Aquarists unite: fish are friends, and food

Haus said:

Seeing people notice this thread made me figure I should do an update...

That tank you saw (with the memorial jug) was how it was a while back. it had been running forever with essentially zero effort from me, and I had added those plants you saw in the back.

I made one change, I added a good light from Amazon which had the right color temp, and even simulated a day/night cycle with "sunrise and sunset" phases.. That apparently made a lot of dormant plant seeds and stuff spring back to life.

The light : Amazon product ASIN B08N19TY71
The result :
View attachment 514096

I'm needing to prune out vegetation once a month now....

Click to expand...

Looks great, I think you just need some shrimp! I'm guessing most of the pruning you do is the water sprite in back? That stuff nearly took over my tank until I let the duckweed proliferate a bit too much and block out the majority of the light. I didn't really miss it, it was far too brittle.

Everything eats shrimp. If not fully grown over, the baby's are super tiny and can even disappear into your filter.

There's 2 main types of shrimp. Carodina and neo carodina. I forget which is which
But the cooler looking and more expensive kind are weak and will die easily sure to water parameters. The cheap ones will eventually breed out their color, become ” wild type " , but are more resilient

Haus said:

The light : Amazon product ASIN B08N19TY71

Click to expand...

Amazon links don't display properly for me, could you post a pic of the brand etc?

For anything smaller than an Amano or full grown ghost shrimp you need to have extra barriers to keep shrimp out of tray filters and sumps. I was constantly having shrimp end up in the sump side of my biocube/washed into the tray until I put mesh traps over the intakes.

Also, they jump tanks. It’s either a water parameter problem or it can be caused by coming into abrupt contact with rambunctious fish. I don’t think the cherry-sized shrimp got much launch power, but I’ve found two Amanos that were able to clear at least 5’ from the tank.

Updates: My German ram got killed by my bristle nose pleco, they’d constant beef over food/veggies in the tank until the ram got injured badly enough to croak. Let the pleco eat him, and now I have a single fish in a 29g cube. Can’t decide on what to put in there, it’s an odd tank size/shape and isn’t well suited to any medium sized interesting fish. Betta are okay but I feel like it’d have to be a plakat, water flow’s probably too strong for a regular betta. I love rams but they are too tempermental/territorial over food. Maybe I’ll go back to dwarf gourami; pearls are pretty sweet.

30g is doing pretty well though the assassin snail population is pretty much the same problem as the trumpet snails that came before em. Only has ember and headlight tetras, and a few shrimp.

Feels weird typing hygger into my Amazon search bar....

Anyways, here's my tank: