NatureNut

Call the store you bought it from and explain the situation... any good store should advise you well. I agree that you shouldn't just let it starve... poor thing.

I prefer the drop tests... they're cheaper and more accurate if used correctly.

Did you do water tests? If this just happened you should check for levels of ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. It could be that something went out of whack that the other fish could cope with but the 3 that just gave birth couldn't deal with because they were already under stress. My swordies eat algae wafers all the time, by the way.

I'm no expert, but my swordtails popped out several batches of fry with no added salts, and they and their offspring have gone on to 2 other homes to continue, again with no salts...

2 more sleeps!!!!

4 more sleeps for those of you who will stay up all night tagging and bagging. LOL I might be selling something next time. I would have this time if I had my membership already, but I procrastinated... sooooo I get to sleep the night before and be fresh and ready to bid bid bid! :drool:

I'm so sorry to hear about your loss.

I'll be there! I'm counting sleeps and have been since I heard it's on a day I can go (PLEASE never another auction on a holiday! I mean Thanksgiving? Argh! ) 6 sleeps left!

I've been lucky... I don't prefilter my AC even with sand. I know it could cause me a problem one day, but so far so good... Many of my tanks have sponge over them because of small critters in them. I appreciate you starting this because something besides the ugly yellow sponge will be nice.

http://albertaaquatica.com/index.php?showtopic=9277 Just throwing a link there for people like me who are a bit slow finding things. LOL I just realized it's also linked from your signature. Sorry! Well... I guess my link is now to help anyone like me who doesn't notice signatures.

My dwarf puffer is in completely fresh water... from what people have said you might want a back up plan in case you get an aggressive one, though. *My connection failed and then posted this when I logged back on later*

Nope... we might be lucky with this individual, but he's never given us a moment's trouble. He mostly spends his time hanging out on the edge by my computer begging me for food.

I'm glad you had no losses! I almost forgot to double check that everything was running when I did my WCs 2 days ago. Neither of the filters on my shrimp tank had started pumping. It was luck that I noticed. I have a routine of checking for temp and filters after WCs, and on my daily rounds. There's tanks all over the place here so I can't count no sound to alert me to something. Always good to share these stories, I think... it's a nice reminder to us that we can't be too careful.

You asked about different species as well. If you don't want to need a herd of loaches, one little dwarf puffer will clear out every snail in your tank in a hurry. I keep one in my community tank. He's by far our favourite fish. We feed him snails from our other tanks now, but he also gobbles up NLS with no problem at all.

Welcome aboard! I'm sure you'll find tons of info and helpful people here.

I agree in the buyer beware principal. I know, as a potential buyer, that there's many knowledgeable people here that I could write to ask about a price on something I'm not familiar with, as well as being able to do a good ol' google search. That said, there's been a few occasions where I thought things got a bit inflammatory on the boards and I wished it had been taken to PM for the confrontation... I'm one of those people who just want everyone to get along. LOL Thankfully the norm for this board is that people are very understanding and helpful. I think a 'rule' about this could be more all encompassing. If someone wants to give me, or anyone else, anything beyond constructive criticism, advice or praise (ok... there's more to it than that but for simplicity sake...), I'd rather it go private message. People also need to be aware that things said on boards can easily be taken differently than they were intended due to no opportunity for reading body language... they need to be careful how they phrase things, as well as how they react to what has been said, if it could potentially be taken more than one way. I'm sure there's times that some of us feel a person is being inflammatory when that is not what they intended. I don't envy the board moderators on ANY board. I've done it... VERY hard job. I thank you all for the work you do!

A couple of ideas: You could have someone who's going down from Edmonton bid for you, just tell them the max you're willing to go to. Alternatively, why not just post in the Buy/Sell forum that you're looking.

We used stress coat in Calgary for a few years, and then moved to Edmonton (this is about 10 years back now). Our fish were fine for a number of water changes and then BOOM everything except one died. My husband went to the fish store, bought new fish, brought them home and they all died again... it wasn't until he went in with those for the LFG that a salesperson actually asked what happened and we found out about Edmonton switching between Chlorine and Chloramine... tough lesson. Would sure have been nice if they'd told him that when he came in about the FIRST batch of fish. Anyhow, I can tell you that at that point Stress coat did doodly squat about chloramines, and therefore I assume ammonia.

At the auction a year ago I got lots of nice java moss, but I got completely out bid on every piece of java fern. I also got some nice hygrophila (assorted) that did really well.

I'll be doing a water change in the next couple of days and I'll test the new camera on tank pics. I agree about the rio nano being crap... I can get it to skim sometimes for weeks at a time. Nice dark skimmate coming out... then all of a sudden it will quit completely, or won't skim AND pump at the same time. I would love to see instructions for one of these things... apparently they don't come with any. Ugh. If I can find a decent small skimmer and little or no cost, I will run one, just for the extra protection, but for now it's double filtered, basically. I do end up with some algae in it toward 2 weeks if I don't get to a change quicker than that, but basically the tank is doing fine. There is a powerhead in it as well. A sump would be lovely and all, but I really don't have a ton of time/money to put into altering this tank in a big way. I hope I don't mess it up too much adding things, but the tank has run like this for over 4 years. Don't tell my husband, but the next BIG structural 'improvement' will be for it to double or triple (or quadruple) in size... that won't be for awhile yet, though. $$$

Thanks for the tips, everyone! Keep 'em coming! I'm enjoying the dark side for sure... I just want to go sllllooooowww with making changes to the tank so that I don't end up messing something up TOO royally. I was figuring to add a few more non fish items before I get another fish. I THINK that's the right way to go about it. It's a 20g setup, a few corals and other unidentified goodies, some snails (I suspect could use more of those), 2 big blue legged hermit crabs, 2 smaller of the same, I THINK there's 3 peppermint shrimp, but it might be 2, a bazillion brittle stars with assorted leg counts, a yellow tailed dasmel and a royal gramma. I had some identifications done for me early on of the corals, but I should probably get better pics of what I can't id. Recently some bright yellow blob showed up... we have no idea what it is or where it came from. LOL The tank was more or less exactly like this (without the shrimp and big hermits, which I bought awhile back) for 4 years, with 2 owners. Those fish have staying power. The owner 2 back once left it for 3 months without a water change! One other thing I want to get is a better skimmer... I have a rio nano on it as well as an AC, but the rio is a pain in the butt, as far as I'm concerned. ANYHOW, I'll take this over to CanReef as well... I've snooped through there, but haven't spent as much time as here.

I think I'm ready to CONSIDER adding some things to my tank. When I was picking something up from someone's house one day, I saw they had clownfish hosting in their frogspawn. Has anyone else experienced this? Frogspawn is MUCH easier to keep than anemones, so I thought that might be a nice option for us. I'm also curious if anyone here knows of local sources for aquacultured SW critters... thinking of a clownfish, inverts, easy care corals and the likes. Calgary is my usual stomping grounds, but I'll be in Edmonton next weekend, so that's a possibility as well. Willing to mail order too. Just tire kicking and looking for ideas right now, so that's why I didn't post this in the actual buy/sell forum.

Welcome! There's a search feature linked at the top right of the screen for this site. It works very well, searching all forums. I use it tons. I hope you enjoy your time here.

Darn.... I was almost convinced to shut mine down because of another thread... now I'll probably leave it running. Thanks for sharing. Sounds like all the fish made it, that's the big thing.

Wow... I'll stop mine too! Thanks!