Recent content by johnny leftist

Is your tank live or silk planted? If it's silk, i'd suggest switching to live plants...it adds a whole new dimension to your setup, and provides insane benefits as far as natural filtration.

Betta fry grow a lot slower without water changes...they produce a LOT of stunting hormones. I leave the tank at half volume till I put in the filter, then fill it all the way since the babies are usually hitting a growth spurt about then and need more stretching room.

I used to breed bettas and I would use golden pothos stems and hornwort in an otherwise bare 20gal that was half full. That's all till the fry were 3 weeks old, at which point i'd introduce a seasoned sponge filter. The trick is daily water changes rather than active filtration

Good eye on that...a bubblenest wouldn't hold up well in a tank with a HOB unless the flow was baffled to the point that it's no longer doing the job.

How recently did you introduce those two to the tank? I'm asking because they seem to be rather dully colored, especially the male. If that's their normal, non-stressed coloration i'd recommend choosing a different pair to spawn. Brighter parents generally make brighter babies, which are more...

That's a tail bite....they do that when stressed kinda like how people bite their nails.

I think a lot of the most popular fish (goldfish,guppies, bettas etc) get that way in part due to being the hardest to accidentally kill :-D

The only time I've ever had shredded tailed guppies was due to fighting.

You can soak it up with any kind of CLEAN media (I prefer paper towels since they're single use and therefore less likely to contain contaminants) but a simple siphoning water change shoukd be adequate to prevent further occurrences since you're removing protein before it has a chance to...

If you live somewhere relatively warm year-round and have a back yard, you might want to opt for a terrestrial turtle like a box or tortoise. Either that or install a pond, since most turtles end up too big for the average home aquarium (15-20 gallons just will NOT cut it after the first year of...

The only fish I've ever had/seen problems with are small tetras (neons/cardinals) or pygmy cories. ADFs will sometimes attempt to perform the 'alligator death roll' on them, biting down on the head and twisting their bodies till they either suffocate or break the vertebral column. It seems to be...

Just up the water changes and agitate the water surface a little more (an airstone on a check valve should work fine) and it should clear off.

Without any other information all I can say is it looks like swim bladder disorientation, usually a symptom of an infection in the swim bladder. Does he float sideways constantly? Does he show difficulty swimming? Does he struggle to either get up from the bottom or down from the surface?

In my experience excessive jumping or ramming is usually a response to either too much ammonia/nitrite or not enough space. It's a natural response of the fish trying to hop from an unsuitable body of water to a better one, like the way walking catfish will flop from stream to stream when they...

I see them now, it looks much more like protein scum than a bubblenest.