memorywrangler

Do you know what the problem is with lapis? I had great plans for lapis in a shell dweller tank...

I haven't but, I probably will.

My "Brand X" is BSD.

I had been using Coop eggs, but I ran out, looked around and some other promising brands. I thought I'd share some of my observations and measurements. First, they seem to hatch about the same. I use rock salt for a salinity of about 25ppt (1.017 specific gravity @ 77F) and tsp of baking soda per liter, which gets my Ph to about 8.5. I use two water bottle hatcheries that hold about 900ml each. And heat them each with a 5W that's on for 20 minutes out of every hour, which keeps it around 80F. I get good hatches in 24 hours. I took some measurements of the eggs and nauplii: Coop eggs are an average of 0.28mm in diameter after 24 hours in water. Brand X is 0.20mm. Coop nauplii are 0.53mm long and 0.19mm wide, on average. Brand X is 0.5mm by 0.15mm. That 0.05 mm reduction in width seems small, but by a very crude estimate, it suggests that the coop nauplii have 70% more volume than brand X. Brand X nauplii subjectively look much smaller than coop nauplii. I know some people say that smaller brine shrimp can be eaten by smaller fry, but the size difference (in terms of how big a mouth you would need) seems not that large. The biggest difference between the two, though, comes in how they shells (don't) separate from the nauplii. The Coop eggs, I get very few sinking shells. But with brand X, I get lots of sinkers and it plugs up the fancy RO-style valves on the bottom of my hatcheries. It's very annoying. In test tubes, I tried increasing salinity to get the sinkers to float, but it was no use. I went as high 44ppt (1.031 SG) salinity and they still sank. 😞

Alright, I've been experimenting with tying (rather than rubber-banding) bags and I've notice that tying them doesn't seem to create a perfect seal -- I can squeeze the bag up side down and water will drip out very slowly. Should I be worried about that?

Thanks! very useful. How do you decide when to use breather bags or when to use "normal" bags?

Young scarlet badis.

I'm getting ready to ship fish for the first time, and I'd like it to be a success and avoid as much trial and error as possible. I've read this: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/how-to-ship-live-fish But I'd love to hear what other do, preferably with details like where to get good bags and other supplies, if you have any particular tips or tricks that work well for you. Thanks.

I grabbed this photo from my grindal worm to verify that the little white specks are eggs. But what I found is confusing. In the photo we have: A: An egg cocoon B: An egg cocoon with newly hatched worms inside. C : An adult grindal worm D : A young grindal worm about the same size as the ones in the cocoon E: The Mystery and point of this question -- a much smaller worm of some kind. Is 'E' a tiny grindal worm or some other species? Maybe some kind of nematode? There are lots of them if I scan around with my microscope.

Alas, all the eggs seemed to have died. They got all encrusted with ciliates maybe mold. One held on until yesterday, but this morning the eggs membrane was split open and the fry was gone. I've looked and looked and can't find it anywhere, so I think it got eaten. Next time I'll go the "clean" hatching route with methylene blue. Live and learn.

I have 3 eggs that seem viable. The fourth landed in the sand, is covered in sand grains, and now has critters inside it, so I think it's a goner. The egg is 1.6mm in diameter. Their appearance has not changed at all since they were laid, but the embryos have started moving, as you can seed in the linked video. There's been no more spawning, unfortunately.

Thanks for the pointers! My breeder box is one of the hang-on-the-side-with-a-pump to bring water in from the main tank, so I think things should be pretty stable. Interestingly, something about the flow pattern of the breeder box causes micro-fauna to collect in there which will hopefully be good eating. I'll add some moss for good measure.

Well, leaving them in place turns out not to be possible -- I lost one to an assassin snail. Lesson learned... So, the three remaining eggs are in a breeder box. Here's two of them.

My C. habrosus spawned ahead of schedule. Any tips on caring for the eggs/fry would be welcome! I bought a group of 6 small C. habrosus a couple months ago and grew them out in my community tank. It looks like I have 4 males and 2 females. A few weeks ago, moved them to new 5 gallon on my desk with a honey gourami so I could enjoy their antics and maybe get them to spawn. I've been conditioning them on black worms, BBS, and grindal worms for a couple weeks while they got settled into their new tank. I had read I should do cool, soft water changes, so I was going to purchase some RO water, but I didn't a routine WC last night and found four eggs this morning! They stuck them in random spots, so I suspect their may be more. They are a little ahead of my research and planning, so if anyone has any tips for caring for the eggs and fry, that would be really helpful!

I took another census today. I didn't lose any while I was gone, but I found one corpse today, which is not too surprising: A few of them have looked sickly for a while. They are growing well, and looking very badis-like. Everything is going smoothly. Lots of BBS. Now I just have to start thinking about what to do with them...

I think I’ll try that. No one around here has daphnia available now. For some reason it’s only available during the cooler months. I’ve had moina cultures on and off, but they recently crashed.

Here's some more data. Clearly I have too much time on my hands. The thing I'm happiest about is that I seem to have had almost no mortality. I get different numbers when I count, but the max has always been 34 or 35. The bad news is that I have to go out of town from Sunday to Tuesday, and I don't have a good way to feed them. I think I might dump them in with their mother and my two other females. They are a tank full of java moss which has lots to eat. I'm going be sorry to not have such a close eye on them though. Growth rate: Length distribution on the 2023-08-14 Here's the underlying photo for the histogram: They are even beginning to look like badis:

I think the universe is trying to tell me something: Both of my moina culturing jugs failed within about 10 minutes of each other. Fortunately, it was while I filling them, so it wasn't a huge mess. I would just decide to be done with it, but then I was reminded of why I like moina so much in the first place: I have some fry to feed and I'm going out of town for three days. With moina, I could just dump them all in and the fry would be fine. Now it looks like they are going to have to tough it out -- and an extra 24 hours too for me to get brine shrimp going when I return.

Not so tiny now. I think all 34 are all taking BBS. Now I just have to feed them four times a day.

It's been a while, and my moina project has become kind of a disaster. A few things have happened: My efforts to culture green water have failed. I stopped short of ordering a chlorella culture. The exception to #1 is in containers where my moina live. The water is pea-soup green, but the moina have not been doing well. Their numbers will spike after a big water change and then quickly crash. They don't seem to eat the green water. I have a scud infestation, and I think they might be eating the eggs? Getting rid of the scuds and keeping them a way is a big challenge because I have scuds everywhere. It's mostly on purpose, but they are in the water storage buckets I use to supply all my tanks. At this point, I'm either going to batch culture them in clean water (grow out, feed them powdered food, harvest until the crash, tear down, and repeat), or reclaim the space in my "fish room" and just hatch brine shrimp continually. It's been pretty frustrating. At the time, I thought the cyclops would eat the moina, but I think the variety of cyclops I have are way too small for that. Now, it's a big free for all in there and that was working for a while, but as I said in my previous post it's been a disaster lately.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Pointing the pump outlet at the surface created a lot more surface movement than I wanted, so I ended up building a little airlift pump instead. The fish seem happier with the gentler flow.

I'm worried about gas exchange/oxygenation. Will the fish in my new 5-gallon have enough O2? I have a new Fluval V all-in-one. The way I have the pump setup, there is a great deal of flow through filter, but no visible water movement -- the surface is very still and flat. This is how I want it because I would like to have floating plants. The only real break in the water's surface is the "waterfall" into the filter compartment. For aesthetic and power outlet reasons, I'd rather not run an air stone. Will my fish suffocate? More generally, I've heard conflicting things about what's necessary to have good O2 levels, so I don't really know how to think about this aspect of my tanks. Any good guidance or references would be appreciated. Also, are there any cheapish, reliable-ish tests for dissolved oxygen? Something like a drop checker for O2 would be great.

I've moved them out of the 5 gallon and into a fry container, so I can feed them something other than infusoria and paramecium. It also makes them easier to count. I counted 30 of them in this image, and I counted 34 yesterday. Not bad! They got very good at hiding when they had the whole aquarium to roam around in, and I was worried I had lost 2/3 of them. I have also collecting pictures through microscope. The bigger ones are are now larger than my microscope's field of view are have notably orange bellies when I feed BBS. I think the smaller ones still need vinegar eels or paramecium. I was also surprised to see that vinegar eels are thinner than paramecium.

Last November I got 9 juvenile pea puffers. They matured into 2 males and 7 females, and eventually I started to see spawning behavior with the bigger male following an nudging one or more of the females. Then, tragedy struck: The dominant male and one of the females jump out of the tank and behind a cabinet 😞. Shortly after, I tried moving the remaining male and 2 females into a smaller tank in hopes they would spawn. The seemed pretty unhappy in there, and I moved them back to the original tank. In 3 months since, the personality of the group has changed dramatically: Thy are more shy and they don't hunt as aggressively as they used to: they used to attack blackworms and snails and now they just pick at them. The remaining male doesn't seem to have risen to the occasion and don't see anything resembling courtship behavior. Has anyone had a similar experience? Any suggestions on how I can encourage the remaining male and females interested in spawning? Are they depressed? In mourning?

Some of them are surviving some of them are not -- I've found a few tiny corpses. They still very difficult to see unless I put my head directly over the tank and look straight down. I've been feeding them paramecia, and it's creating a white mulmy layer on the the bottom of the tank, which I'm sure has lots of things for them to eat. Somewhere in this mess there some baby fish... It makes me think I should just start feeding coop fry food because that stuff always creates lots of infusoria-rich mulm when I use it. I know they are eating because I got this cool video. I especially like how you can see it lock on to the rotifer with both it's eyes before it goes in for the kill...