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memorywrangler

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Everything posted by memorywrangler

  1. Both look male to me, unfortunately.
  2. There have only been a few changes in the last few months: I moved in the bettas, but they had been happy elsewhere for many months and the tanks they came from are fine. I started feeding from a new daphnia/moina culture that I got a club auction. I think the mother culture was outside. #2 seems maybe worrisome? but I've been feeding it to all my tanks, and I haven't had problems anywhere else.
  3. This is after a large water change I did last night, so the nitrites are lower than usual: nitrite = 0 nitrate = 0 ammonia = 0 kh=7 gh=10 pH=7.2 78F two sponge filters I use Prime on all water changes. The substrate is black diamond sand.
  4. In short: My 22 gallon planted tank seems to have some sort of disease established in it. Most of the fish are dead or probably dying. What do I do with/to the tank to make in habitable again? Longer version: I've had two deaths over the last few weeks. Both were guppies -- one had always been a little on the sickly side and had visible pineconing before it died and other had suffered an injury a month or two prior and had seemingly recover. I don't know if she was pineconing or not, since her body was bit beat up when I found it. I chalked these up to bad luck and complications from the injury. But now both of the female bettas in the tank are listless and pineconing, so I suspect they have all been sick with the same thing. I'm transferring the bettas to a hospital tank and I'll try to treat them, but I'm not optimistic. My main question now is: What do I do with the tank? it's well-established with lots of plants that I like and that are, frankly, going to be expensive to replace. So what do I do (short of stripping it and starting over) to the tank to make it safe to re-stock? If it helps, the only other fish in the tank at the moment is a small pleco that I could relocate while treating the tank. Thanks
  5. None taken. I'm under strict orders to keep everything in my man/fish cave 🙂. (Except for one nice display tank in the living room).
  6. I did this for a long time for moina (like small daphnia). The water change easiness is nice, but there were two problems I ran into: After about 18 months the containers develop cracks due to fatigue and started to leak. I couldn't clearly see what was going on in the cultures. I shifted to 2.5 gallon aquariums, which are only marginally more expensive and allow a much better view.
  7. This is such an intriguing option! I tried it, but it never worked. The worms would just sort of slowly dwindle away. I think maybe my scrubbers had some kind of cleaning agent on them. Maybe I'll give it another go later in the year.
  8. Two years ago, I returned to fish keeping after a 30 year hiatus, and quickly became enamored with the idea of raising live foods. I had daydreamed about them I was 12 or 13 and read about exotica like “daphnia” and “scuds”. I had no idea how to acquire, much less raise, them. Now, with the internet and a grown up’s pay check, those and many other live foods are within reach. In the past two years I have tried my hand at a bunch of different live foods. At times I’ve been more excited about the live foods than the fish I was feeding them too and have frequently found myself with more live food that fish to feed them to. I even bought a microscope (ok, maybe two microscopes) so I could see what was going on. I thought I would share my experience, impressions, and especially useful tips I found or discovered along the way. Here they are in roughly the order I tried them: Vinegar Eels These were my first. So easy. Apple cider vinegar and apples in a bottle on the shelf. Tip: The method usually given for harvesting them (with the filter floss and fresh water in narrow-mouthed bottle) is overly complex. I just sucked some vinegar out into a brine shrimp net, rinsed them a bit, and dumped them in the tank. Infusoria Infusoria are a great science project: It’s good fun watching a jar of weak vegetable broth process from clear to cloudy with bacteria to clear with tiny paramecium motes of food swimming around. I had great fun looking at infusoria under my microscope. But it can be an unpredictable and smelly hassle, too. Sometimes the cultures go bad, and it can be hard to start cultures at the right moment so you have infusoria ready when your fry need it. Still, it’s cheap and readily available. Tip: Don't use cabbage or brussels sprouts to start your infusoria, or it will be extra stinky. Moina — Round 1 These guys caught my eye from the start, since they are small, I keep mostly small fish, and you can order the eggs from Geenwater Farms on Amazon. The eggs worked, and pretty soon I had a nice little colony of them growing in two 2.5-gallon drink dispensers. It was a hit-and-miss process that you can read about here: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/31271-any-ideas-to-refine-this-moinadaphnia-culture-approach/ I tried all sort of things: Co-culturing with snails and/or black worms. Feeding the snails vegetable and watermelon scraps. Growing aquaponic strawberries with them. Adding corn husks to increase surface area which some articles suggested would be useful. Blasting them with grow lights 20 hours a day. I also tried and tried to grow some green water, but to no avail. Well, almost no avail: I could grow green water (https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/29405-crashed-moina-cultures-converted-to-accidental-green-water/), but my moina wouldn’t eat whatever variety of algae it was. In the end, it worked ok, but the cultures would crash every 6 weeks or so, which was annoying. Eventually, the drink dispensers developed cracks, I got frustrated, and I gave up (for a time…). Black Worms I tried black worms at about the same time as moina — first keeping them in a bowl with an air stone and then graduating to bigger and bigger containers. These would crash on me too — all of sudden they would all just disappear. I thought maybe they had escaped en-masse, but I never found any evidence of that. They just vanished. I did some experiments about how to prevent this: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/31877-suggestions-including-salt-to-prevent-blackworm-culture-crashes/. My main conclusion is that building a self-sustaining culture of black worms is pretty hard. They don’t grow that fast, so you'd need a very large population to generate enough biomass to be self-sustaining. But it is pretty easy to keep them alive for months (and get some growth). This has two advantages: 1) I can buy them in larger quantities and 2) I can weather the occasional shortage (There was a really bad/long national shortage last winter). Most useful resource: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/20459-big-bad-blackworm-tower-%E2%80%93-culture-journal/ Tips: Black worms are a widely-used model organism in biology, so there are 100s of research papers written about them. Unfortunately, very few provide practical advice about raising them. Instead, most suggest the “paper towel method” which is a completely useless mess. Just use some gravel and a sponge filter. Tips: According to one source, black worms often come infested with external parasites, which can cause cultures to crash. The solution is to soak the worms in a 5-6% salt solution for 20 minutes. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve had no more crashes. Interesting fact: Black worms eat head down. So, when you see them sticking out of the substrate, that’s their rear end and gills. Grindal Worms I was excited about these — small, supposedly easy to culture, and definitely easy to purchase at my LFS. The only draw back is that you have to feed them every day, which is a hassle. I just fed mine cat food, and they’d do great… for a while. Then something would go wrong: Mites, fruit flies, mold, nematodes (https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/34442-whats-going-on-in-my-grindal-worm-culture/), god knowns what, and the culture would fail. It was super frustrating, because it seemed like it should be so easy. They just would never multiply enough. Maybe I harvested too much too early. Overall, very discouraging, especially since they are great size for many of the fish I keep. Tip: My LFS sold cultures with an unsalted (and preferably raw) peanut in it. It would keep the cultures going if they didn’t feed them for a day or two. I’ve never seen this tip anywhere else, and it is really helpful. Paramecium (photo credit: Wikipedia) Trying to avoid the hassle of infusoria, I ordered a pure culture of paramecium from a biological supply company. The idea is paramecium are bigger, more nutritious, and more reliable than infusoria. I didn’t really find this to be the case. Mostly I found that it was really hard to keep my paramecium culture from being contaminated and then overrun by other, smaller ciliates (which is basically what’s in infusoria), which sort of defeats the purpose. Tips: Like black worms, paramecium have been studied ad infinitum by scientists. Also, like black worms the guidance for culturing them is annoying. There are two standard methods frequently cited in the scientific literature. The first involves making a tea of timothy hay (whatever that is). The second suggests boiling a precise number of wheat berries in a volume of water. Both of these methods are needlessly fussy. For the first, I have no idea where to buy timothy hay. For the second, wheat berries, while cheap on a per-ounce basis, can be hard to find in small quantities. (Pro tip: you can buy “farrow” in the bulk food section of grocery stores. It's just wheat berries). A better solution is to just throw in a piece of dried, uncooked pasta. Snails I had a pea puffer tank for an almost a year and raised rams horn and bladder snails for them. Nothing could really be easier. You can feed them anything and they breed like mad. Mine seemed to like watermelon rind alot. Scuds (aka Gammarus) I got the scuds for the pea puffers too. They take a while to get established because their breeding cycle is about 90 days, but once they are going, they can’t be stopped. I mean they really can’t be stopped, even if you wanted to stop them. They are like cockroaches. Every tank I have is now infested with them. My conclusion is that scuds are fine if you have enough fish to keep their population in check, but this can take a significant number of fish. Also, they grow to be pretty large, so you need pretty big fish to keep them under control. For instance, my nine pea puffers in a 20-long did fine, but when I replaced the puffers with two female bettas and a 6 guppies the scuds got out of hand. When they are out of control they will eat everything. For me, they have eaten: The leaves on all my java moss Many of my stem plants (starting at the roots) Some of by Anubis Most of my crypts. Some of my java ferns. A bunch of black worms when they got into my blackwork culture (I have video of this somewhere. Scuds are savage) Corydoras eggs The breeding colony of assassin snails in one of my tanks. They also have a big downside compared to moina or daphnia: They spend most of their time hiding rather than being out one the water column where fish can easily find them. For complicated life reasons, I’m going to have to shut down all my tanks in a few months, which I think will be my only chance of getting rid of them. I don’t plan on inviting them back. They are too hard to control. Tip: To harvest I would float a piece of zucchini in the tank. After a couple hours it would be covered with scuds and I’d lift it out with a brine shrimp net. Tip: In the picture you can see a blue scud that showed up in one of my tanks. Anyone want to selectively breed the next colorful crustacean sensation? These could be the next cherry shrimp! Brine Shrimp I came late to brine shrimp, since the daily grind harvesting and hatching seemed a bit intimidating, and I really wanted moina to work. But I started breeding fish and moina couldn't keep up. Overall, it’s very clear why brine shrimp are so popular — They are no less work than all the other kinds of live food (and maybe more), but they are much, much more reliable. At first, I used those black flying saucer hatcheries, which work great for small quantities. Then (unwilling to pay for the Ziss) I moved on to a hanging beverage bottle setup. After some experimentation, I developed what I think is a reasonably nice setup and routine for hatching and harvesting. Tip: You can do much better than 3/16 airline tubing to drain your hatchery. My system uses 3/8" push-fit tubing (like RODI system fittings, but bigger) and a 3D-printed adapter to inject air. It can drain my 1-liter hatchery in 21 seconds (vs. 63 seconds for the 3/16 airline tubing based system). Take that, Ziss! Tip: There is actually difference between different brands of brine shrimp eggs. I spent too much time investigating. You can read about that here: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/34636-investigating-differences-in-brine-shrimp-eggs/. Easy Infusoria During one of my fish breeding adventures, I was using the some ultra-fine fry food. I was probably over-feeding because a lot of fell to bottom of the small enclosure I had the fry in. I noticed that over a couple days the food gave rise to whitish layer on floor of the container. Out of curiosity, I stuck some under my microscope and found it to be teaming with ciliates and other infusoria-like critters. So, that’s how I make infusoria now: I sprinkle in some food when the fry are out of their eggs and wait for the white stuff to develop. The fry can eat the food or the critters. I found that my Live Food Food (see below) works fine for this too. Green Water I did eventually get green water going, but by accident. I had an idle 20-long grow out tank that I neglected after selling the fry and low-and-behold it turned emerald green. And this time it was the chlorella -- the good kind of green water. I didn't really know what to do with it, though. I used some to start a new moina culture (see below -- it worked fine) and gave a way some at the local fish club, but it doesn't seem to be needed to keep the moina alive, so I ended up dumping most of it. Moina — Round 2 (w/ Daphnia) After all of the above frustration, I found myself day-dreaming about moina again. This time around I bought two, 2.5 gallon aquariums and set them up with heaters, air-lift tubes for circulation, and permanent siphons and with a valve so I could harvest them easily. My eggs had apparently gone stale and wouldn’t hatch, so I ended up buy a mixed culture of moina and daphnia at my local fish club auction. I’m keeping it simple this time: No intentional co-culturing — just the moina and the daphnia. And all I feed them my Live Food Food (recipe below). Shifting from drink dispensers to aquariums was a huge win since I can actually clearly see what’s going on inside. So far, so good. It’s been two months and nothing has crashed. The moina and daphnia seem to coexist just fine. The main difference with my approach this time is based on a detail in this excellent article (https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FA024) that I had overlooked: They don’t suggest raising moina as a long-term, self-sustaining culture. They suggest doing it as a batch culture. So, this time, I’m expecting them to crash and I’m prepared to strip the tank and start again (which is why I have two cultures going). By accident, these cultures also produce significant quantities of dero worms and seed shrimp. Tip: Only feed moina and daphnia when the water is crystal clear. This prevents fouling. Tip: Bending acrylic tubing is fun! The overflows are made from 3/4" acrylic tubing that I heated and bent with a heat gun. Then I epoxied a drip irrigation valve to one end. The air valve at the top lets me draw water up to get it into siphon. Then I can dispense at will! I also built the airlifts by bending and drilling smaller acrylic tubing. Live Food Food Finally, I thought I’d share my recipe for my Live Food Food. It’s a tweaked version a recipe from Aqarimax Pets ( https://www.aquarimax.com/). They suggest mixing it with water which is a hassle, but I just keep in a plastic jar with holes drilled in the top and sprinkle it into my tanks. This is what I feed daphnia, moina, and black worms. I also use it to create infusoria too. Ingredients: 1 part garbanzo bean flour 1 part pea protein 1 part brown rice flour 2 parts spirulina powder Instructions: Combine. Mix. Feed. Notes The first three ingredients are available in the bulk food or specialty flour section and are super cheap. Spirulina powder is a little more expensive and available from Amazon. Here’s a rough nutritional analysis: Protein — 40.55% Carbohydrate — 40.76% Fat — 6.13% Fiber — 5.22% It's roughly similar to some commercial fish foods I looked up. The Future As I mentioned above, I have to shut down my all my tanks in a few months, but I should be back in business (scud-free) next summer. I think my first big project is going to be to build some 5-gallon moina/daphnia cultures into a sump+refugium+auto-feeding setup to simplify the feeding of micro-predators like scarlet badis, indostomus paradoxus, and freshwater pipefish. I have a forty-gallon tank that would be perfect for it.
  9. @Guppysnail provided me some "San Francisco Strain" eggs (Thanks!) from brine shrimp direct and I've added them to the comparison. Here's the data: I apparently didn't gather data for the San Francisco _brand_ eggs. I found them expensive and hard to hatch. I estimated volume by computing a the volume of an ellipsoid. Obviously not a perfect measurement, but it gives some idea of their relative sizes in 3D. The San Francisco Variety shrimp are a bit shorter but also more variable than the normal BSD shrimp. The egg size for the SF variety are noticeably more variable. So, all in all: COOP eggs are easily the biggest and produce the biggest shrimp. Normal BSD eggs are more consistent than BSD SF. BSD SF are more variable, so there are probably some smaller shrimp in there. For now, I guess I'm sticking with COOP eggs, but I did notice that the BSD SF eggs seem to hatch pretty fast for me, so maybe I'll use them in emergencies.
  10. Quick update: From my original group of ~34 fish, I sold all but 3 on a combination of Vivvy, eBay, and Aquabid. My conclusion: selling fish online is not a simple or quick task. I got about $10/fish for them. Of the several I kept, one has finally colored up as a male: He's about 2cm long, and we are currently at just about exactly 3 months post-spawning. To recap, I had three females. I lost two of them for unknown reasons, which is stressful. Further adding to my concern is that the female doesn't seem to be interested in my big male (and father of current crop). There is some spawning behavior but so far, no eggs. Here's that male (note the very parallel stripes). His stomach is a little sunken despite abundant food. Maybe has a parasite?: Picked up this little male 2 weeks ago because he had some interesting non-parallel stripes: Here's what he looks likes after gorging on brine shrimp for 2 weeks: Interestingly, he's only slightly larger than the fry that is just coloring up. I also find it interesting that the fry also has non-parallel stripes. Maybe it's a juvenile marking thing? So maybe I'll trying spawning this guy...
  11. I think the universe is telling me something again. I have this idle grow out tank that's sprouted green water by accident: I put some of it under the microscope and it's tiny: The cells are about 2.5um (0.0025mm) in diameter. Is this Chlorella?
  12. I can try this again, but until about 2 weeks ago, I was on a shorter photo period and had the lights at 60%. It hadn't been helping much.
  13. This is my 24” deep 30g tank that’s been up for about 4 months. It’s “mid tech”— it has a meager yeast-based CO2 system, I fertilize regularly with Easy Green and root tabs. I have a coop light that’s on 9hrs/day at 100%. It’s got an HOB and a sponge filter. It’s planted with spiral Val, jungle Val, pearl weed, and and dwarf sag. So why are the Val and sag taller? They grow, but then the tops of the Val turn brown, die and break off. Pearl weed grows great, and the Val and sag spread by stay short.
  14. I’ve never seen juveniles for sale. They’re quite drab. My impression, and I could be wrong, is it most people buy a scarlet badis to have a pretty little red fish in their nano planted tank. And they serve that role very well! Fully developed, dominant males are quite striking. But, yes, From what I’ve seen, if you went to a fish store and purchase 20 Scarlet Badis, it is very likely that all of them will be male. The way I have gotten females, is to go to the pet store and stare at the tank for a long time looking for fish that have no red on them whatsoever. They might be females, or they might be “sleeper males.” So, you take them home and grow them out for a little while. If they develop color they are male, if they develop eggs they are, female. Then several months of searching across two local fish stores, I managed to find four this way.
  15. That's an excellent question. I wondered that for a long time. There are three theories I have heard: There's something weird about sex ratios, so mostly male are produced in captivity. This seems unlikely, but I guess I'm about to find out 🙂 There's an international cabal of scarlet badis breeders systematically refusing to sell females. This is the most amusing option. Also far fetched. I've heard females are pretty easy to find in parts of Europe for whatever reason. The females are quite drab, so most people don't want them, so the importers don't import them. #3 seems like the simplest answer, especially since they are not very a lucrative fish. "Unsexed" scarlet badis (almost all of which are male) sell in my LFS for $9 and online for $10-$15 (not terribly much more than, say, nice live bearers), so it's not like discus, peacock cichlids, or those zebra plecos where there's big money to be made in breeding. I haven't looked carefully, but casual observation shows that even though peacock females are drab, there's a pretty good market for them. Finally, I think badis lovers enjoy the thrill of the hunt. I'm trying to sell mine and I'm in contact with some other breeders doing the same. We all agree that the actual demand for females is much lower than we expected based on the traffic in badis-themed discussion groups on line. These groups consists largely of people asking if a fish looks female and bemoaning the lack of females. I think buying female badis is probably not as fun, especially since breeding them is nothing terribly special (they spawn easily and fry are pretty robust, although tiny). That said, one breeder reportedly sold two females for $100 each, which seems nuts to me (but I will probably have some pretty-certain females in a few weeks, and if anyone wants to pay me $100 for, I'll be happy to oblige 🙂
  16. Here's an especially pretty picture from a couple weeks ago.
  17. Latest update. We are now at 10 weeks. I pulled 6 fry and took some pictures. Some are the same fish. They are beginning to get stripes. I've also had decent luck selling them: I've been selling them in unsexed groups of 3 for $36 or 6 for $60. So far I've sold 3 groups. I won't be quitting my day job just yet...
  18. Well, I sold off a whole bunch of adolescent platys for a pittance of store credit at my LFS and picked up some San Francisco Bay Brand brine shrimp eggs. I bought the 6gram vial for $10 -- so $1.60/gram -- which is bonkers (fortunately, the vial is nice...). They also sell an 80g jar for $24.99 -- $0.30/gram. For comparison, my BSD eggs are $0.10/gram (for 8oz), and COOP eggs are $0.22/g (for 100g). Just looking at them, the eggs look very similar to the Brine Shrimp Direct eggs. I set the new eggs up with my normal recipe, and after 24 hours the results were deeply disappointing -- very low hatch rate so far and it seems like 90% of the eggs sink. I won't write them off just yet -- I put them back in the hatchery for another 12 hours to see what develops. Some hatched, though, so I can compare sizes. They are very similar to the BSD: BTW, if anyone has some of BSD's San Francisco Strain (https://www.brineshrimpdirect.com/brine-shrimp-eggs/san-francisco-strain-brine-shrimp-eggs/), and wanted to ship me a tablespoon of them (I imagine normal USPS would be fine), I'm happy to do those too. Right now, however, I have far more brine shrimp eggs than I can reasonably use.
  19. The nearest parallel seems to me to be selective breeding in bettas. There are some similarities: Dramatic sexual dimorphism which seems like it might complicate things since it's hard to tell what genes the female is carrying The males might need to be raised separately. Not so much due to aggression, but to let them fully develop their coloring. Colony breeding doesn't really seam viable (although I have heard of baby's just appearing in some badis tanks, Im not sure how efficient it would be). it also seems like there would be a reasonable market for fancy badis. I'm shocked at how many my LFS seems to go through.
  20. I'm pondering a selective breeding project to try to develop some interesting variations in coloring/finage scarlet badis. I've never done anything like this before, and I'm curious about two things: What experiences other people have had: How many generations did it take to see some results? How challenging/frustrating was it? How large a breeding population did you have to maintain? Resources (like a book rather than blog post) about genetics with respect to selective breeding. thanks!
  21. OK, so the test doesn't exist yet, but help me build it. The idea would be to award points based on different aspects of your engagement/obsession with keeping fish. My current proposed list of questions is below. Please suggest additions and I'll edit accordingly. 1 point for each aquarium you currently have running. 1/2 point for each aquarium that you have empty "just in case". 1 point for every 40 gallons of water currently in your tanks. 1 point for each variety of prepared food you regularly feed. 2 points for each variety of frozen food your regularly feed. 3 points for each variety of live food you regularly feed. 2 points for each variety of water you regularly use in your aquariums/fish room that require some kind of preparation other than dechlorination (e.g., RODI, brackish, salt, hard water for African cichlids) 1 point for each tank with CO2 1 additional point for each tank where CO2 is regulated (i.e., not yeast-based or chemical generator) 1 point for each species of fish you have raised to maturity. 1 point for each "grow out tank" you keep 1 point for each species-only tank you keep. 1 point for each 100 comments posted on this Aquarium Coop Forum. 1 point for each cycled filter you have on hand, just in case. 1 point for each aquarium you have built yourself. 1 point for each aquarium stand you have built. 5 points if you have a multi-tank auto-water change system. 5 points if you have a air supply "loop" for many tanks. 10 points if you have structurally modified your home to accommodate your fish tanks. 10 points if you been collecting in the wild. 1 point for each city you've been to and visited the LFS as a tourist activity. 1 point for each $100 you've sold of fish in the last year. 2 points if you regularly attend a fish club auction. Award yourself one point for taking this quiz.
  22. Mine are the "Premium Grade Brine Shrimp Eggs". I haven't tried their San Francisco strain. I've also seen "San Francisco Bay Brands" eggs. Maybe I should try both? This is clearly getting out of hand... 🙂
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