What did you get done today?

[JChristophersAdventures]

@Odd Duck More great inspiration... thanks! It will be a challenge to make sure it is both artistic and functional... but, it will be fun making it happen! Today (the 4th day) of hydrogen peroxide water and zero visible tannins in the water, so my soaking wood rounds are now drying on a rack.

The rest of the wood is due on the 21st, but I suspect it will actually be arriving on the 18th or 19th. We will see. I visited a number LFS in the nearest large city last week and found nothing of interest... at any price.

So, I went online and found a dealer that after several communications, worked with me to get some really nice pieces and if all goes well, I will have something "spectacular" at a very reasonable price. It amazes me how much some people are asking for a piece of slate with a ordinary tree branch screwed to it! lol

@Guppysnail As for RF, it wasn't my first choice anyway, so maybe I will steer clear of it. Still working out the plant and 'scaping details. Will likely hang some moss from the major boughs (intersections) as well.

Edited September 15, 2023 by JChristophersAdventures

[anewbie]

Move yesterday so doesn't count; then today i moved the 10 which took a while but i think i got everyone. Tomorrow after the dust settle i'll fix the plants in the tank (i planted them today but need to adjust) and then go back to the condo to start with the 40B (giving me two days on that). Right now i'm just watching my army of loaches in the 550:

 

 

They are so much happier in a 550 than the 120; seen by the fact that they swim up to me constantly to say hi. In that mix 9 clowns; 4 yoyo;  - thank also has 6 zebra but the zebra aren't swimming with the clowns right now - i think they got tired out - they were with them in the morning. People who say an 80 or even a 200 is large enough for clowns are kidding themselves; they never tried a 550 - wish i had room for a larger aquarium for them.

[nabokovfan87]

On 9/16/2023 at 2:56 PM, anewbie said:

They are so much happier in a 550 than the 120; seen by the fact that they swim up to me constantly to say hi.

Awesome to hear this little tidbit. I can't explain it at times how interesting it can be for some species only, or species behaviors, in different tank sizes and group sizes. I feel like it's helpful for us as hobbyists to keep this in mind when we make stocking choices, specifically the group size, and just making sure the fish have enough location to keep themselves engaged.

I can only imagine how they greet you and how enjoyable that is. 🙂

[Fonske]

I haven't done much today but one of my blood parrots did. Lots of eggs on her filter!  ..too bad she is alone in her tank.

[anewbie]

Marginal update picture of the 10x4; really should get a fish eye lens but then i'd have to upgrade my 10 year old digital camera; hum.... not ready to get back into photography:

 

Also did some work on the 4ftx4ft (for my a. pucallpaensis); three pictures of the same aquarium:

 

 

First one is front; 2nd one is from left sides and third one is from left side different part - again it is much easier to take a picture of a 29 or 10 than these larger aquariums 😞

The tank you see from the side shot are the 8x4 which is next to it.

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by anewbie

[Ruud]

Setup my new Fluval 207 filter in my new 100 L aquarium and started to cycle with a bit of Seachem stability. I allready had the tank and most of the parts needed, just added the Fluval. Peeve: why do heater suction cups always fail somehow (and thermometers for that matter)... I have Eheim heaters in all three tanks and all fall from the walls constantly...arrrrgh

[Guppysnail]

On 9/20/2023 at 6:23 AM, anewbie said:

Marginal update picture of the 10x4; really should get a fish eye lens but then i'd have to upgrade my 10 year old digital camera; hum.... not ready to get back into photography:

 

Also did some work on the 4ftx4ft (for my a. pucallpaensis); three pictures of the same aquarium:

 

 

First one is front; 2nd one is from left sides and third one is from left side different part - again it is much easier to take a picture of a 29 or 10 than these larger aquariums 😞

The tank you see from the side shot are the 8x4 which is next to it.

 

Once that grows in it will be a show stopper. Great job!

[Odd Duck]

On 9/19/2023 at 10:41 AM, Fonske said:

I haven't done much today but one of my blood parrots did. Lots of eggs on her filter!  ..too bad she is alone in her tank.

Is she a lone cichlid with no other cichlids in there?  Because not many of those eggs are fungused yet.

[anewbie]

setup a ghl mini-wfi to monitor the ph on my blackwater tank. Still can't see a thing in there but the hatchet fishes i put in a week ago are still alive and come to the surface when i drop in food which they chomp down.

[Fonske]

On 9/22/2023 at 2:46 AM, Odd Duck said:

Is she a lone cichlid with no other cichlids in there?  Because not many of those eggs are fungused yet.

She is the only fish in the tank. She's busy fanning the eggs and being super-protective (against humans) but some of the eggs are turning white already.

[nabokovfan87]

On 9/21/2023 at 10:47 AM, Ruud said:

I have Eheim heaters in all three tanks and all fall from the walls constantly...arrrrgh

Those ones are... notoriously bad.  Happy to report my e-series fluval ones are a gem and work so well.  Maybe there is an aftermarket heater clip you can find?

[Odd Duck]

On 9/21/2023 at 8:06 PM, Fonske said:

She is the only fish in the tank. She's busy fanning the eggs and being super-protective (against humans) but some of the eggs are turning white already.

I would expect them all to be white soon when they haven’t been fertilized.

[anewbie]

Not all of this done today but the last couple of days:

setup ghl meter to monitor temp and ph

setup co2 injection into 550 gallon aquarium; discover my 2 foot water jar thingy actually works - might not be as efficient as @Mmiller2001 horizontal unit but works a whole lot better than the diffuser i used on a 120; can easily drop ph to 0.8 without much effort (0.8 is the most i'm willing to go with fishes used to lots of oxygen). 

work on my dripper system - discover drippers have a front and back - discover 1/8 is not 3/8 - order more parts - today when parts arrive retest dripping system.

measure chlorine of my system - discover it is measuring 0ppb (which is good ithink); cross check with tap which measure 389ppb (which seems low but maybe not - no real clue; need tap expert.

notice my festum have settled down the past week and stop trying to jump out when the lights go off and stop running away from me - they seem to really be getting use to their 10x4 home and now come up to be fed (the large males used to run away from me when i fed them in the 120); really lovely fishes.

discover my blacknight is still alive after not seeing him for 6 weeks; all i really saw was the white tip of his tail but that is more than nothing.

need to spend more time working on the mist system for my blackwater setup - will take pictures when complete.

 

[Mmiller2001]

On 9/24/2023 at 1:35 PM, anewbie said:

(0.8 is the most i'm willing to go with fishes used to lots of oxygen).

Remember, CO2 and O2 are independent of each other. CO2 does not displace O2. O2 does not decrease in response to CO2 addition. This is the desired condition while injecting CO2. Maximum O2 and around 30 ppm CO2. Have you ever checked a degassed sample of your tank water? Take a sample, enough to pH, let it sit open for 24 hours and then pH it. This pH value is the baseline pH to measure pH drop from.

[anewbie]

On 9/25/2023 at 9:41 AM, Mmiller2001 said:

Remember, CO2 and O2 are independent of each other. CO2 does not displace O2. O2 does not decrease in response to CO2 addition. This is the desired condition while injecting CO2. Maximum O2 and around 30 ppm CO2. Have you ever checked a degassed sample of your tank water? Take a sample, enough to pH, let it sit open for 24 hours and then pH it. This pH value is the baseline pH to measure pH drop from.

I have a monitor that measure the ph and the co2 goes off for approx 16 hours (4pm to 7am); so i measure it before the co2 goes on - also i measured it before starting co2. However - i have noticed ill-behavior from fishes if co2 gets above 1ph drop (gasping at surface) so i try to be conservative. Also i'm not trying to 'max' plant growth but just beef it up a bit.

[Mmiller2001]

On 9/26/2023 at 4:30 AM, anewbie said:

I have a monitor that measure the ph and the co2 goes off for approx 16 hours (4pm to 7am); so i measure it before the co2 goes on - also i measured it before starting co2. However - i have noticed ill-behavior from fishes if co2 gets above 1ph drop (gasping at surface) so i try to be conservative. Also i'm not trying to 'max' plant growth but just beef it up a bit.

I bet your .8 drop is actually 1, maybe more. My tank resting pH is about a .5 lower than the degassed pH.

[anewbie]

Not sure - the stable ph seems around 7.1 (there is a rock in there leaching calcium i think); and the low reading is around 6.3

[Ruud]

Bought some plants at the LFS for my new 100L (see the journal), planted a few, glued Anubia to wood and been thinking about what to do with the empty 10G (Apisto breeding tank? Try shrimp for the first time)

[anewbie]

I've been working on two things - first getting the mist system setup:

This is above the blackwater aquarium - sadly one of my brand new marble hatchet fishes jumped out onto the back land mass and died 😞

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And getting my drip system working on the 550:

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What this is - i have ro and filter water - each run through a dripper that sets the flow rate - around 2 to 2 1/2 gallons an hour - they go to a T then go through a flow meter to measure the flow rate and total gallons used and then up into the aquarium. The aquarium will eventually overflow and go down a tube into the drain.

 

[mountaintoppufferkeeper]

Managed to get decent photos of 2 of the 4 cross river puffers. They are a pretty cool interactive species. This has been the hardest project so far but they are beginning to find their calm with eachother. Lots of plants, lots of food, lots of space, and even more plants and coop planters

Less decent of the other 2 

[Odd Duck]

I had other plans for today which may not all get done since the lights came on to this.  The tank is a hot mess of black beard algae right now (slowly getting under control) but not normally a big cloudy mess.  I could see it was already clearing but I couldn’t figure out why it was cloudy until I saw a poof of red clay down low.  Apparently the cories have inspired my big boy blue eyed lemons to do some sparring and the center back of the substrate is all wallowed out all the way down to the thin clay layer in the bottom.  Today, I regret my choice of substrate layers.  😆 😂 🤣 

I was already planning a big water change in this tank today.  Let’s see if I can inspire the trilineatus cories since I’m pretty sure this was all, or at least mostly bronzes.  My very chunky bronze girls are almost all looking tired and much slimmer.  There’s nowhere near enough eggs to account for all the breeding that went on (from the looks of the deflated girls) so I suspect there has been a big protein boost for the bristlenoses making them all aggro.  Maybe even the gold nugget.  He likes cory eggs, too.

Shenanigans have happened.

[Ben P.]

Put this together today, I'm very happy with it

[Odd Duck]

My big bristlenose boys have evidently been scuffling quite a bit the last few days.  They stirred up some silt by digging down to the deep clay layer and are now repeatedly stirring it up so my 100 G nanofish tank is a complete mess.  I’ve got floss added to the filters but it’s going to take a while and I may need to do the floss denser.  🤦🏻‍♀️ 

But I think I know why they’re scuffling.  Both of my beautiful long fine blue-eyed lemon females (thank you @Guppysnail) are hanging out around one boy - see the one in the back on top of the cave?.  I don’t blame the other boy for being jealous!  I’m not sure why the middle cave is suddenly the hot prospect for a new home.  It was previously the left end cave that was the “IN” house.  There are 4 caves scattered across the entire 5’ of tank.  Why they’ve all decided on this one I don’t know.  There must be something about how the water current hits the opening of the cave or something.  🤷🏻‍♀️ I’ll fiddle with and tilt the others a little differently later this week and see what happens.

The big boys have gotten the whole tank stirred up, plus the cories have been breeding like mad - at least the bronzes.  I haven’t seen the trilineatus breeding but they are far more subtle about it just shimmying along the plant leaves vs. massive zoomies all over the tank like the show off bronzes.  😆 

The tank is so stirred up the clown pleco came out!  I haven’t seen his tummy since he was released into this tank out of quarantine almost 2.5 years ago!  Look at this big fat belly!!!  Considering I NEVER see him eat, only occasionally see him latched onto wood in one of his hideaways, this belly is quite impressive.  Must be kind of like a panda eating only bamboo or other herbivores that need that big belly to ferment their cellulose diet.  I was so shocked it took me a minute to realize who it was.  I actually thought for a second, looking from across the room, “That can’t be an oto that big, can it?”  Then, “That’s not a cory hanging out like that, is it?”  “Wait, that’s my clown pleco!”  Grabbed my phone and got the pic.  😆  It was so confusing to my poor old brain!  😆 😂 🤣  He’s really not much bigger than my biggest female bronze cory and they’ve been zipping around and acting up so much in the last 2-3 days that I actually thought it was a cory for a few seconds!

 

 

Edited October 3, 2023 by Odd Duck

[Guppysnail]

@Odd Duck that clown belly is impressive.   Hopefully you have a little boy for her. That belly looks suspiciously like an egg belly. 
 

for comparison ⬇️ 

[Odd Duck]

On 10/2/2023 at 1:03 PM, Guppysnail said:

@Odd Duck that clown belly is impressive.   Hopefully you have a little boy for her. That belly looks suspiciously like an egg belly. 
 

for comparison ⬇️ 

I’m 99% certain it’s a male because if the denticles along the back half of the body.  It’s big enough I’m slightly concerned about it, but everything I can find on sexing says male from the denticles.  I’ve tried a couple times to get him a friend but they’ve not done well and ended up passing with no visible issues - not skinny, not bloated, not an empty belly, seen to be eating, no skin lesions, nothing.  Just found dead with no apparent cause.  I’ve not heard of them being a particularly sensitive species, but I haven’t been successful with any except him.  🤷🏻‍♀️ 😞