Recent content by Kataobbe

Hi Josh- Cycling a tank is when you establish a healthy bacterial community in a previously barren tank. So when you start from scratch in a new tank, it takes a while for the microbial community to balance out into a nice, stable, fish-friendly form. How long was your Molly in the tank &...

Ah! My bad, that was a translation to English fail. I meant substrates like sand and gravel, not dirt. If you bought aquarium sand though you shouldn't need to do that-- that's mostly for if you ever want to try adding "wild" substrate.

If you use unknown soil, you can avoid a lot of the contaminants problem by doing one or two 24hr soaks in water before you put it in the tank. Any water-soluble contaminants will go into the water during that time, so if you combine that with sifting the soil to remove any larger particles you...

I can confirm. The glass actually pierced the fish bags, so I am also paranoid that there's a wound on my fish somewhere I can't see. The color of my catfish was awful by the time I got them into my new tank. They've thankfully bounced back, but one is still a little more red in the head than...

Ha, thanks! He's not so bad, my old bacterial community was excellent at keeping the ammonia at 0 & the plants ate the nitrate happily. I just have to get the tank back to that state [emoji26] I'm resigned to daily water changes at this point, I just hope that the stress from all of the...

If only one guppy is showing symptoms, you may want to isolate him on his own for a while to (try) and prevent everything from spreading to your other fish. if you're looking for cheap/fast a 1 gallon jug of water with a bubbler to keep the oxygen up should be able to keep him alive in the short...

Hi all- My day job is building different acrylic tanks for oceanography experiments. I'm currently working on a project studying the survival/behavior of Dungeness Crab larvae in pH / O2 / temperature gradients if anyone's curious about behind the scenes of oceanographic science (hint: gaff...

If you get it from a reputable source like TAP plastics and build your own it should last over a decade-- my lab group builds a lot of acrylic tanks for oceanography experiments, and we have tanks going back 15-20 years that are still fine. It's pretty easy to build your own if you want, local...

Hi all- Newbie here, so I'm not entirely certain where this thread belongs. If there's a better subforum (getting started? Unhealthy fish?) Let me know and I'll move it. I had a 10 gallon established tank with plants and fish (my first tank), but it just broke yesterday while I was moving...