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withoutclass posted:On the same tack, has anyone done or read up on the Walstad Style of aquariums? I've never had a fish tank or anything before but I find the idea of a relatively self contained and self sufficient tank quite appealing. I have a 7 gal walstad tank for my shrimp. No heater, no filter, just a small air pump with gentle bubbles for circulation. 1.5” of sifted topsoil capped with 1.5” of flourite. I had to poke it for the first few weeks with a skewer to let off the gasses until the dwarf hairgrass got its roots established, and it also has anbuis, hornwort and frogbit. The plants grow like crazy and I have 0 ammonia, nitrates and nitrites.
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Sep 12, 2020 21:38
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withoutclass posted:Any reason to have the bubbles from a biological perspective? I've seen some videos where the plants themselves will bubble gas into the water. They will put oxygen in the water even without the bubbles, but overnight when the plants aren't producing the shrimp were hanging out underneath the floating plants and the snails would move up to the top of the tank too. So I added the bubbler to help with gas exchange and everyone has been happy since. I would just use a circulator pump but I couldn't find one slow and small enough for my tank.  it's about a month and a half old at this point. I am pretty happy with it. The bacopa in the front has really taken off in the last two weeks and found its way from the background to the foreground. I am going to trim it down and replant it further back on my next maintenance day. I currently have two berried female neocaridina so I am trying not to disturb them until the eggs hatch edit: withoutclass posted:I got interested by watching this channel. This particular vid has gourami's. I think he has tetra's in another video. Most of his feature betta's. this is what got me into walted tanks too ickna fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 02:21
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Finnankainen posted:Crisis averted, mystery solved. I decided to clean out my sump and apparently all the shrimp decided they wanted to live there. Shoulda checked that first Another thing to look out for is light intensity. Mine were hiding most of the time until I switched to a lower powered light and now I see them out and about regularly.
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Sep 15, 2020 21:36
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big dong wanter posted:absolutely cant keep shramps alive, my water conditions appear ideal with the exception of a half dozen ppm of nitrates. i was under the impression that you needed a bit of nitrate in the water for plant growth but i have seen many planted tanks with a shitload of shrimps. for the record i get a dozen or so and in about 3 months it goes down to one or two, there are no bodies from what i observe so i imagine the other shramp ate them. which kind of shrimp? I have this exact same problem with ghost shrimp in my 15 gal. my walstad 7 gal with cherry shrimp has been pretty stable and I have 12 new shrimplets that hatched in it last week.
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Oct 7, 2020 16:10
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SuperShmoe posted:(snip) The worms are perfectly normal earthworm relatives and come free with the dirt. They won't bother your shrimp. the stuff on the leaves look like snail poo. You probably will want to give it a couple of weeks for the roots to establish before you are out of the woods on off-gassing, but you can pretty much add them whenever. Poke the substrate with a bamboo skewer every day or so to release built up gasses until the roots have taken care of it. You may want to consider a small air pump to with a restriction valve to add some light air bubbling for water circulation.
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Oct 10, 2020 03:42
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TheAlmightyFrog posted:Pretty sure one of my Bosemani rainbowfish killed the other one. Yesterday the one was harassing the other more than I have ever seen, nipping at fins and ramming face first into the other. The one getting harassed i guess tried to hide in some driftwood and got stuck, and I had to pull it out and I think it lost some scales on its head from struggling (or the rescue, I don't know). The rest of the rainbowfish in the tank seem fine. You can euthanize him humanely by putting him in a cup of water with clove oil. https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/what-is-the-most-humane-way-to-euthanase-aquarium-fish/
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Oct 20, 2020 17:47
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Schwack posted:Beats me! I'm guessing maybe they aren't true amanos? They do an OK job of clearing algae, but I've got no idea how to tell otherwise. It looks like a clear neocaridina based on the shape and size, I have several of them in my tank from some cross breeding of my cherry and chocolate shrimp.
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Dec 23, 2020 06:21
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Schwack posted:The only neocaridina I have in the tank are cherry shrimp. So far I haven't spotted any red tinged baby shrimp, might they color up as they age a bit? They'll start to color up after their first few molts, yeah. You'll be able to tell if you have true amanos in several months, they usually grow to be about twice as big as the cherry shrimp. edit: your substrate also will affect how deeply the cherries will color up, they adapt to the brightness of it and usually express more coloration on darker substrates. ickna fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 08:05
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B33rChiller posted:That seems like some grade A advice, and has given me a lot to think about as I plan. Thank you If you’re big on the planted aspect, definitely dig in to the walstad method. I have a 7 gal planted tank with cherries and snails that has needed no real attention after the first month or two. if you choose to go with nerite snail, get only one. If they mate you will have a trail of immovable white eggs that defy physics.
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Dec 28, 2020 08:00
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fart store posted:Anybody know anything about the little white balls attached to the leaf of this plant in my 10gal? Does it respond to stimulus, like contracting when touched? I had some mystery white clumps on some plants in my shrimp tank, as well as hydra. I did the betel nut extract (planarian zero on Amazon) treatment and it took care of both. I removed my nerite snail first to be safe but the rams horn snails survived it.
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Jan 1, 2021 07:59
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anecdote is not evidence, etc, but... I had a betta not give a poo poo about the ghost shrimp for two months other than casual investigation. then one day they started losing eye stalks. over the next week I was pulling a mort out of the tank every morning until there were none left. Not terribly sad over $0.25/each feeder shrimp, but if they were neocaridinas I would have been very upset.
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Jan 9, 2021 08:41
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Schwack posted:Anyone have tips on dealing with hydra around fish fry? I noticed 3 hydra in my breeder box this evening, almost certainly because I've been feeding my CPD fry Hikari First Bites over the last week or two. I know the general advice is to cut back feeding, but I'm not sure how to do that without killing the little guys. Hello! I can confirm that nothing you do in regards to feeding, photo period or water chemistry will do anything meaningful to remove these fuckers. In fact, some of the things you might try (such mechanical removal or destruction) might even make things worse. I had minor success using a eye dropper and Seachem Excel to kill individual organisms, but it did not address the unseen population at large or their ability to reproduce asexually from small cellular fragments drifting through the water column. I have personally used this exact product: [ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07M683JK4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ] to completely eliminate the extremely insidious infestation of hydra in my walstad tank several months ago without any collateral damage to my desired inhabitants, which were newly hatched cherry shrimp. As a precaution, I removed my nerite snail. With the recommended dosing schedule, I had no mortalities among the rams head snail population in my tank that I gave no shits about anyway, and completely enjoyed maximal efficacy against the the desired target of my genocide, the hydra. edit: Additional benefits were also realized against the intended target of the product as labelled, the planaria worm. ickna fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 09:11
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I successfully moved my 7.5 gal walstad shrimp tank to my new apartment today. I had been sweating it for weeks and had actual dreams about the process failing, like the ones you have about teeth falling out but it was all the shrimp lying dead in the dwarf hair grass. I have about 2” of soil and gravel and drained the water level down to about 1” above that. I couldn’t bring myself to break down the entire tank since it has only been up for about 10 months and all the plants are thriving and the dwarf hair grass has spread out to a nice carpet. There was no way I was going to be able to catch all the shrimp and babies either. I ended up using an offcut bit of 3/4” plywood with a bit of foam padding held level with the top of the shelf it was on, and slid it directly over. Installation was reverse of removal and after carefully shining light through all the edges of the glass panes I didn’t see any evidence of cracking or silicone giving way. I’m going to give it a few days to see if anything leaks before I put all my books on the lower shelves though. I did break down my 15 gal with a school of guppies a few days before the move. They live on the back porch in a large home depot tote now, and I think I am going to keep them there permanently. I need to set up the 15 gal tank again and get it cycled, then I’ll look into some new stocking options. I think I might go with some actual red cherry shrimp for this one, as my 7.5 gal has a bunch of natural color and chocolate + blue mutts from cross breeding the bargain bin assortment I ordered when I wasn’t sure they would all survive. Now that I have a better handle on it, I don’t mind dropping the dime on the more expensive pure red ones. I would like to find some kind of fish that hang out near the top or middle of the tank, and could ideally maintain or grow their own population - perhaps another live bearer species, since the guppies seemed to really enjoy their time there and it was neat to watch them grow up without tending to eggs or breeder boxes. I think the shrimp would also breed well and not be threatened too much since there are two rather large bits of driftwood with lots of hiding spots for them to hang out in while they grow out.
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May 5, 2021 06:00
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Stoca Zola posted:Daisy's Rice fish might be a good alternative, or maybe clown killifish, both are small and in a well planted, gently filtered tank they have a chance of breeding and fry surviving since the kind of plant cover that shrimp like is also good for fry to hide in. Kubotai rasboras might work too, or dwarf rasboras, or trigonostigma (harelquin, espei, hengeli) - as long as there are some fine leaved dense plants for fry to hide in, a mature tank can result in fry raising themselves without intervention as long as there is a population of infusoria growing. Or you could supplement with powdered fry food which the shrimp will eat too. You don't need to collect eggs or mess around if you just want to let nature take it's course. Shrimp safe filtration is fry safe filtration and I think that's a pretty big factor in fry survival as well. Thanks for this, that definitely helps narrow things down. I do plan on keeping it heavily planted, it already has lots of java moss, frogbit, bacopa and an amazon sword all ready to go back in. I had also knocked back the flow rate on the pump and added extra pre-filter sponge to the intakes for the ghost shrimp and betta that lived in there before I put the guppies in, so it looks like it is in good shape too. Not really looking to breed for sale or move to a larger tank, so I think I will definitely skip the livebearers. Edit: the Daisy’s Ricefish seems like the perfect choice here, excellent recommendation. ickna fucked around with this message at 07:43 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 07:37
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Love my mutt neocaridinas. Most turn out clear/brown, and the occasional one shows vibrant red or intense blue.
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Jul 7, 2021 03:38
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Guppies don't give a poo poo, they will be happy wherever you put them. I have a 10 gal storage container on my back porch that has about 30 of them at various ages. It started as a place to ditch excess hornwort, frogbit and java moss from cleaning my indoor tanks, then I tossed in some feeder guppies from my LFS to keep it from becoming a mosquito breeding spot. Now they are all content and making babies, as well as swimming up to see me when I go out back to water the garden and toss them some dried spirulina for a snack.
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Jul 9, 2021 06:18
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VelociBacon posted:I have an apartment without a patio, and a 5g nano tank, there's just no way. But they sound chill. If you have room for a 15 gal tank inside, they would be fine there too; they seem to breed out to fit the space they have perfectly. All the guppers in my back porch container pond were in my fluval flex 15gal indoor tank over the winter before I moved to my current place during the spring.
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Jul 9, 2021 06:26
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VelociBacon posted:I appreciate the info which I'll file away somewhere in my brain but if I had the room for a 15g tank I would do a 'big' aquascaped tank with canister filter, CO2, etc. Right now the 5g is enough work for me and I'm happy with it on my fireplace mantle. Apartment space constraints suck. I wish I had room to do a bigger setup and with all the fixins too, as I'm a gigantic nerd and love to play with technology for its own sake. I really pushed my luck with my partner getting the 15g fluval flex and stand, which was mostly agreed to because it was for the betta she rescued from her mom's house (he'd been neglected and unfed in a tiny cup in a cabinet for almost 6 weeks before she found him and brought him home to live with us). He eventually died and the guppies moved in when it started getting cold outside. My favorite tank is still my 7 gal super low tech Walstad tank on the bookshelf that all my mutt neocaridina shrimp live in. If I had to choose only one to keep, I would ditch the porch guppy container and 15 gal to keep my tiny shrimp tank.
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Jul 9, 2021 06:42
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