nabokovfan87

LOL. This is like when your mom says the tupperware she needs is right in front of your face and you argue about it for 5 minutes. Flashbacks.... It is a pretty awesome little neck of the forums. Be sure to read the rules though!

To be fair. mine do not care what a mop is and I've never had a fish lay eggs in a mop. I thought I did a good job making mops. It's ok. One day..... Sounds like my herd of panda's. They'll work it out. They were going crazy, but they've slowed down as their tank got smaller due to moving. I really do enjoy the herd, but I also enjoy the herd right where it's at.

I finally got a Co-Op Towel after seeing Cory hype it up on one of the recent streams. I was using a golf towel I got when I was a kid, nothing special but it had my teams logo on it! I then started using just one of those cheap hand towels I had to put my contacts stuff on in the bathroom. It was a cool color, decent size, and I use it 15x every time I change water. What has been your experience with hand towels and your aquarium maintenance? With the ACO towel?

Well when the mop stays and the plant is moved around.... She won't want her eggs touched. She wants to protect them essentially. This is why pleco caves turn into cory night clubs. Mama cory is the guard and you can't get in the discotech. LOL. I'm guessing this is why some "breeder tanks" are specifically void of plants. Maybe this is why Dean doesn't have them! LOL, no no no, he's said he just can't keep them alive, but it's an interesting thing to consider.

When I first read the OP I literally thought there was just "a lot of stuff" in the bottom of the pond and it was lowering the PH. I don't think you're having KH issues, which is good, so now we just need to really understand what the PH really is. The rain may have been very low in KH/GH and caused a crash. It also could've just been low in PH in general and that with the tannins in the water caused it to drop pretty heavily as well. I don't think it would've caused it to drop to 3.5, but especially with the liquids they could be expired, seperated, or something random causing an error. I trust the ACO and tetra test strips pretty much as equal or better than I do liquid because it's always been accurate for me and doesn't result in as much user error.

Top of the leaves!? That's so interesting. I have 3-4 kinds of anubias. I have the elongated leaves, nana, nana petite, and coffefolia. Out of all of those, and even valisnaria, they tended towards coffefolia and the moss that I had. (It wasn't java moss, but something I got from petco). I am literally sitting here staring down adding a 5th variety of anubias to the tank. It's so interesting! Decisions.... decisions....

So.... Her plan worked and she protected her eggs from poachers. LOL. Nature doing what it should be doing! Smart fish you got there. She will very likely take very good care of her eggs. Drop some methylene blue in the tank and give her a chance 😉 The surface she is laying on is moss or what plant? Yes.... They are definitely "personable" and definitely defiant when they want to be! I try to give them everything, but they aren't happy enough, so I wait for them to tell me they are perfectly happy.

That is a thread I would check out just for information purposes. For your situation, there's a few things we need to narrow down. 1. What is your KH, GH, PH out of the tap? 2. What is your KH, GH, PH after the sample is aerated with an airstone for 24 hours? 3. Is there enough aeration in your pond? 4. What is your KH, GH, and PH in your pond currently. Set a container outside, if it rains again, go out the next morning and test the rain water.

I need an app to alert me. 😂 When I was trying to be very serious about getting them to trigger I was checking temps and then when it was good to be a "cold day" I would open the window and let the cold air rush in. It's one of those things where I just don't have experience with it to know if I'm doing the right things. My focus right now is going from 1 to 2 meals a day, worms and frozen food every other day, not just mostly spirulina foods. Very interesting! I will have to play with this. On "good days" I've been feeding worms just before lights out.

When I had it, it grew insanely tall, very thick, and very much felt like it grew as a matter of out competing everything else in the tank. What is the red/green/blue settings on your light? What is your dosing schedule like and what are you dosing? You shouldn't need the root tabs for PSO. The red growth is usually just due to it getting more/intense light. As long as you're not seeing algae on the leaves itself, I'd trim it, plant the stem, and then propagate it out. It basically just needs trimmed if anything.

Have to say, No UGF Helps! But I do enjoy the whole "reverse pond view" concept.

Temp has to be above a certain level and then it's about time. The lifecycle is very specific and you're treating the tank as well, not just the fish. When I went through it, I lost about 1/2 the tank and was treating it for 3-4 weeks. It was an issue for me because I was going from 70 to a higher temp and trying to hold the temp while the ich hatched out.

My pandas are the same way. Just in general they like to have the right "setup" and then once that is available they spawn almost every night/week. I am trying to get these black corys going now that I have the plants taking hold and the bigger fish out of the tank. They seem to be very weather dependent. First time was a massive storm moved in. Second time was another massive wind storm we had when I saw a lot of behavior but no eggs. I removed the ziss bubble bio, added the skimmer, and I'm working on fixing the tidal to give it that river pattern on it's intake (no skimmer, no midwater intake anymore.

Awesome! That is a great thing to see and hopefully all of the fish "perk up" over the next couple of days with the adjustments.

I give you Cory's best tip! I love this video because it's so true. We always are trying to "figure it out" and sometimes it's just about taking a step back and thinking. It's a good story and I just enjoy a good story when Cory has one to share. 🙂 For otos, I go by their gills and their stomach colors. If they are typically red, they are stressed and I try to drop temp and add oxygen. They definitely can "tolerate" warmer water and do so in the wild, but I try to get them highly oxygenated water because they usually just struggle so hard to have everything perfect. Otos are by far one of my favorite fish that isn't a cory. I have 4 (I think 5 now because I just moved one) otos in my display tank and they are going to be hitting summer temps here. I am hoping I don't lose any. 😕 Tank right now is at 76 degrees when I last checked and it's got nothing in it except for a filter and the light. Every day it gets a little closer to that 110+ degrees outside.

Easy iron works. If you're seeing more deficiencies than you'd want to look into something like dosing more easy green or specific instances where you need to dose a specific micronutrient. Usually going to be RO water or running your tap water through something like the zero water filter. You can do a portion of it and re-test to see what you need to "condition" your water to for WCs

Just potentially to help with your sanity, I'm doing a deep dive into fixing mine. I have been using them for 5+ years or something and I have worked through a lot of setup issues. Here's my tips/tricks/methods and please feel free to post there or DM to ask me anything you need about fixing the issues you specifically are experiencing. I'll read through everything up above, but i just want to note that the Otos probably want to be slightly cooler temp. That may be one factor, the other is usually nitrates (or any of your nitrogen cycle water parameters) as well as aeration. Cooler water increases oxygenation as well, which helps the smaller species out. Finally, with otos, it's almost always going to be a food issue, occurring slowly over time. Your hillstream loaches are also going to enjoy cooler temperatures and higher flow than the rest of the tank stocking. If you could, I'd put the otos and loaches with your white clouds in a "cooler" tank (70-74 degrees or so). The biggest thing is just knowing how the fish are kept before they get to you. We all feel bad for all the fix in the big box store, but honestly, every one of my fish if from a petco/petsmart because that is all we have here. I totally understand the frustration and I ask about bettas source just to try to understand how much of a "risk" it is where you would be getting the fish in to your care severely stressed or suffering. They get into your care, try to be recuperated, but it's ultimately a matter of time in some cases. If you want to keep a betta, perhaps the local shop keeps them better and does QT with them effectively for diseases. You should be able to ask the shop about how they care for them. Second to that, I would recommend aquahuna for a betta and plan to get one their myself (or a ram!). How are they during feeding? What do you feed them with? It might be difficult for them to eat some foods due to their size (smaller feedings, 2-3x per day may solve that) as well as something like a flake food or powder food might be easier for them to ingest. The Xtreme nano pellets might be perfect, but I recommend turning off the filter for 15-20 minutes when feeding because of the skimmer on the tidal. So they might have an issue with the betta bug bites. Do they seem to eat them easily enough? I'd definitely push towards feeding them 2x a day minimum for nano type fish. I'm not sure what this means. Every 3-4 months? Right away I think a few things should happen. This is to get the tanks to "reset" so to speak so we can track down what exactly is going on. 1. 50% water change on every tank for the next 3-5 days. If nitrates are above 20 ppm, change water again the following 24 hours. If Nitrates are below 40, you might lower the volume to 30% every day until the nitrates drop below 20 ppm. Ultimately, we want to keep these at a max of 20, but it's going to usually fluctuate between 20-40 depending on a variety of factors. 2. Weekly gravel vac on every tank. Even if you just top off a tank or something, if it looks like there's 40+ ppm nitrates weekly, gravel vac weekly and try to get the waste out of the water column. If you have nitrates at 10 ppm, then you might gravel vac every other week. This is going to depend on tank bioload and how much is being fed. 3. After every tank is given 50% wc today/tomorrow, I would dose salt and then offer flake food an hour later. Some fish are thin/struggling and it might be a vitamin shot so to speak to get them going in the right direction. There's a very awesome video on how to get through the issues you're going through. Ultimately I think your fish will do a lot better once things start to improve. I don't think this is something that can't be recovered from. There is hope! The post you were asking about mentioned "not doing gravel vacs" and ultimately it was because of the type of substrate in those tanks and because the mulm/waste is absorbed into the soil substrate to provide the nutrition for root feeding plants. As far as it comes to a regime for caring for my tanks, this is what I do in mine: Once a week, I test every tank for water parameters. I am doing this weekly (sometimes multiple times a week) because I am having water hardness issues and trying to get plants to take hold. It's been a fight! Once a week I will gravel vac lightly, this is just to remove waste from the tank in areas where I know there's going to be fish laying and a LOT of waste in those spots. I have some clown plecos too that leave a lot of waste and it needs to be removed so I can tell if my corydoras are eating or not. This takes no more than 5-10 minutes on my tanks (for both tanks). The only thing that takes time is moving from tank to tank and moving the bucket/stool. On days where I gravel vac I will also scrape the front glass for algae. You can scrape all sides of the tank, but only the front is really critical to enjoyment. In tanks with otos, I only scrape the front glass. If water parameters test ok, the tank "looks fine" I might skip the gravel vac and just change water only. Gravel vac at minimum is every 2 weeks. Once a week I change 30-50% of the water. Once a month, I deep clean the filter, impeller, intake, and pump housing. Once a month I will clean the lid, light, and try to clean the front glass off from water spots.

All good! On the ACO youtube channel you have about 10+ "master breeder" videos. I usually search for that and go through the list. The oldest one is going to have the most detail I think. Then every time Cory re-visits, you might get another tidbit.

It could just be the lighting / camera showing things in a certain light, but it seems like the plants are having some struggles. The mass of plants in the middle seems yellowish, in general. Same with the plants on the left. The anubias on the right looks good to me. When you do play with lighting, I think there's more going on (and I don't know the solution to these issues, but it looks nutrient based). Washed out colors (in general) and dark veins on the leaves with yellowing leaves. The ones with green look to be doing ok. Red, I think people may want to see the leaves and view for any issues with nutrients. Your algae issues might just be that the plants aren't growing fast enough to out compete with the algae. I've had some success with dosing more often, but also providing cleaner water at the same time. I would change water and then dose right after to ensure when I'm seeing nitrates on a test, it's purely the dosing chemicals and not bioload issues. Green veins with Pale leaves could be: Magnesium: If leaves are cupping Iron: If leaves are not cupping

I know others will disagree, but I think minimum for that light is going to be 50%. for my repens I have it cranked to 80% (29G tank). For this one, because it's a lot shallower, as long as the light is over the repens, I would think 40-50% "works". Of note, you're also gettting some loss due to the light being far away from the surface of the water. Even though it's a shallow tank, there's some refraction loss going on. https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/snells-law (This might be a fun tool to play with) To be clear, I say "others will disagree" because there's a lot of people that run the lights very low to avoid algae. I totally understand it. I've had major plant loss due to running the light too low. Height of the tank issues, etc.

Mine are "colony bred" so it dictates a lot about survival rates. when I do see a fry, I've only ever lost one because I moved decor around. If you follow the "no substrate" and trying to hatch everything, I would just follow Dean's method and leave it at that. He's perfected it. 100% I feel like most days I don't know anything! LOL Some amazing tanks from everyone here.

I've got two clowns in my tank, never had any noticeable wear on the wood. They definitely chew on it, but it's not something where the wood just magically goes away. It would probably take 5-15 years depending on what variety of wood you're talking. Soft woods generally aren't recommended and hard woods take a while to break down. The sera spirulina tabs and mixing the wood with soilent green seems to be a favorite of mine too.

Here's some examples of how to handle it.

One of the meds I was looking at yesterday was specifically for treating "cloudy eyes". Yes, this one. Treatment for popeye. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/collections/fish-medicine/products/mardel-maracyn Needless to say I think there's a few things that NEED TO be done right away on this tank. A SEVERE gravel vac needs to happen and it needs to be done weekly or just remove the substrate. Second to that, I'd recommend using a canister filter, clean it monthly. I'd also recomment removing all the decor and adding something like vallisnaria. If the fish will destroy it, something like micro sword might work. Leave the pirate ship if they would like to for theme purposes, but you really need something in there to help with bioload and health of the fish. Best thing is probably to rehome these fish and find something more applicable for the tank itself and the care people are willing to provide. It's unfortunate, but it's going to be something where these fish likely will outgrow this tank if they are properly cared for.

From everything I see in your photos, the tanks are absolutely beautiful and I'm very sorry you're having issues. I promise you, we have all been there! I haven't been able to grow a plant in what feels like 5 years, despite many efforts. I want to take a step back and ask about each tank and your maintenance routine. How often are you changing water, what %, and how often are you cleaning the filter/gravel vac? How often are you cleaning impellers? My other question is just going to be, where do you usually get your betta's from? I would highly recommend bolivian rams. Similar care, you can literally use everything you have, but swap 1 betta for 1 bolivian ram. It's a fun fish with great personality! What is your feeding regime?