or add in the fish. they get an 80-90% water change, but that's the lowest stress method for me when changing substrates.

ok ok ok..... I have so many questions now! LOL Egg hatching columns? Egg hatching using sand? I assume this is a commercial setup for aquaculture or research type of atmosphere? What does the sand do with the eggs to improve hatches? If I take my ziss tumbler, might be a good place to start.... 🤔 Something like a coffee sifter might make this a slightly easier task these days 🙂 They also have the fine metal filters they use for coffee which would also work and are extremely common to get a hold of. They use them as puck screens or even filters for pressed coffee makers. Interesting crossover.

Hey hey everyone. Tomorrow I think it'll be a good day to make a "mix" of repashy for the fish. I currently have: -Community Blend -Bottom Scratcher (for invertivores) -Soilent Green Maybe @Guppysnail is the one to ask and this should be a DM, but I did want to ask what everyone's experiences has been when mixing, what works well. I'll try a batch out with even portions of all 3, see how it goes, and report back on how the fish acted to it.

Very likely to be internal tapeworms or some sort of internal parasite. Going back to what's already mentioned, but I would focus on using Expel-P for ~3 weeks of treatment. This one IS something where you want to make sure you turn off the lights, black out the tank for the first 24 hours. Perhaps the light in the tank destroyed the meds before they could do their job if you had used them previously.

Pandas are going nuts today. Slightly stormy weather, just miles away, but you can smell it in the air. 5 pairs of them going all crazy chasing the females everywhere on different parts of the glass. Just these globs of little catfish darting all over 🙂 I'll give them some worms, that's my afternoon....

More than anything, it's a tool. Just like everything it might have flaws. One of them is that it's incredibly old and doesn't have any of the new filters. The thought behind it is solid though and I do think it's a good tool for cataloging fish parameters and being reminded of what makes sense where. I do not agree with it in some ways, but in others I find it works pretty well. For stocking, I'm always going to recommend a very lightly stocked tank and not having the mindset of pegging a tank to anything over "75%" in some respects. Whatever the tool is for measuring "full". In terms of health of the tank, less is more.

This is the absolutely best way to handle it. If you can, don't have any preference issues with it, you can also have the crushed coral as your substrate or mixed in the substrate itself. Part of the pain of KH/PH issues is that you don't really fix anything until you get KH up high enough. you're at 0 for KH right now, which kind of is a "good thing" because it means there might be less room for things to crash. It's one of those things where if you decide to use something that isn't crushed coral you need to keep a very, very close eye on PH and KH and swings because it can swing pretty hard. I dose the seachem alkaline buffer for my tanks and it's generally easy to do so. It's not something where it works well or is easy and I have lost 4-5 shrimp as a result of stress from swings too high or too low. The second best option is to precondition your water before you do water changes. Dose in what you need to, and then you'd go ahead and have that running and ready to go. You can then test to make sure parameters are what you want, adjust as you need to. Third best would be to just find species that thrive in that water and not worry about it. You'll have an amazing blackwater tank!

Very interesting. One day I'll had to challenge pondguru to make one! I do understand what you mean about it being a lot of work. It's a very obtuse way to solve certain problems and using recycled plastics even to make microbeads and such might be a much better, more elegant way, to handle that and push some recycling efforts as well. Is the one you have a custom job or one that was made and sold at a shop? They're definitely dumping loads into the sewers. I'm guessing they do the "nothing out, nothing in" thing because it makes for a good PR catchphrase. Yeah.... "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. There's a lot of that, unfortunately, that goes on. Especially with stuff like finning, sharks, "fish" products, etc. Reminds me of grocery shopping most of all. All of those pre-cut fruits and what not that are just a polite way for some stores to get rid of old food and push out expiration dates. I see my local stores doing this a TON with meat. Can't sell much, so they added 5-10 varieties of "marinated" versions that it can all turn into. Always looks bad. Sucks when you go to the store and all you get to do is pick through rotten stuff. so gross 😞 It's kind of unfortunate how many PR words are manipulated these days to hide things. As a designer, I tend to giggle when I hear the reasons why some things were purchased because of what it says on the box.

AqAdvisor is a pretty neat tool to use for stuff like this. In my 75G I had: -approx. 20-25 Green Tigerbarbs -3 SAEs -1 RTBS -25+ Panda corydoras -2 clown plecos -1 rubberlip pleco -1 BN Pleco -4-5 Borneo loaches -3-4 random other fish (from other tanks that needed proper care) Very true. We had to rehome an angel because it just went crazy. Having a "few" rams will be such a cool thing. I recommend checking out the black emperor tetras that aquahuna has. They look awesome. -1 white cloud

@Biotope Biologist might be able to help us here, especially with the microscope stuff! The med trio is missing one piece that might help. well two. First I would dose the tank with salt and just start with that while everyone is trying to provide help. General Cure / Paracleanse will work for: Expel-P and other meds would focus on: Another one to look at would be prazipro @Odd Duck has recommended these for treatment with the random worms I found in my tank. I started with expel-p and salt, then after fish had some time to recover and a few very big cleanings, this is what I've been following.

Turn off 10 of the valves and get the others to work "well". If you can't then you have a leak somewhere or potentially a situation where the pipe going into your system might be too small. You can hook up two in series if it's a situation where you're not getting enough force. Photos of your pipe / output from the device itself and how you have things setup might help trouble shoot as well.

The first question is what kind of shrimp in particular are we talking. Each variety has different needs and different parameters. It also will help to understand acclimation method that was used. Shrimp are and can be extremely sensitive and usually require a particularly longer acclimation if we are talking certain types. Please also request a photo, filtration, substrate in the tank so we can have an idea of what's going on. As for your testing results, I always have issues with the color on a few. I see that for PH and I always stare at it and wonder if it's 7.0 or 6.3 range. You can get polyfilter as well and avoid having to get 4-5 different test kits for metals. It might be the way to go for this situation as well.

Awesome stuff! I think you can build one with squarespace and then whenever you're ready to "turn it on" is when it actually charges you. Cory's business channel as well as James hoffmann might be a great place to get some inspiration!

Looks great! I think it's subtle but fits the design and setup very nicely. Because it's a shrimp tank, if you ever have a "branch" or some sort of leftover nano size wood, I'm sure the shrimp wouldn't mind that to graze on. I can't wait to see it grow in.

The ohko is very cool. I enjoy how you've set it up. I'll be ver intrigued to see how things progress for you! based on the photo. 100000000% get some sand please!

super interesting. I wonder why! I wonder.... have either of you kept any of these prior? Has she ever had corydoras before? What fish has she shown an actual interest in? Maybe a single tank, moss, bolivian ram is the perfect tank for her?

AWESOME photo. Very well done. My goodness! We have a few threads that would love to have your photography skills! There is one for macros, one for photos that go through a watercolor filter, and another for just amazing shots. Please feel free to search those. Awesome work capturing all those colorations!

welcome! No concerns at all! please ask any questions you might have.

sounds awesome. please feel free to share some photos! The 36G bow, what brand is it by chance? I think the one I had was a 38, but I just couldn't handle the obtuse blur it caused on my eyes. I have some pretty sensitive vision issues. 😞 Take them at night, everything else off but the tank lights. Lens as close as you can to the glass. No worries at all! Please post whatever you can. We'd love to see it. 🙂

please feel free to ask anything you need to! We've all started somewhere, but the majority of us might still have the exact same struggles and questions! 🙂

No idea....... @Guppysnail pls help us!

If at all possible, please provide some photos and test results for each tank, including temps. One of the bigger things to help on our side is to understand how things are setup. If a tank has an airstone, hob vs. sponge filter, etc. I would imagine tank temp is about 76+ or so. Perfectly fine for Julii corys, it may stress Otos slightly. They are a very small fish and in my care I try to keep them 70-74 with added oxygenation. Cooler water holds slightly more oxygen and it's a bit easier for them day to day. They might do perfectly fine at warmer temps, but that's just a note. I look online and everything says "70-80" for range, which makes me want to shoot for 74-75 as a target temp for that type of a listing. Others can chime in and we'll see what everyone has their otos at. Right now it's summer in so cal and so mine are at ~80 on a bad day. Probably the similar temp, pandas might be acclimated to warmer waters but generally prefer the cooler waters. Part of it depends if they are hobbyist bred or east vs. west coast as well. I believe the albino's are fine at the warmer range, but I'll edit/verify this one. Otos again, might not like the 78 deg temps. Temps on the Julii might not be compatible with the Otos, but it sounds like they might've just had some acclimation issues. PLEASE watch this video and report back on how you fed them or acclimated them. A big thing from this experience is to always try to keep them with wood. Food with aufwuchs is also recommended. They might, but in my tanks they generally ignore all of the hair algae. they prefer to graze on surfaces, new growth, and brush algae. When I scrape the glass, the otos usually jump in and try to get the little bits that might be left.