memorywrangler

Maybe not pea puffers then... Do you mean with the pea puffers or with the others as well?

pipefish are an excellent idea.

I’m thinking about putting together a heavily planted “nano predator tank”. It would be stocked with micro predator nano fish. Candidates include: Pea puffers Scarlet Badis or tiger badis Indostomus paradoxus (aka armored stickleback, aka alligator toothpick fish) Sparkling gouramis Pygmy sunfish Fresh water pipe fish What else? has anyone kept any of these fish together? How did it go? Any other stocking ideas?

That might be it. Lately I've been using RO water for top-up, but for a weeks I wasn't. Unfortunately, I didn't measure Gh during that time.

The substrate is black diamond sand, seachem flourite, and seachem florite black. There is only one rock, and I added it recently with a java fern attached. I have no idea what kind it is. I'll try taking it out.

I’m still learning about planted tanks, and I have a theory about what’s going on in my tank. I’m hoping some of you could offer your input. I have recently-setup, 22 long, planted tank. It’s “mid tech”: it’s got a pretty strong light for the tank’s depth and it has a home brew, yeast based CO2 system that adds some carbon. It has some shrimp and 9 pea puffers. I was dosing easy green two or three times per week, but my nitrate levels were very low. Also, some of the plants weren’t growing very well. As an experiment, I started dosing two pumps of easy green every morning. I’ve also been measuring nitrates every morning and they have stabilized at 10ppm. Since I’ve started doing this, all of the plants have started growing more vigorously. I also got test kits for potassium and phosphorus: potassium is at 30 ppm and phosphorus was at 0.5ppm. The general hardness for the tank is 23° or about 400 ppm, which is much higher than my tapwater and my other tanks: they are about 14°. I read somewhere on the co-op website that a lot of tanks get their phosphorus from leftover fish food. However, I’m just feeding the pea, puffers live snails, so there is no leftover food. My theory is that my tank had a phosphorus and nitrogen deficiency, which the daily easy green is fixing. I’m also wondering if the magnesium in EZ green is causing my hardness to go up. So what should I do? My plan is to do a large water change to bring down the Gh, and start supplementing with phosphorus. But I think I still need my nitrates to be higher. Should I also supplement specifically with nitrogen in addition to biweekly easy green? thanks!

The visible dangling thing is now detached and on the bottom of the tank. would the epsom salt still be useful? What’s it supposed to do?

I had been trying to spawn this female with a male. They seemed interested, but nothing came of it after a day, so I separated them. Then, a few hours later, I found this. She had had eggs visible in her abdomen and they are now gone, so I figure that must be related somehow. Is she going to be ok? What should I do?

This is all very excellent information. Thanks for assembling it. Do you have citations for the comments above? I've looked for more information about culturing moina, but I haven' t found much beyond "Culture Techniques of Moina : The Ideal Daphnia for Feeding Freshwater Fish Fry" by Rottmann et.al. Thanks.

9 months ago I started a pair of moina cultures that includes some ramshorn snails to clean up the leftover food and some floating plants to absorb nitrogen. They worked ok on and off. They'd crash and recover, etc. Then 2 months ago I went out of town for 10 days. As The Internet suggested, I took out almost all the moina, hoping to revive them when I returned. When I got back, I added some black worms (because why not?) and started feeding again. The moina did not recover, so I added some eggs, which seemed like it might work, but then didn't. Now I have two, apparently thriving, green water cultures with snails and black worms (which are not proliferating, which is fine -- I've started raising black worms separately), and a very rich variety of other critters (notably cyclops). The green water would be great and everyone says it's so hard to maintain, but I have no moina to feed it to. I'm trying to figure out what to do. Options include: 1. Dump and everything except some of the snails and start over. 2. Dump one of them and start over fresh with moina and feed the green water too them. 3. Do 90% water changes to keep the green water under control and reseed with moina. 4. Do something else someone here suggests. 5. Chuck it all.

ok. Well the LFS gave me 3 new fish and a discount on the other two (which I thought was reasonably fair), so I'm back to 10. They suggested by gH was too high (22). Their tanks are at 14. 2 50% water changes partially with RO water and I'm at 14 as well. We'll see how it goes... One of the first batch that was being shy seems to have perked up a bit, so maybe that's a good sign.

Thanks, that's helpful. According the store, these are farm-raised in Indonesia, but I was going to deworm them anyway. Do you think I should do that before the med trio stuff? I have the air stone running, but I hadn't considered salt.

This has not gone well 😞 The first one died, followed by 3 more over the night and a fourth is looking ill as well. The remaining 5 are looking ok at the moment. The fish died within the health guarantee period from the LFS, but they will only do replacements, so I'll end up with more fish from the same batch. I'm obviously concerned for the. m as well. I'm pretty unsure about what to do. It seems like the best course is a couple massive water changes, delay the med trio for a while and get them eating/healthy and then try again? Maybe doing the meds serially?

I have 10 pea puffers in quarantine and i started the med trio yesterday. As usual the water clouded. 9 of the puffers look fine, but one is listless, lying dead-looking on the bottom or swimming in poorly controlled circles. There are no visible symptoms. Water parameters are fine so far. Suggestions? Take it out of the tank and put it in clean water? Feed it? Wait and see? Sorry for the terrible picture. They are in a tub and the water’a cloudy.

I'm about to buy some pea puffers and am planning to use medication trio before deworming them. The problem is that my quarantine tank has lots of small ramshorn snails, so I can't prevent them from eating. What's the reason for not feeding during the medication trio treatment?

The coop multi-test strips.

What level of nitrates should I be targeting? I've heard 40, but I feel like even to get to 20, I had have to dump a lot in.

I have a brand new 22 gal tanks that’s holding a bunch of plants I’d like to grow out while it cycles and I collect hard scape etc for the final setup. I’ve dosed it a few times in the last week with 2 shots of Easy Green but I’m still reading zero nitrates. The plants are growing. Should I keep dosing till I read some nitrates? How much? How often?

I need a light for my 22-g long. It's 36x12x12. I'm planning a heavily planted, low-tech pea puffer tank. Which light should I buy. If I want 24-hour programability (rather than just on/off), two popular choices are 1. Fluval Plant 3.0 LED Light 2. hygger Aquarium Programmable LED Light (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086STZG4Z/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=AVCC5D32ELY5X&psc=1) They seem similar, except I understand that the hygger is way harder to program and the fluval is waaay more expensive. I'm fine with hard to program. Other than that, which is better? Is there another option I should be considering? The options are pretty daunting. (I'd consider the coop light, but I don't I'm patient enough. :-)

Lucky you! She looks good to me.

I was thinking about my next breeding project, and looking for something that would be useful to the hobby/fish of the world. I don't have space or time to breed for real money and the chore of distributing/selling/giving away more guppies or white clouds or bettas doesn't excite me. Is there a fish that is popular but rarely imported can be bred in the home aquarium but for some reason isn't? Is there a breeding project I could undertake that would actually make a difference? My current idea is producing female scarlet badis, since they never seem to get imported and breeding scarlet badis seems pretty doable. (also, if you have some female scarlet badis, let me know)

Very mysterious...

I’m planning out my first African cichlid tank. And I’m thinking of doing a colony of L. similis shell dwellers and a pair of J. transcripts or ornatus. I was envisioning a mostly open tank with a rock outcropping to break sight lines and provide habitat for the Julis. Is this a good plan for an African cichlids beginner? Would it work in a 20L? In a 29?

I've been weighing the pros and cons of different filter types, so I built a spreadsheet to summarize my research and limited experience. I'm curious what other people think. You can view it (And comment) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EL9l70x2YL04_BBNof9zZH-fLJirA-xrf_uQ6z593WI/edit#gid=0 Please share your thoughts! Especially if you think some columns are missing.

Disaster Strikes! My Moina+Snail Symbiotic Culture Doesn't Like Leafy Greens! After nearly a week of steady harvest (more than my fish could eat almost) and happy fish, we've had a serious population crash. I'd been feeding the culture with watermelon to good effect, and I thought I'd mix it up and feed them some chard stems. Bad choice, it seems. The snails didn't like them, the stems turned mushy, and water turned very murky and yellow. Yuck! Then the moina population plummeted. I did an 80% water change and it was so sad: Usually drawing off a quart of water yields a feast's worth of moina, but 2 full gallons produced almost nothing. 🥲 Oh well, I'm sure they will recover.