firestorm

LOL actually kevin the reason for having so many different types of species would be my bf's fault. And now I am the one who has to clean up after his mistakes. And yes I love all different types of fish, and currently have 6 tanks in total. If I keep the discus in the 90 I will probably leave the rams in there as well, and maybe a couple of the ottos. The reason I bought an RO system, which I got for a great deal on ebay, is because I wanted to eventually try and breed my discus, which most people said I will need that type of water. Tammy I would also love to hear what your water conditions are like to have them breed in our water, but the wild caught might be more difficult to breed than the domestic. Or I might try and go for a 75 gallon for them, since I have found one place (Francos aquariums) to have great deals on their tanks. But maybe i'll find a better deal on buy and sell. I noticed the last time I was in Golds they also were setting up some tanks that they will be selling (still don't know where denis finds room for any of this stuff lol). I will most likely be buying an eheim shortly for the 90 gallon, so I can take the filtration from there and use it for the other tank. I only want my fish to live healthy long lives, and love to relax watching them. I am totally having the multiple tank syndrome, but can't get my dream tanks of around 200 gallons each until I live somewhere with a basement. Sigh.....if only I could have a nice huge discus colony in a 200 gallon Actually I have big dreams of all of this. Right now I am trying to gain the experience with all different types of fish, then one day I would love to start getting breeding groups and start my own business of breeding top quality fish. I hope to eventually afford to get either wild caught or F1's, then breed those myself to have the best quality. Right now it all seems so distant, but that would be awesome to do, and maybe even open up my own store, having great quality fish bred by me But for now, I am still in the learning process, but young enough to be able to live out those dreams. Thanks guys Caressa

Sorry tammy, I forgot about you, and yes your info was great as well, and I liked your opinions. I am considering buying another 55 for them, or putting all the others in there, but I guess it would be less stress on most of the fish to only move the discus over, not to mention the ease of catching them compared to all the rest lol. I do plan on getting about 1 or 2 more discus in the next month or so, so I might even go for a 65 gallon or something. I did have cardinals in there, but they ended up being smaller than I thought and half were gone by the next morning. I will have to try and get some more then, as I love their colors. Thanks again guys.

Oh no kevin it, wasn't your responses or geleens comments that were criticizing, I found them to be helpful and I am open to hearing things I don't already know. Thanks for your input, alot of it was useful to know. And I fed them bloodworms tonight, usually do every few days for the black ghost knife. The discus loved them, so at least they were eating. And by the way those pictures were taken a few hours after we put them in the tank, so that might be why they looked so stressed. They look much better today and I will try and get more in the next couple of days so you can see the difference in them. Well when I get that bigger tank I might then move my blue acaras, angels, and black ghost knife out into that one, I guess the catfish also. Then I might try and put my frontosas in my 90 gallon african cichlid tank until I can afford to get a bigger one for them as well. Just spent money on a smaller tank and put the dwarf puffers we once had in the 90 community, now they are in a tank by themselves. The cherry barbs are a pain in the butt to catch, but I will keep my eye on them. As for the apistogramma and kribs, I may leave the apisto, don't know yet, and I will keep the kribs with angels and acaras. Hmm lol I have alot of sorting out to do here, but I am glad for the advice since the discus are my favorites. Don't want anything bad to happen to them. And the siamese algae eaters we just bought today, only about an inch long right now, but they are only in there temporarily until we can get our hair algae under control. The ghost shrimp, if they get eaten, oh well. I will try to soak the pellets in bw juice next time, although they do say garlic works good too usually. Guess if I see my plants being stressed I can always take them out for the time being and place them somewhere else to grow. How many discus can you fit in a 55 gallon? Once I get my tax rebate back I will be able to afford a little more to rearrange things. And thanks alot, I would rather hear from people who have kept discus who actually know what they are doing.

Thanks guys for your useful suggestions. And if you just want to criticize me then why not just not respond to my post. I know that fronts are not the best tank mates for discus so that is why we only have them in there for now while they are still small, and will be buying another larger tank for them in about 3-4 months. As for angels, I did not know they were that bad to mix with discus, so thank you for giving me a heads up. So far they haven't really eaten anything yet, and no they do not look as stressed now as they did at the store. Many discus as well will develop black spots when they are in stress, which is often why you see them that way. We also had a small discus that had the black spots, but they started to go away. We only got these guys this past friday, so of course it will take them a week or 2 to get used to the tank. Right now in the tank we have 4 discus, 4 german blue rams, 2 bolivian rams, 3 frontosas, 2 blue acaras, 4 angels, 3 kribensis, 1 apistogramma, 1 black ghost knife, and 1 pictus catfish, 4 cherry barbs(we couldn't catch to sell, and hope they get eaten), 4 ottos, 2 siamese algae eaters, and 4 ghost shrimp. We will be doing 2 25% water changes at least every week, and that being said we leave our water as is and don't mess with pH's and stuff, so since my pH is 7.6 and KH is about 120ppm, both the discus and frontosas will survive fine in these waters. Soon after removing my frontosas I will be starting slowly to use some RO water in their tank, I am still waiting for my system to come in the mail. I feed my fish mostly NLS pellets, sometimes we feed our nutrafin max to get rid of it, and sometimes things like spirulina disks or frozen treats. I may try rubbing the food in garlic if the discus don't eat within 5 or 6 days. We believe the discus with darker stripes is a blue red maues discus, and the other one a blue manacapuru discus. I really do believe they are wild caught because of all the pictures we have seen of different types of discus. Most domestic discus are the ones with all the fancy colors, since they cross breed until they get pretty colors, just like alot of other fish. They are both in the bottom pic, and all the rest of the pics are just other ones of them. And I do believe the glass was a little streaky because I looked at their eyes and they are both fine. As for the spots on the ones fin, I have already seen that and I am keeping my eye on it. Thanks guys, I am still pretty new at keeping discus, so I am open to any helpful tips. I might be grabbing a couple more wild caught discus from spencer jacks in a month or so, which will probably be my limit. Kevin if you would like to see about going in on buying some from spencer, let me know. And denis had about a few left, but that was on friday, so I am not sure if he has any left, but I only paid 59.99 for each, which to me I don't care if they are wild caught or not for that price considering their size. Either way I got a good deal. Edit: Oh and we try and keep the water temp between 82 and 84, so we can try and please the plants and the fish both. We don't want to have it too high because of that reason. But we supplement them all with CO2, seachem fertilizers and fluorite mixed in the gravel, as well as proper lighting. The plants are still becoming established, well some of them, so it will take time before we see any great results from them, but they are coming along. Some are starting to grow quite well. Only time will tell with them.

I found this today on mops, and I found last time I ordered something through them their shipping costs were great!! If you still need the laterite that is http://www.mops.ca/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/sk...f930+1207511458

I actually like pisces for some things, they do sometimes get some good fish in we can't find anywhere else. And sometimes they will have good sales on. I also know they have some really nice fish at imperial aquariums off 36st NE too. I have to say I like golds almost the best, and riverfront aquariums would be next. They both know quite a bit about fish, and can often have rare to find fish. Golds as well has great prices on food.

So we picked up our 2 wild caught discus early on this week, unfortunately we didn't have a quarantine tank available for them, but we have been monitoring them every day to make sure everything goes well and we can catch anything that may happen early on. Here are some pics!!!

You put it very good. I think so too. There are probably not enough SW things in here to be opening up a whole new page for it. So if everyone can put specifically that it is for SW, then people who will be interested will only take a look. And I don't know about this, and can't remember if you have it or not, but if you have a page for "other" fish, then they can post their concerns about SW in this section.

Yeah I think it also looks like some sort of deformed jewel. I have 2 jewels in one of my tanks, but they have longer bodies. Is this the only one you have like this? I have never seen a jewel that looks like that unless it is a terrible hybrid gone wrong lol.

Yeah the most pairs of rams I would keep together would probably be 2. Once they choose their mate they tend to stay with them. Sorry to hear about them killing the other rams. We have our rams in a tank with kribensis, and non of them seem to bother one another, and with kribs, try for one breeding pair or 2 females and one male (our dominant male killed the sub dominant one) I am so surprised that your rams killed one another, they usually bump into one another, kinda like ramming them, but I have read that rams usually can't badly injure another. Maybe they were wrong then. Good luck to ya, wish my rams would breed that fast

Thanks werner for that site. I was actually looking on it and the type of algae we are getting is the fuzz algae. We just got a few ottos a few weeks ago, so I am hoping they will help in getting rid of the problem. I will look into this type of algae on some other sites as well, I have a few bookmarked, and I will see what other things I need to do to get rid of it. I know we don't have any of the other types, and rarely get the green algae that grows on the glass. But thanks for all of that. We actually don't have that much of it, just a little bit on our onion plant and java fern.

Those suckers are rated for tanks up to 20 gal each. Not near enough for a big tank like a 90gal. Yeast based systems and DIY CO2 are really only efficient (and effective) for tanks up to about 50gal- then it's better to just go pressurized. I know, that's why we have 2 of them. Once I have enough money I will be going with a pressurized system, or I might make a couple more myself using the good ol' pop bottles(for now). Amazingly enough we have hardly had any green algae growth, only the hair algae, but it looks like it is slowly decreasing. I am still pretty new at the whole keeping aquarium plants, even though I did do quite a bit of research on all those aspects, I know what I need to be getting here in the future. My plants are still thriving even with those two ladders. We have great lighting for them, we have put fluorite in the substrate, we use the seachem excel and comprehensive fertilizers, and we have the 2 bubble ladders for now, and refill the canister with fresh juice every week(I make my own mix). I just hate how expensive the CO2 tanks are

It could very well be. I know it says it helps reduce waste as well though, so I am hoping it doesn't eat up all the good nutrients and steal them from my plants too. You never know what you will be getting with store brand products. Although I know sometimes theirs work just as well and they cost less. I guess it is trial and error, but I will for sure see if I can get a copy of the ingredients from the store. I don't want to be putting chemicals in my water that I absolutely don't want. And the strange thing is that we have 2 nutrafin natural plant systems in our 90 gallon for CO2, so they should be getting enough of that to not have a problem with algae. But since my plants are not well enough established, it could be why I am getting the hair algae. My suggestion to you jimired, is to buy yourself a magnetic glass scraper, they work really good for the algae on the glass, and once you have your plants well established, with enough of them, you should start seeing a decrease in algae growth. You can also try putting phosphate removers pads in the filter, but I wouldn't completely recommend it with a planted tank. Try limiting the light your tank is getting as well. Just shut them off an hour earlier than you usually do, and make sure your bulb isn't wearing out and is the proper wattage for good plant growth. Unfortunately algae can be very difficult to get rid of. And what other types of fish do you have? You might even be able to get away with another type of algae eater.

yeah it's weird because today the female is now out and about, and they are no longer guarding the cave, so they might have had no luck with this batch or something. Maybe I should try turning the ornament upside down and see what comes out. I know it's a bad thing to do, but I would really like to know what was going on inside there. Yeah right now they don't seem highly aggressive that they will kill anyone, but I can see it happening once they become larger. I didn't know the exact location they were from, so I guess that's why this was moved then. I am hoping I may have gotten lucky and we have some babies, but if not this time then hopefully next time for sure. So with these babies I won't need to use the baby brine? I have some of that and the regular brine shrimp. And I can always crush up pellets and flakes small enough for them to eat.

Yeah, I have had my eheim for years and I have to say, I love their filters. I never thought of that method zoban, thanks for that. I think I was sick and tired from sucking it all the time. Not only that, mine is a 2250, so it takes so much sucking. I will for sure try your method next time. Yes eheims are very quiet, that's one thing I love about them.

Ok, I am really thinking our kribensis cichlids bred. We have an ornament like a tree root, which has a cave inside. The female stays in the cave all the time for the past couple of days, and the male hangs around outside guarding the opening. They were doing dances with each other for the past 2 weeks, a day after we got her(when he finally saw her), and now this. I think I might have some babies soon. What do you guys think? This is my first time with these guys, so I don't know what to expect. I have only been keeping kribs for a couple of months now.

Thanks guys for the helpful info. The only tank I can see putting them in to quarantine would be my 25 gallon which is currently being used for a breeding tank of kenyis. But I guess I can stick them back into the 90 african tank, and use this for at least a few weeks for the discus. I was planning on breeding discus and rams in the future, maybe a year or so. So I figured by doing a ratio of RO to tap, will help in breeding them. I especially want to get in on breeding wild discus, because I don't want them to be from some awful imbred strain. Right now we have 2 discus which are domestic, but I want to try and get the rest all wild. Our 2 discus we have now I wouldn't consider adults. They are only about 4" in diameter right now, and the wild caught are quite a bit larger than them, maybe about 7". So I will do my best before getting them to set up the other tank for them. I just don't want to risk the chance of losing a bunch of fish again, which some are not cheap to buy. So I will take your guy's advice and quarantine them a little longer. So how would I use the prazipro? And can I find it at any pet store? I will check with golds when we pick up the fish, and I will see if they have some. Yes and I like denis, because they do alot of their breeding themselves, and we have found many good deals from them compared to others.

Not sure exactly which is best for helping fertilize, but we found that when we added the peat, it became more like dirt and wasn't as good when we siphoned, as more of it came up and made more of a mess in the tank. The only thing about the fluorite is that it can create alot of cloudiness due to the dust, so you would want to rinse it well first. sounds like a good idea with freezing it, how come I didn't think of that before lol. I know you can also buy fertilizer sticks that you push in by the roots of the plants, and some of them can fertilize them for up to a year. never thought of the red clay, that might also work for you.

Really? Well our dealer has told us the wild caught discus are hardier than domestic raised discus. They always have really nice healthy looking discus there, better than other stores we have seen. I know that discus are not as hardy as other kinds of fish, so I will still take extra special care of them.

I actually went in on friday with my boyfriend, so that he could look at them as well. We ended up putting 2 on hold because the guy from the store told us they are hardier than domestic discus. Apparently since they are in the wild they are more immune to disease and such, and are not inbred or anything, therefore healthier. He has had them and won't sell them until he knows for sure if they are ready to be sold yet. This store amazingly quarantines tanks for quite some time to ensure they don't sell poor products. All our fish we have ever got from them are more rare to find, and have never died right after getting them. We have mostly only had problems with other stock. So I am quite confident that the fish will be fine without further quarantine. I guess I will just have to wait and see what happens. I don't have any other tanks large enough for them to be quarantined, and I have not received my sponge filters yet(just in case I could use a large tote to quarantine them). I hope that they will be fine, and all my other fish too.

I was about to give up lol. I didn't know there were so many types of geophagus/gymnogeophagus until now.

Yeah it doesn't say what is in it actually. Next time I am down I will ask them or look on the huge bottle they have, cause it doesn't say on mine. One of the guys at the pet store, who deals with all their plants and planted show tanks, showed us this product and says it is great to help remove hair algae, this is our first time using it. It is helping slightly for that type of algae, but I am not 100% sure with other types. Though we have also seen a decrease in green algae on the sides of the tanks.

Ah I see, didn't know you wanted it for that reason. The best place to look then is online, mops is a great site to shop at, I was in pisces today and didn't see any laterite. When big al's opens up on 32nd ave NE, they might carry the stuff, but they won't be opening their new store until late spring. Have you tried using liquid fertilizers containing iron? And I don't think you will be able to make balls out of the fluorite. Your other bet is to try sunnyside acres, which I believe is somewhere off memorial in the west, or try golden acres which is right behind pisces.

Oh and another thing I forgot to mention is that if your tank is in direct sunlight, you will find the algae will grow more, so best to keep tanks away from windows or keep the blinds closed at the time of day when the sun is hitting your tank. Here are a few websites that are great at explaining different kinds of algae. http://www.firsttankguide.net/algae.php http://www.seaweed.ie/algae/default.lasso http://www.otocinclus.com/articles/algae.html http://www.thetropicaltank.co.uk/algae.htm

More plants. In most cases, if you have a well enough planted tank, the plants will compete with algae for nutrients and often will win the battle. Try staying away from plant fertilizers containing iron, since algae thrives from extra iron. Try leaving the lights on for a maximum of 10 hours a day, and make sure you have proper lighting and your bulbs aren't getting old. How long has your tank been setup? And how long have you had the plants in there? What types of fertilizers are you using and are you using any CO2 in it? All of these things will help in whether you will get lots of algae's, whether they be green or brown, and will be the main factor on whether your plants will thrive or not. Our 90 gallon planted tank is well planted with no more algae, except the slight amount of hair algae. We have a hagen power glo bulb plus an extra 21" 15W plant grow light on it. We use seachems flourish fertilizers, and find the excel to be the best. As well we have put seachem fluorite in the substrate and mixed it in with our sand and gravel. Green algae will grow more in better lighting and it is also easier to find things that will eat it. Besides being a little bit nicer looking. Brown algae, also referred to as diatoms, are usually found in aquariums with terrible lighting or low lights, and newer established tanks. It can be unsightly but it will usually turn into green algae as the tank ages. So getting rid of green algae can be helped by minimizing light, but brown will still thrive. Best thing you can do is put a little elbow grease in to clean it off. If your tank is not planted, then you can also try and get products that remove phosphates, as this is one nutrient that algae likes to feed off. By minimizing nutrients they feed off, it will also help keep your algae problem under control. Ottos are good for eating algae, as well as most plecos, and siamese algae eaters. Stay away from things like chinese algae eaters, since they become very aggressive. Hope this helps