Crow's Journal

[TheSwissAquarist]

On 10/31/2023 at 7:06 AM, Crow said:

So about a month or so ago I noticed ONE blue with spots ramshorn snail in my small army of brown ramshorn snails. I pulled it out and tossed it in my other low tech tank. It wasn’t long before it got busy laying eggs and almost all of them have been blue! So now I have a tank full of blue ramshorns! Every once in awhile I see a brown one,  and I just pull it out and toss it back in the cube.

All that to say earlier today while I was trimming the blue snail tank I noticed a ramshorn with a very red body and a white shell. And in my other two tanks I managed to find three more of the same colored snails. So I set up a jar, pulled all four, and got them set up with some plants and wafers. Hopefully I’ll have a similar situation with these guys as with the blues and I can get another little colony going! I’ve been wanting red/pink ramshorns for a couple years now so I’m pretty excited.

This will also be a great opportunity to see just how much I can abuse pearlweed haha. The jar is only getting spill-over light from my emmersed plant experiment and ambient light from the kitchen window.

 

These guys also glow under the blue light, so I thought that was pretty cool.

That’s fun! Are you planning to keep the strain going? 

[Crow]

Eep, sorry I keep poofing! I get distracted very easily! 😖

I hope everyone had good holidays and that the new year has brought good things!

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Me: I think I'm getting this growing aquatic plants thing down!

 

Also me: 🤡

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I have a pretty good idea of what's wrong and how to fix it, I honestly just don't care at this point. (But for the curious, I believe the co2 was up too high, the lights were down too low, and I wasn't fertilizing enough). There was a, what we'll call babysitting, incident about a month ago and wiped out everything in a couple tanks with the exception of the EBA and the cories in the 75. I'm over it now, everything is fine and looking up! I've finally decided on pulling everything (that's not a fish) and redoing the 75. I've hated this tank for well over a year, so it's a bit of a bittersweet moment.

Just gonna do plants now that my pleco is gone because I'm not really interested in going through the effort to acquire and play with hardscape at the moment. I'd rather put the money into equipment, fish, and plants. Also, there are still some plants I want to be able to grow successfully first. Like s repens haha. Just trying to decide if I want to throw the cash at aquasoil or not, although I'm leaning towards not. I'll be salvaging what's left of the hygro cory, mexican oakleaf, rotalas, crypt jacobsenii, pink miracle sword, and samolus parviflorous, and tossing everything else.

And I just got some new baby angels for the 75 too. They're so cute, they school around together and follow the EBA around wherever he goes 🥰 angels are so precious when they're little lol.

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Shrimps are shrimping! The orange guys are a real hoot. They're always buzzing around and getting into something. The guys in the little rainbow tank aren't out a whole lot unless there's snacks though haha. I haven't seen any shrimplets yet, but I've seen a few berried mamas.

 

We ride! Onward, Buttercup!

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The red ramshorn got an upgrade from their jar. It's about a month old. Going through that new tank diatom bloom. It's a 5g kit tank from one of the big pet box stores and it came with filter, light, lid, and the dark pebble substrate. Finally decided to try out the sand pit in the pebbles thing I see other peeps doing. Needs a good trimming/replanting sesh and a water change.

The light it came with paired with a nicrew controller is decent, the filter it came with is ok. The light so far is strong enough to grow any of the plants you can pick off their shelves, even the alternanthera. I mean, the alternanthera isn't jumping up, but it's not died and melted either and has new growth. Great little kit all around for 60$, wished I'd been able to start with one of these instead of the Fluval Chi I had years ago haha.

 

On 10/30/2023 at 11:57 PM, TheSwissAquarist said:

That’s fun! Are you planning to keep the strain going? 

Looks like it! They're going along pretty well with very little intervention on my end 🙂

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Thanks for reading! 🙂

Also wow, they weren't masterpieces to begin with, but the color in my photos is so washed out after being transferred from my phone to my computer. The 20 long especially is so much more vibrant in person.

[Crow]

I've determined to post even boring stuff if that's what keeps me from forgetting to come back for months!

 

Did a little trim and a replant/clean-up in the 5 gallon. Decided I'm going to swap over from ez green to dosing my GLA dry fert mix every day like I do in the other tanks. Lost the bottoms of the limnophila hippuridoides and the s. repens lower leaves, which I believe MIGHT be from lack of enough nutrients.

B&A trimerino/cleaning

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Also trimmed and replanted a bunch of tops in the 20L. I acquired some massive dish washing tubs for like 3$ each and some soil so I'll be pulling a bunch of the plants I don't really like in this tank and starting to grow them in the tubs using my old nicrews as grow lights. I think I'll probably start by removing the Persicaria(?), water wisteria, green rotala, polysperma sunset, and stargrass.

I did a thing I don't normally do and bought some flourish root tabs for my pink crypts and a couple other plants that were struggling. I don't usually use root tabs, but I wanted to see if they would help.

Also starting to see some diatoms. Could be because I bought a lids for all of my aquariums which caused me to have to take the light off of its stand and placed onto the lid to avoid the shadow caused by the hinge without reducing the brightness. I'm going to bump the light intensity down a bit and reduce phosphates in my fert mix.

Also, no more ramshorns in this tank. I did not know apistos ate snails! I either somehow glossed over that information or it wasn't really mentioned in the few articles I read. My EBA also eats snails, so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. Looks like I'll be picking up some otos soon, I guess?

B&A trim. I forgot to turn the light down womp

 

The faces of hardened criminals!

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Thanks for looking, hope you're having a great day!

Edited February 4 by Crow

[Guppysnail]

On 2/4/2024 at 2:28 AM, Crow said:

I've determined to post even boring stuff if that's what keeps me from forgetting to come back for months!

Great journal. Sometimes what is boring to us others get tidbits of advice and inspiration from. 🤗

[Crow]

Aw thank you, I appreciate your kind words! 
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well, I was gonna pull up the star grass when the new plants got here, but the apistos decided to rent the basement apartment, so I guess I’m keeping it after all 🤷🏻‍♀️
 

[Crow]

Aaaay, look what I found this morning! Dunno if you can see them, but the little miss is marinating some eggs there in the corner of the tank. 

 

On a separate note, I got one of those fluval breeder boxes on a whim to replace the pennplax mesh one that I had that was just… ugh… this thing is amazing. I used it to acclimate a group of new glowlight danios into my other 20 and I’m able to leave the one with swimbladder issues in there without worrying.

[nabokovfan87]

On 2/7/2024 at 1:58 AM, Crow said:

I used it to acclimate a group of new glowlight danios into my other 20 and I’m able to leave the one with swimbladder issues in there without worrying.

That's awesome.  It definitely is useful!

[Crow]

A bit late on the update cause I was layed up in bed For a few days with some ick the little one brought home from daycare. Regarding the eggs I guess mama got hungry for a midnight snack coz they were mostly gone by the next morning and completely gone by the evening 🫠 Or maybe dad got them, who knows. I’m not particularly fussed about it though because I have my hands full at the moment with other small projects.

[Crow]

Little bit of progress update on the 5g! Trimmed and replanted a few of the rotala and s repens tops, cut the remaining stems to just above substrate. Added another crypt and a lagenandra meeboldi (pretty sure I spelled that wrong, but I’m on mobile and not going to tab over 😉).  Now I get to watch them melt and hope they come back. I think they will because the roots I can see look healthy still. Rotala is filling in pretty well. I don’t know if the kit light will be strong enough to turn the rotala pink, but it’s at least strong enough to send it running sideways and turning into a bush. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy with a light that comes in a kit before. The limnophila hippuridoides is starting to recover from the stems melting and have new, healthy growth since swapping from easy green to the dry ferts. There’s nothing wrong with easy green and I like it, I’m just more consistent with dosing with the dry ferts since I’m already at it with the other tanks.

Jan 30

today, Feb 12

I also swapped out the filter because a very curious and determined killi pushed her way through the current to swim through the output slot and burrowed through the polyfil floss I had stuffed the box with and was swimming around in the filter 🤦‍♀️. She’s fine, but I don’t want to keep having to rescue her lol.

And you can see the orange shrimpies have been doing a great job of cleaning the sand of diatoms. I am going to have to hit the tank with some chemiclean to take care of that BGA though. 

Edited February 13 by Crow

[nabokovfan87]

It looks to be some solid progress @Crow.  Keep on doing all the little things and I am sure it'll be a really special tank.  I love the way you did the gravel on the sand around the wood.

[Crow]

I’m pretty excited, I saw my first red rili shrimplet this afternoon! It was so tiny!

 

And thank you so much Nabokov!

[Crow]

I have not seen anymore shrimplets in the cube tank, but are a lot of nooks, crannies, cracks, and plants they could be hiding in. At least I hope that’s what’s going on. 

Also, would it be unethical to feed my extra snails to my EBA? I have SO MANY and I’m worried they’re competing with my shrimp for food in this tank. 
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I found a red shrimp in my pumpkin shrimp tank. The color on it isn’t great and I don’t want red mixed into what I have, so I caught it and put it in my apisto tank since I don’t have anywhere else to put it. The male apisto ended up running into it and just ignored it. The red shrimp’s been in there a couple days now, so I think he miiiiight end up being ok, at least as long as I keep the apistos fed maybe. 
 

Bought my female apisto a couple different kinds of caves. One is the coop apisto cave, the other is a corner cave that goes under the substrate and has a stump entrance that sticks up above the substrate. Hopefully if she lays again she’ll feel more secure.

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My downstairs tanks as of tonight! Not great, but not bad. 

 

I have a nutrient imbalance of some sort. I know there’s calcium in the water, but there are plants showing calcium deficiency. Everything that’s not a rotala hasn’t really grown this week and the rotala isn’t looking good imo. Potassium maybe, over fertilizing perhaps? I used the rotala butterfly calculator for the first time today and made a mix off of that. So I’m going to try dosing off of that for a couple weeks and seeing how that goes!

[nabokovfan87]

On 2/15/2024 at 11:19 PM, Crow said:

Also, would it be unethical to feed my extra snails to my EBA? I have SO MANY and I’m worried they’re competing with my shrimp for food in this tank. 

A lot of hobbyists do and have snails for food usage.

On 2/15/2024 at 11:19 PM, Crow said:

So I’m going to try dosing off of that for a couple weeks and seeing how that goes!

Best of luck!