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Anyone have experience with a common pleco in a fiberglass and wood tank? I really like plecos, and I'm excited to finally have a tank big enough to keep one (900 gallon plywood | MonsterFishKeepers.com) but I'm concerned that their grazing behavior over a long period might compromise the...

I have a long-term plan to build a large tank (~1000 gallons) for a big predator, and I'd like to have it initially stocked with feeders and some things that will be able to survive with a large predator and keep things interesting. In the long run I'd like the tank to have a bass, 1-3 common...

Soon I'm going to be away from home for an extended period due to military deployment. I'm not sure how long, but at least six months and maybe closer to a year. My wife will feed the fish for me during that time, but with two small kids I'm not sure I can count on regular water changes. I'd...

I'm going to be moving to a new house next week. It's not far - maybe 2-3 hours by car - but obviously the tank needs to be broken down. I presently have a 55 gallon tank with 8 largish sword plants (Echinodorus sp, mostly bleheri) and a healthy fistful of water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes)...

I'm looking for a smallish armored catfish intermediate between a bristlenose pleco and a common. I want to keep it with a pickerel, currently about 6-7" but which will soon enough be 10-12". Since the pickerel is an obligate piscivore and will never be trained off live foods, I want to make...

Anybody know of a commercial product that can be used to automatically dispense a liquid solution for filter feeders? I'm thinking specifically of fairy shrimp, but something designed for brine shrimp or corals would be good.

I have a custom size 60 gallon tank (not custom for me; I bought it used) that I would like to add some plants to. The problem is that it's absurdly deep, so much so that it's impractical to light all the way to the bottom. I also want to keep a coarse gravel substrate for some of the fish, and...

My convicts hatched out a batch of new fry yesterday afternoon. I need to get them moved out of their parents' tank and into their own 5 gallon to induce another spawn and to minimize the chance of cannibalism. The fry tank has a HOB filter with fry guard and a brand new substrate consisting of...

I'm wondering if it's possible to maintain two pairs of convicts in a 20 gallon tank. They are small right now, about 2" total length. Initially I added four, and they paired off immediately, but one pair died about a week later, three days apart. I believe the cause was aggression by the other...

I bought a used XP2 canister off Craigslist recently, and I'm not sure how it's supposed to work. The interior has media baskets like my Eheim, but there's no standpipe to take the incoming water down to the bottom of the canister. There isn't even a hole in the media baskets to accomodate one...

I'm trying to build a sump for a 75 gallon tank out of a 50 gallon Rubbermaid tub. This will be a freshwater tank, and I would like to have some floating and/or emergent vegetation in the sump for nitrate/phosphate removal. Keeping floating plants out of the pump requires some sort of baffle...

I left my Eheim Professional II canister filter running for a couple days without checking on it. When I looked in on it, the pump wasn't running and it had siphoned out maybe 15 gallons of water onto the floor. It's possible that power was lost briefly during a thunder storm and the pump may...

I find myself in a bit of a situation. I have a new 55 gallon tank cycling with my new Eheim filter. At this point it can process at least 4 ppm ammonia, but so far no evidence of processing nitrite. I need to go out of town this weekend... about 2500 miles... Friday morning until Tuesday...

I have a 30 gallon tank that contains 3 crawfish, a baby pike who's just about to hit 4 inches, and a small swarm of juvenile feeder fish. A few of the feeders have become infected with a fungus. It appears as a white cottony growth that attacks fins or tail, and in one case the whole latter...

I bought a 60 gallon tank off Craigslist recently, and it came with a sump-style filtration system originally designed for saltwater, if a bit poorly. At the moment it's just a small (maybe 5 gallon) acrylic tank stuffed with bioballs, which may explain why his fish died and he got rid of it. I...

I'm about to need a ready supply of feeder fish, and I'm wondering what the best thing is to breed. Guppies seem like fun, but are they the fastest breeders? I already have mollies in a community tank, but I plan to make a separate setup. I need to know what species to start with, and anything...

I'm sure everyone has seen the cheaper glass tanks at the pet store with the warnings that they are for lizards only, not for aquarium use. Does anybody know exactly why that warning is there? Is the glass too thin on these tanks to hold water pressure, or are the seams not watertight? I ask...

So I just picked up half a dozen wild mollies from a nasty, turbid, eutrophic ditch at the edge of a construction site, and they have a terrible case of ich. I'm fairly surprised they're still alive. I'm not sure what happened in the ditch, but I threw back one that had algae growing from a...

The problem: I have some eggs stuck on the glass that I'd like to protect. They are snail eggs, tightly adherent and not readily removable to any sort of refuge. I've had limited success in the past using a dryer washer, which consists of a domed wire mesh attached to a rubber ring, placed over...

I have a 75-gallon tank with a 300 gph HOB filter. Initially the high water turnover was good for filtration, but as I've added more and more plants it seems increasingly unnecessary. I've just added a CO2 system and I'd like to limit flow so as to keep more gas dissolved. I've raised the water...

Does anyone have experience breeding fairy shrimp as feeders? I have a 5-gallon tank set up for raising blackworms, but I'm not making much use of the water column right now so I was hoping to add something relatively low-maintenance that swims. I'm told scuds will eat the worms. My fish love...

Trying to find a place to buy a 10 or 20 lb can of CO2 in the North Charleston/Goose Creek area. The best I can find is a 20 oz paintball gun canister at Lowes. There has got to be something better than this.

I haven't done this before. I've heard that too much ammonia can be detrimental to the bacteria colony (or encourage different kinds of bacteria to develop instead). Is the same true of nitrite? Today I saw the first measurable drop in ammonia (5 days in using filter media from an established...

I'm completely new at this. I've been lighting my 75 with 2x40W fluorescents, which is woefully inadequate. My plants are almost all native from marginal habitats here in the South, and they need high light. Nearly all would grow wild in less than 2 feet of water in otherwise direct sun, and I...

I want to upgrade the lighting on my 75-gallon tank but I have basically no idea what I'm looking at online and can't find any place locally that has VHO fixtures I can look at. I'm reasonably sure I can figure out how to wire things together if I had the pieces in front of me, but product...