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It might be worth trying to add a filter shrimp or two or a freshwater clam. They would be in heaven, and could possibly clean up the green water more cheaply and in a more interesting fashion. Maybe the water's too far gone, but who knows.

I had a dwarf puffer for some time in a carefully arranged 2.5 gallon with a ghost shrimp, and they seemed to do fine. I felt bad for him eventually though, and moved him to a 5 gallon. I can't necessarily say that he seems "happier" or anything in the larger tank, but it makes me a little...

What you are describing is known as "the loachy dance" in many loach circles. Generally, it is said that many species of loaches do this when: A) They are moved somewhere new. B) Their environment changes somehow. C) They are disturbed/agitated/affected for some other reason. D) They feel like...

Your loaches may be snacking when you're not watching (eg, late at night). I've noticed that mine are like little kids and don't like most foods the first few times I try them out. Then eventually they catch on and do their best to not let any other fish have any kind of food whatsoever...

Hey Ashley, what happened to the fourth clown loach you used to have? Not that I'm suggesting that it's rotting somewhere, I'm just curious what became of the poor little fellow.

I have so far had good experiences buying directly from other aquarists/small companies using aquabid.com. The site could use some work, but it does its job. This has several advantages, including that in many cases you can at least see a picture of the item/critter actually in question, so...

Too bad that link says it's very difficult to maintain in an aquarium -- it's really neat-looking.

That probably wouldn't actually make the water heat up [i]faster[i/]. Aquarium heaters are like house ones -- turning the thermostat up higher doesn't make the place heat up faster, since heaters generally only have two settings (on and off). All that turning up the thermostat higher than you...

Why not use breather bags?

Thank you for all of your clarifications and advice. I probably will look into getting a little bit better of a filter, though in the meantime it's nice to have it confirmed that the rest of the stuff in my tank will probably carry sufficient bacteria. As was suggested, I may also try either...

If you search, you ought to be able to find quite a few threads and articles here and elsewhere about clown loaches' behavior, but the short answer is that they tend te be fairly shy and nocturnal by nature. No matter what, they will pretty much be incredibly shy at first. With time, they...

I have no idea about the plecos, but I agree with you about the coolness of things like the loaches' eye spines. Here's a picture of my finger where I think one of my larger (though still relatively small) loaches slashed me when I poked my finger into his cave in the process of rearranging...

Can anyone think of any reason not to put small neocaridina shrimp and apple/ramshorn/pond snails together in the same breeding tank? Neither adult will eat the other, obviously. As far as breeding, the shrimp are livebearers, so the snails have no chance of snarfing the young'ns, and since...

It's only natural to be concerned, but don't worry, the blackworms hardly feel a thing. :wink: Seriously, though, seeing as guppy adults are probably the most common feeder fish, I wouldn't feel guilty about the fry.

So I've been running this filter that came with a starter kit for a few months, and the filtering pad is starting to look pretty ragged. Eventually rinsing it out isn't going to cut it and I'm going to have to replace the media, which is normal. The problem it, this chintzy filter doesn't have...

Here are a couple pictures off the net (one from the above link)

Yep, they've got some nice little spines right under their eyes. They're not slash-happy though, if that's worrying you. In my experience they mostly just use them on each other when they fight over food or to figure out who's top dog. Though one of them MAY have sliced my finger when I stuck...

I'm sort of in the same boat. I'm trying to think of someone I could ask to feed them around the midpoint, but barring that I'm planning on introducing a whole mess of baby snails for my dwarf puffer to snack on in his tank, and then dumping some blackworms and cucumber in with the community...

Well, if you're in the market for diatamaceous earth, I happen to know that you can get 25 lbs for only $10 at Lowes. I bought some by mistake yesterday thinking it was pool filter sand. :wink: I was going to ask if you'd thought of using filter shrimp or freshwater clams? An expensive...

Sounds pretty evil all right. It's impressive how finely it sounds like it's able to filter. Thankfully Lowe's was kind enough to take it back, and then when I went to the pool supply store the guy gave me most of a bag full of pool filter sand free because they'd had to open it earlier to use...

And especially not with shrimp! This stuff sounds like bad business, all right. It's going back today, and I'll look around further for pool filter sand. Thanks for all the info.

It's an auction site, and in my experience PayPal is pretty much the standard method of paying, though I imagine there are those that would take checks. Hopefully you can do the PayPal method, because it sounds like your puffers could use snails relatively soon. I bought a starter culture of...

Yeah, like I said, I knew going in that there was a good chance the puffer would chomp the shrimpsters. I was willing to give it a try only because dwarfpuffers.net listed shrimp as something dp's will sometimes tolerate -- kind of hit and miss. I agree that the one shrimp was definitely...

Have you been able to get a hold of any snails yet? If you can't find any locally you can buy some from some place like aquabid.com, or even ebay. There are probably online companies that sell them as well. My first puffer died because it wouldn't eat, so I know how it is (of course, back...

I've had my dp (Mahar Shalal Hashbaz) for a few weeks now, and from the beginning he'd had a ghost shrimp and two red cherry shrimp in the tank with him. I'd picked up the red cherries for a ridiculously high price at a lfs, so I was initially very hesitant about putting them in their with the...