nabokovfan87

I've tried a "few" flake foods. I definitely like the thicker nature to the xtreme variety and the ingredients work for my own requirements. Especially the spirulina varieties. I have tried cobalt, hikari, tetra, and a few others. I honestly prefer a pellet, but need a sinking one for my fish and just use vibra bites instead. I would think the success you're seeing is due to their thicker consistency and due to the protein % on the foods.

On the actual faucet there's a pretty dumb/silly/goofy design issue. You just need to tighten it. This gap opens up when you tighten the attachment somewhere. You can manually fix it, it'll work fine. Stick your finger in this end and you can tighten it. If you have something hex shaped, that works as well Mine came apart one day and suction kept getting worse and worse and worse until I figured it out. I hope that helps.

Would be very fun to have this cross over with the macro photography thread. I found a random online tool and just cropped it. A lot of phones have filters too with one or two of the watercolor filters. I think B&W is also a very fun aesthetic!

This is a fun idea! Love it.

One or two of these will be mine next time I order! I cannot wait. I need the tank to be "ok" first.

You are safe to use it. Yes, it has a few things that treat a few illnesses. Fungus is specifically one of those. Salt will help with treatment, especially because it's external. The cories will be fine with salt. I just dosed mine with the "level 2" and they had no issues. You can safely try level 1 if you have any concern. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/aquarium-salt-for-sick-fish I would treat with Ich-X, Maracyn / Erythromycin (same thing), as well as salt. I would follow the directions on the back of the box for Maracyn as well as Ich-X. You might treat the fungus itself and then present with open sores which could lead down a bacterial infection. This is why I would use both meds in this case in addition to the salt.

Correct! The main question being how plants process Ambient/indirect light from a window compared to the more focal light from the fluval LED variety of lights. Is there a major difference in how the plants respond to artificial vs natural light sources and is there any concern, should or shouldn't there be for a "planted tank"? As an example, I run my LEDs on my room with heavy ambient light at 10% instead of 50% because I know it's a very low demand tank and the anubias hasn't had any issues growing without the light higher up in intensity.

Looks good! I am excited to see the progress. The before and after is really nice. The plant on the left is doing really well too. I was watching one of the talks on the ACO members playlist and there was one by someone who keeps a lot of specialized plecos. They said that they can have acclimation issues but typically respond to clean water. The same talk included a lot of conversation about clean water vs. good water parameters, but I imagine that's a very specific perspective and point to be made. They didn't expand on the concept, but something to note and just a bit of information I wanted to share with you. Hopefully it's helpful next time you try for a pleco.

Oh for sure! Even with a high tech CO2 setup, I haven't had a ton of success getting the tank to pearl. There was several days where I'd just sit there in awe and then I had some plants flower for me, yet again, breathtakingly fun day when I saw that. I know the plants were happy because of their growth and things like that. The tank was happy because everything was working well. I can't wait to get back to that! Especially considering now, I have substrate that other plants will enjoy and thrive in a bit easier. It's funny, I say the plants only pearled a few times. I'm sure it was many more times, but I just never paid enough attention at the right times. 1000%. It's a quote from a movie, "Are you tired?" Definitely not! I appreciate the motivation, thank you! Nice work getting through the algae. It's a good feeling when you get there and takes some doing.

That's the Otos favorite kind! 😉 This is the part where I always make the wrong choice. More light vs. more fert vs. both. If you're dosing once a week, try twice a week. If you're already dosing twice a week, I'd tried to bump the light in that spot by 5-10% or try moving the light to give that one plant slightly better direct light and see if that alleviates the growth issue.

@Brandon p Well, the moss is officially on the way. Here's to hoping I can grow it. The plan for now it to just suction cup it to the wall and let the mat grow in a bit. I also got some stem plants to add to the tank and hopefully provide that little boost I need to finish knocking this algae out. CO2 is standing by ready to go when the tank is ready for it also. I don't think this algae has a chance anymore! 😂

I actually really like the scape. I sense some moss in your future! I am excited to see it whenever it's planted. Nice work. I got mine from amazon, nothing fancy, but just 100% black tint window film. If you have bubbles, just re-apply it and then use a scraper to remove them. This one!

Most importantly, after a year of fighting it.... I ordered some stinking MOSS. 😂 I think when I had first joined the forums, first couple of days I was talking with Odd Duck about the awesome mosses used and how badly I wanted to get back to growing them in my tank. I went down a rabbit hole of a moss wall that never showed up right, but..... I officially have everything I need to get the moss wall going. One side I have some susswassertang on the way and on the back wall / hardscape another variety. I ordered my first tissue cultured plants for the main tank, specifically hygro pinnatifida just because there was a slight sale for the holiday weekend. I also planned to order from a different source just to see any difference in the plants adjusting to my water given all the issues I've had. Which leads me to tonight, the main reason for posting anything here today. I think I beat the worms going on in my tank (Edit: NOPE), hopefully, and I did the water change required following treatment of paracleanse. I ended up re-scaping the tank, moving plants around, trying to unbury them from the depths of the substrate. I had added the substrate from my QT tank back into the main tank. It was originally from the main tank and now it's back. I am assuming, when I added it back in I did a terrible job of monitoring how the plants got covered up which led to a few getting choked out. I think I only lost one, but I will potentially lose another given the adjustments made tonight. Everything had been struggling, having to add meds with the salt didn't help, but I think the tank is back on the correct course yet again. I think that's the 5th or 10th time I've said that, but I mean it every time I say it. Originally when I setup the tank it had a pretty good arc to the substrate, higher in the back, and it was pretty pleasing to the eye, especially with the wood setup in place. I have a giant seiryu stone that I can fit in once the BBA dies back a bit more and it'll be pretty awesome again. It's a small change, but it's a big one for the eyes day to day. I'll dose in some easy green tomorrow, check things out after the muck has had a chance to settle, check for parasites again, and try to sort out the filtration, plants, and lighting stuff. It's a journey..... today was a good day, thankfully, and I hope the fish didn't get too stressed out on me. I really dig the pattern on the tails. Very unique!

@Odd Duckthis might have been the technique followed. It's one I saw randomly earlier today. As mentioned above, it's a pretty common idea. Octopus, I'm very sorry for the struggles. I hope the fish in the side tank recover. Definitely drop an extra airstone if you can to increase oxygenation for them. Did this at least take out the algae in any capacity? I just had hands deep in the tank, moved all kinds of stuff trying to change up the tank and give the plants a fighting chance. Rocks are covered in the stuff and it's just so frustrating. I'll end up cleaning the HoB tomorrow after it takes in all the muck from tonight (hopefully) and then scrub the heck out of everything again and try to get through this last little bit of extremely persistent bba I have going on. I wish you luck. Keep us posted.

I hooked mine up and it's definitely as loud and as silly and as goofy as many youtube videos make it seem. I also think it's probably one of the single best "HoB Blank canvas" devices in the hobby and it's something I wish had a modern version made out of new materials that worked a bit better and fixed issues. A few tips and some advice. 1. Make sure you clean the air intake with something hard and sturdy to remove hard water deposits. The intake is slightly too narrow of a dimension and will fail over time. 2. Hook it up to a HIGH QUALITY air valve like a metal one and adjust the flow accordingly. If you do this, it will be silent and will be very nice instead of as loud and goofy as mentioned above. 3. There's a billion mods for these things and I highly encourage you to check them out to incorporate some of these ideas into your setup for breeding. I purchased the large one and plan to leave the first and last containers with foam (something to stop fry and ease the intake) so that I don't have any issues with anything. This is one of my favorites, and you definitely should watch to the end to see the concept. Yet again, another way to set it up without using any additional air pump. I'd suggest literally just silicone it too, it's dumb that it's a "feature" to be able to switch gate sizes when it does nothing but cause issues.

Yep, Just do what you're normally doing. If anything, crush some pellets with your hands to make them smaller.

I'm trying to answer this without getting technical. There is a very technical answer as well that is extremely relevant. The analogy being something like a blend of taco seasoning. One company might add more paprika, one company more garlic, etc. Everything has the same "main ingredient" in the case of something like erythromycin. One might be 5%, another 7%. One company might add something else. Maracyn from Fritz is equivalent to API Erythromycin. General cure from API is equivalent to Paracleanse from Fritz. The technical answer for why, for what other additives help or don't help, I can't speak to that. I don't have the knowledge or education. Sometimes things that are added specifically might not help or might be there to help the medicine dissolve, work more effectively. It might even just be salt to help treatment. There's a variety of reasons and as we continue to use the same meds over and over the things we are trying to treat for become more resistant, which lead to needing other meds or needing higher doses. No, he is saying that something might be labelled as "medicine" but is essentially snake oil. You have to pay attention to ingredients and do research to understand what is an actual medicine. Say you were out in the cold and you're freezing severely. You get inside and put a blanket on. What you really need is some hot broth/soup and a fire and warmth. That's what cory is saying. Make sure what you're doing is the correct thing and not just buying a bottle of something because it "claims it will" fix something. i.e. snake oil solutions. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/how-to-treat-sick-aquarium-fish

Welcome to the forum. Potentially they got too wet and it's causing issues? The tank water would be high in nutrients, plus the wet season you mentioned, they might just need to dry out and hold back water more than you normally would?

Exactly! Best of luck with it.

I want to start by saying my goal right now has been to grow moss. Simply moss. *deep breath, exhale slow* I had a tank which crashed due to my inexperience and losing CO2/fertilizer regularity. That was the underlying reason for the plants struggling. Following a few months of that, I trimmed the plant that was doing "too good" (PSO) and seemingly destroyed any progress I had on the tank. Everything dwindled down slowly over time except for my anubias. Following that, we moved houses, which led to everything in tubs with a light and almost no day to day care. I also lost the ability to setup the tank for an extended period of time which led to massive BBA outbreaks and extremely bad conditions for the plants. This post is my attempt to try to explain everything that has happened since those initial struggles and offer any bits of advice I can to help others who may have struggles with algae. I'll start here, with this video, and my morning of thoughts when the robots on youtube finally got one right and recommended a video I actually wanted to click and watch intently. I would encourage you to click it on and listen to George as you read and then go back and re-watch with the added visuals. When I first setup any sort of a "display tank" I had some pretty high expectations for myself. I had a tank, with good substrate, easy plants, and I wanted to let the plants grow before I did anything else. The idea being it was a planted tank, not an aquarium. I want to have plants in my aesthetic and I wanted to be able to have consistency in my dosing schedule and just enjoy the greenery. I planted the tank, it looks amazing and like 100's of videos I'd seen of aquascapes that led to success. Immediately I had issues with the plants uprooting themselves, not taking hold, melting, and withering away. All of that $ spent on plants was basically a waste. Attempt 2, I did a lot more research on planting depth, tried to ensure they didn't pop out of the substrate and things stayed in place, withered away, melted, and was basically a waste. Attempt 3, I tried to add the anubias from the tubs, convert it to new growth and then add another batch of plants and *hope* they actually take hold. Things were on edge of sustainability.... I can't keep buying plants to fill in this tank and have failures. This is the point when everything started to crash continuously for me. The anubias had BBA, the dwarf hairgrass had brush algae, melt, KH issues, lighting issues, lack of nutrients, and ultimately was not setup for success. Between power failures, my own struggles with consistency, overdosing because I thought it was a lack of nutrients causing the plants to fail and noticing too many shadows on the tank I had to take a step back and really just adjust how I was viewing the entire situation. One of Cory's videos had encouraged consistency, longer time between water changes, a month or several weeks at minimum. I was focusing on consistent weekly water changes and trying to keep that schedule, adjusting my lighting and dosing as a focus for my changes. There was some success to playing with those variables (separately), but ultimately the tank did crash and has struggled. I currently have the lights turned way down and I currently have the dosing set for 2/3 of a dose 2x a week of easy green. I think every sentence above speaks to how frustrated I have been with my inability to grow anything. I know if I add a stem plant in the back, it will help. If I add moss it will help. My struggle is getting enough new growth so that the entirely of the new growth can push out the algae for good. More on this concept later. I have had the tank to a place of stability where the algae is not increasing several times. Weeks of stability, but eventually something happens and it always takes hold again. I have even gone to doubling, tripling the amount of amano shrimp in my tank as a means to passively increase the ability of the tank to clean itself. Through all of these struggles there has been a few nuggets of advice I want to pass along and hope that if anyone is as discouraged as I am, to hold your chin up and try to keep pushing through the algae issues. First, I really want to commend, ecstatically so, the ability of amano shrimp to be great and cleaning algae in a tank. It doesn't matter what it is, they will *eventually* get to it. My best example I can give you is 2 bushes of anubias that have pretty long roots. It's almost like clockwork how they let it fill with BBA, clean it, go elsewhere, and then cycle back to clean those roots. Waking up and seeing those pale bright green roots is one of my favorite things. They can clean any variety of algae and they will do so without needing much of anything besides oxygenation and time. Second, manual removal and manual effort is the only real way to get through a severe algae issue. When it first started I was at a loss because every bit of my anubias was caked in BBA covered leaves. If I remove those leaves, the plant will be encouraged to grow, but have nothing but a rhizome and a few roots to do so. Giving the plant time to do it's work, manually removing the leaves as new ones appear, scraping it off leaves when I can, using a brush on hardscape, scrubbing the hard algae off of the glass and hardscape, and manually taking out every bit of frustration on algae growing on the equipment is the only real way to make progress. It's going to float around the tank and massive water changes will help to siphon out a lot of the floating debris, but it takes constant weekly effort to keep brushing it off and keep pushing it back to get ahead. Especially if the algae is stubborn and persistent. On wood, use a knife or razor blade and scrape it off. Use a sponge or stiff brush on rocks to remove it. Use a soft toothbrush on your leaves and then siphon everything out. Remove the filter, clean it thoroughly, and get ready to do the same thing next week if you need to. Keep doing this, until you get things going the right direction. That is how you give your plants a fighting chance when you're dealing with severe BBA. Third, and I want to say this is my opinion only, I think everything that is green or brown brush algae and green hair algae can simply be stopped by adjusting lighting, dosing, and giving the tank time. There are members here who have algae balls for their tanks as a main feature plant. It's very cool to see. I would prefer moss instead, but I totally understand there can be an aesthetic where something like green hair algae looks nice on the back wall of a tank as it grows in. Manually removing it once, fixing the tank lighting, adjusting dosing, I think will generally fix the vast majority of issues for most tanks. The plants can generally out-compete those two types of algae pretty easily. A lot of people struggle when the brown/green brush algae becomes the BBA variety over time as things worsen. Finally, what do I mean by the chicken and egg thing? Well, this is where I am at now. I have to fix algae so I can have plants, but I can't fix algae because I don't have enough plants. Sometimes plants literally just won't work well in your water. Be it the type of plant and parameters in your water or a situation where those plants came from water that is very different than what you can provide. I think a lot of my own struggles come from water chemistry differences as well as not having the bioload to actually out-compete the algae in question. This is where I go back to my first statement, I simply want to grow some moss.... I am on the verge of getting rid of this stinkin' BBA, it's been a journey and I'm hopeful. Make sure you have enough plants in the tank. That's the final tip. If you're really, severely struggling with plants, add something like PSO that will just out-compete everything in the tank and grow literally.... like a weed. (ref. Goliad Farms and their love of hornwort). The main thing is to keep pushing through the struggle, adapt when you need to, and pay attention to what the tank is telling you. Even daily, try to figure out what is going on. It might mean spending 20-30 minutes sitting there and pondering. It might mean testing 3-5x a week to track how your plants are using fertilizers. Understanding what is going on is critically important and above all be patient and try to give your plants the best chance to grow in. If you need to, consider adding more.

I definitely am not as well! But that's fine. If it looks good to me, I enjoy it, that's all I care about. There's a few places to pick and choose some decent wood. I would try looking at manzanita or ghostwood and see if anything strikes your fancy. Cool stuff.

For anyone who is interested in the above change I made, adapting from a light that was slightly undersized to one that isn't perfect, but more properly sized to the tank itself in terms of PAR reaching the substrate level, I wanted to update and finalize my comments here on my lighting adjustment. I went from a 24" light to a 36" light on my 30" long tank. I'll end up doing a more extensive dive into the issues but I want to provide a "TLDR" final bit of context for everything. I'll quote the original notes from earlier in the thread for anyone who wishes to see them. A few critical notes here: 1. I am very happy that i did this because I feel like I can universally now grow plants that require more intense light. 2. In terms of raw output, not PAR, but actual number of LEDs I think that's a critical factor to keep in mind. 168 LEDs on the 24" vs. 252 on the 36" light. (33% more) What I would recommend based on this, is to lower your settings by that % difference and then monitor how things change after the upgrade. If you have a tank and you're adding a second light, I might also use that same formulation in my own tanks in future. 3. When I was able to focus intently on the lighting and plants, I got the tank to a point of having new growth, then added the new light. I specifically DID NOT want to upgrade the light if I saw the algae outcompeting the new growth. The cycle for me was new growth ---> stable few days ---> algae bloom ---> algae takes over new growth ---> new growth happens again. I have cut the lights pretty significantly each time the algae took over and tried to focus on clean / solid water parameters for the plants.

@OnlyGenusCaps Can you please offer your expertise here to help us with this question? (plants adapting to an open window, artificial vs. natural light) Joe, maybe the best thing is to just shift the light window and treat the window light as your sunrise? I really like this lighting schedule. How are things doing for you?

I don't chop it up, but I do glue it to big flat surfaces. Mopani with moss is one of my favorite things as well as large flat rocks. I don't think I have a picture of it, but I had a piece of mopani that was probably 12" x 16" and it had a big mass of moss on it that started from one little tuft I balled up and glued on. I very, very, very much enjoy it when the moss grows and you see it grab/stick to the surface of the hardscape.

You definitely need SOME blue light. I think the debate is really about how much and what ratio. I would guess this algae showed up just because of some slight imbalance. Could've been dosing one too many days or missed a WC for slightly too long or a span and something got deficient. Manual removal is usually the "best option" as well as any other methods you want to try. Let us know how things are doing. If you would like to know what happens when things go bad.... I unhappily recommend sharing my struggles in the journal I keep.