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You can also use leaf cuttings to propagate java fern varieties very quickly and produce huge numbers of plantlets to fill out a space.

malaysian trumpet snails. they dig through the substrate and come out at night. very prolific.

Really interesting. I think I might have seen that algae in rivers before. I've also read that there's a true freshwater coralline algae discovered in a river in Croatia. Freshwater coralline algae

I wonder what water conditions are required for freshwater coralline algae. I'd love to have that on some of my rocks.

Same here. Mine is borderline too soft. I think there's definitely a connection.

I think Cladophora responds pretty well to blackouts. If I were you I'd try a 48 hour blackout. I've been pretty lucky and not had major algae issues for a few years but when I did have some problems a very strict blackout worked well. It helps to have some big amano shrimp to hoover up the...

I used pier aquatics recently for some fish and they were very helpful and the fish arrived quickly and in perfect health. I thought the way they had packed the fish was odd but maybe they know something I don't. I would use them again for sure.

Green spot is one algae I've never seen in any of my tanks ever. I almost wish I did because I actually love the way it looks on rocks.

I'm guessing you probably have fairly hard water as copepods don't really boom like that unless there's a lot of minerals for them in addition to food as they moult so often and reproduce so quickly. There's really no downside to having them in your aquarium unless you just really don't like the...

I would bet on copepods rather than seed shrimp based on the description of "white dust" but either way they are almost definitely harmless and the population will eventually recede. There's also many small fish that will eat huge numbers of either copepods or seed shrimp.

Yeah this is happening for me but only on mobile and only on the fish subforum.

If you know that the midges are laying in there then rather than trying to individually harvest bloodworms I find more utility in going out at night with a torch and collecting the egg masses they deposit at the surface as they lay huge numbers at once. You're looking for spiral of hundreds of...

Thats me. And it's a very cool plant for emersed setups, it's not the fastest grower but it will eventually green an entire tank if you want it to with a carpet of those dense little emerald cups. Eventually it produces some fronds but they are almost always small and abortive, once or twice for...

You might look at Antrophyum cf. plantagineum as another viable candidate that is commercially available. Like Lomariopsis lineata this is understood to be a fern that gets stuck in the prothallium state. I grow this in my vivariums, maybe I'll try sticking a little piece of stone with some in...

Actually for anyone that might be reading this that's suffering with the struggle to find female scarlet badis I do have a very healthy spare guaranteed male/female pair I can part with, for free, to a good home but it would need to be by collection only on the roseneath peninsula near glasgow...

Really appreciate you taking the time to provide us all with these fascinating insights

I'm thinking about breeding mine again and might have some fry available in the future but I don't have any spare females right now. WIldwoods were sold both males and females quite recently so it might be worth asking them.

I've been doing a fair bit of pond dipping recently and I'm always amazed by the variety of life that turns up. It's got me thinking about whether there's other aquatic invertebrates that could thrive and even complete their lifecycle in planted tanks. I have very occasionally seen sunburst...

I have a ton of tiny clams living in my ponds. No idea how they got there and it's not an environment I would expect them to thrive in but they do. The ponds have acidic gley on the bottom, are fairly shaded but get some direct sun and quite a lot of beech leaves end up in them. The clams tend...

When you grow phals semi hydropinically don't the roots still need to dry out a couple of days a week?

The wood actually looks pretty dry, unless you were going to wrap it in some sort of wicking fabric like hygrolon you're more restricted in what you could grow on it. I would try some Tillandsias. Pretty bulletproof and will benefit from the slightly increased humidity close to the tank.

Why do you believe that to be the case? For Iguanas is this not likely a function of their large size and it being difficult to artificially illuminate a sufficiently sized area with UVB for them at the appropriate levels? all of the geckos I keep max out at about 6cm but I've noticed really...

It's basking lizards that I'm talking about so not the best analogue for humans but if I was keeping a captive human I would definitely try and get them at least some UV exposure. There's a reason why Charlie Bronson has to wear shades all the time now. The lizards use UVB to synthesise vitamin...

I don't mean UV sterilisers integrated into filtration. It seems like a lot of the fish we tend to keep would be exposed to fair amounts of UV light in the wild and I just noticed on a pack of hikari food that it specifically mentions supplementation designed to "support colour retention in UV...

I'm surprsied others are finding these restrict flow more than sponges. total opposite of my experience. I was using 30ppi filter foam. maybe coarser is the way to go but then the pores in the sponge would be unambiguously larger than the grade of mesh on strainers I use.

You can get some very fine mesh strainers. I've used both but these days I prefer the mesh strainers over sponges as I find they're easier to clean and look a little neater- just turn off the filter when you're doing a water change and suck the mulm off. It's much easier because detritus is...

I wonder if you had an oxydator or oxydators working well enough whether you could achieve pearling from plants without co2 by achieving oxygen saturation without an airstone or something creating a lot of visible bubbles.

It's like a glass jar that uses hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst to produce micro bubbles of pure oxygen that dissolve straight into the water. There are some additional marketing claims about 'active oxygen' also being produced but I think these are nonsense on a par with products like seachem...

This was why I stopped using co2. I'm totally sure fish can be perfectly happy in co2 injected tanks as I know people who breed fish with co2 injection but whenever I've used it the fish seemed stressed. The only plants I was ever really interested in growing that required co2 were carpet plants...

Here's potentially a male with two of the fatter females, please excuse how dirty my glass is. Apparently "Male hypoptopomins posses a urogenital papilla located immediately posterior to the anus. It is absent in females" but does anyone know what urogenital papilla look like in fish? I'm...

I second this. Wildwoods are the best I have dealt with by far.

I also highly recommend Bacter AE for any shrimp. I've seen no visible evidence that it has any noticeable impact on biofilm formation but it certainly has a positive effect on overall shrimp health and vitality, improves colour and improves survival of babies. Shrimp used to immediately swarm...

Did you drip acclimate the shrimp when you got them? That's the thing that leaps to mind for me. In the past I didn't realise the importance of acclimating shrimp properly, just floated the bag to let temperature equalise and added a little tank water before dumping them in. Drip acclimating...

St Albans is absolutely beautiful and the tank is looking good.

Fattening up quickly. These seem to eat a lote more than regular otos. I don't have any basis to compare their actual algae eating capacity yet but they have certainly cleaned the glass and the alder twigs I added for them..

In my experience it will eventually adapt to much lower humidity than you might expect, I actually have java fern growing in a vivarium with basking lights but it took a long time for it to start producing more robust fronds that don't dry out and crisp up. The vivarium has an automatic misting...

I got six of these weeks ago as an impulse buy after seeing them incorrectly labelled as simply 'otocinclus' and held in a tank with absolutely no biolfilm for them to feed on. The shop had only been feeding flake to the other fish in the tank and the otothyropsis were pretty starved with sunken...

Really nice and healthy Otothyropsis piribebuy being incorrectly sold as "Otocinclus" at Dunbar Garden Centre in East Lothian, Scotland. EDIT - and they are only £3.20 rather than £18 each at the shop mentioned further up the page!

Really glad the forum is back. I discovered during this break that I'm the sort of person that can go months without ever checking ukaps but absolutely NEEDS to check it several times a day the minute it's offline 😅

Bought a bottle of this recently just because I was curious and began dosing it into a low tech without any great expectations. It definitely seems to me that this product does something. The biggest difference I actually noticed was in water clarity - it somehow seemed to really polish the...

And you wont regret getting some sundanio for this tank either. I also keep these and they are much more interesting than I imagined. Once they are mature the dominant males actually make an audible vocalisation during their mating performances. I think there are several species/subspecies...

Oh man I feeel your pain. I lost track of how many cross country trips I made to shops that swore they had female scarlet badis. I finally saw one in a shop in Hamburg and it was pretty useful to know what to actually look for. After that I eventually found one among a batch of males in a shop...

I've been thinking it should be possible to make a liposomally encapsulated chlorophyll/spirulina liquid supplement that could be stored in the fridge with a decent shelf life and used as hassle free squirt and go daphnia/moina feed. I believe one advantage of liposomal encapsulation of the...

I have been having this exact same thought but I didn't know they were called nuptial tubercles! this could also explain why they are always in exactly the same place even on different individuals.

Well a year on and these fish have grown considerably and appear to be in excellent health however some of them still periodically get these odd white spots around their mouths and only around their mouths. There is no sign of whatever the spots are ever having spread to any other fish in the...

I couldn't agree more! they are really great, for anyone reading this there seems to be a guy called Keith there who is the one to talk to. Really helpful and knowledgeable. Wooki how have you found the cuneovirgata? do they seem to socialise with the alternans? These are great pictures.

I did. I have seven of these now all from wildwoods. They're really cool fish, I haven't kept regular kuhlis for comparison but as far as I can tell these ones are more or less identical in terms of behaviour just significantly smaller. They're quite shy and tend to spend most of the day in...

What am I missing here? I would say ramshorns are the very last thing you would want to introduce to a tank to deal with mulm. 90+% of all the mulm in my tanks is probably from ramshorn snails that produce far larger poo than any of my fish. They're good for green fuzz algae on the glass in my...

I've had this happen often with various mosses and liverworts - and exactly the same experience with fissidens fontanus regrowing from wood that was dried and in the dark for at least a year. I think in the case of the riccardia and some others tiny fragments can settle in some dark corner of...

This very soft water is what they bred in and fry raised to maturity in it seem fine but if I knew they would do better in harder water I would definitely want to amend it.

This has been my experience too. With the well water I was always battling multiple kinds of algae, it didn't take much to tip a tank from 'a bit of algae' to a full blown outbreak and I was constantly dealing with BGA. In the very soft water from belmore the only algae I encounter is some kind...

I used to live in an area where we had well water that was essentially liquid rock, I would run about 5L at a time through a distiller for the misting system on my emersed setups and even from that little water a thick mineral gunk was left behind after all the water had evaporated. I kept...

At 18c you should find that they are slower growing but live longer and become larger. I have a friend that cultures moina and we occasionally swap starters when a culture crashes or there's some other disaster like when I spilled my entire 15L culture all over a carpet floor. He keeps them...

These are coming on nicely. What's that flat light green moss at the back next to the blue bead?

Actually here's where you can buy both adult and tadpole Xenopus tropicalis in the UK Xenopus resource Could be cool to raise one or two from tadpoles.

There's also Xenopus/Silurana tropicalis which is a little larger and more robust than african dwarf frogs but much smaller than Xenopus laevis and can be kept safely with fish that are too large to fit in its mouth. 28mm - 55mm snout to vent with females being larger than the males. I don't...

There's a lot of pretty contradictory information out there about whitespot too with some sources saying that it's always present at background levels in a tank and only becomes a problem when fish are stressed or their immune systems compromised and others saying the opposite. Also a lot of...

This species is too small and fast moving for the only camera I have available to me right now to focus on them, I just get blurry flashes of blue. But the second white dot has also gone this morning. I'm wondering if this is actually some kind of copepod that's attacking the fish, or rarely...

About a month ago I finally got ahold of some sundanio axelrodi that I had been after for a while, I posted about them because one of them was in extremely poor health when I got them and died very quickly. It was a male and appeared to have some kind of parasite and/or fungal infection that...

If you don't absolutely have your heart set on fish then you might also consider Bombina orientalis and Occidozyga lima. You'd want to have lower water levels though in both cases which would mean more of a riparian scape with floating plants and emergent pieces of driftwood for the frogs to...

Is that moss what they call "bucephalandra moss"? if so how do you find it does emersed? I have a tiny, tiny piece about the size of a 5p coin that looks like this which I've been trying to grow out for months and I recently switched it to emersed growth hoping to speed things up but it seems to...

I don't know much about sparkling gouramis but this is a really nice and natural looking tank. Looks like a perfect slice taken out of a slow flowing river margin and I've always found it easier to make a tank look nice than it is to make a tank look natural and nice.

It's well worth considering, there was a pretty interesting thread on exactly this recently that covered a lot of angles Aquarium freshwater fish sourced from wild?

That's really cool actually, I had never heard of an employee ownership trust before. I definitely think you've chosen the right hobby for your retirement! Look forward to seeing your tank once it's ready to go.........and then after that the tanks that will surely follow 👍

OK, i know you're specifically trying to distract yourself but I'm one of those people that now just has to ask what the old job was?

Tank looks great, really nice carpet. How are you finding that filter guard? I got the same thing from amazon but I only installed it a couple of days ago, I've seen people complaining that they get blocked up with gunk and particles too quickly and that they rust. I really struggled to deploy...

Interesting to read this because I've had similar experiences myself where it really seemed like higher flow was causing algae and reducing flow seemed to fix the problem, especially without co2. I can't really think of any reason why this should be the case though.

Absolutely amazing. Can you tell us how you made the dripwall tank? is that fake rock or crushed rock attached to some kind of foam?

Just a tip for anyone looking for female dario dario that happens to read this thread - Wildwoods aquatics in enfield told me on the phone today that they have a new supplier that provides them with even numbers of male and female dario dario that are captive bred and readily accepting frozen...

I don't have american frogbit but I've found that flow has a massive impact on the growth form and root length of water lettuce. With no/minimal flow it grows large rosettes and the roots stretch all the way to the substrate but increasing flow and/or redirecting it across the surface seems to...

I will be sure to keep you posted if I find some. Found a guy in Scotland who can get fish from aquarium glaser in germany but glaser just informed me they stopped carrying these guys two weeks ago. Kew aquatics don't have them on their indonesian import list either and said the best bet is just...

can't thank you enough for this!

Anybody keeping these dwarf kuhli loaches? or ever seen them avialable in the UK? It seems that the wholesaler aquariumglaser sells them, does anybody know of UK suppliers that are able to source fish from them?

I've also grown helvola in an aquarium and it did very well planted in aquasoil. I don't know how necessary a winter dormancy period is because I was only growing it out from a small piece of rhizome before I moved it into an outdoor pond but it thrived for many months in an aquarium. Even these...

Sorry to hear about the fish. It's hard to imagine this damage was done directly by another sprakling gourami though. Is it possible there's something sharp in the aquarium that she rammed into when she was being pursued by a male? I've started sanding down lava rock before I use it in my badis...

Food for thought. I should maybe try seeing how mine respond to slightly cooler temps. I do the same thing with my geckos in terms of creating seasonal fluctuations in day length, temps and moisture but I hadn't really considered that the fish might benefit from it too. Can you elaborate at all...

Those temperatures are at the lower end of the range I've seen proposed for them right? Do you adjust it to mimic natural seasonal changes or have you found some advantage to keeping them on the cooler end of things? Do you notice their behaviour change much after mating? In my experience pairs...

For anyone interested I did a proper inventory of a full batch of fry. From a single mature pair with constant access to various live food at a temperature of 23c in very soft slightly acidic water, 73 fry have matured to a point where their sex can be determined with a high degree of...

I wish i could like this post more than once. I couldn't agree more.

Don't get me wrong - my addition of co2 to the emersed setup is totally unecessary and all of the moss was growing without it in a more or less clingiflm sealed environment as you describe here. It may have some value in more rapidly propagating the smaller and much slower growing species though...

Very true. I grow various orchids and bromeliads in a large vivarium also and I've seen first hand the benefits of additional passive ventilation in terms of minimizing mold just from installing a low wattage solar raptor heat strip beneath the door vent. I have seen a lot of people growaing...

Correct. None of my moss is in direct contact with the water anyway but rather the ultrasonic fogger creates a layer of dense fog every four hours that keeps it fairly saturated and distributes nutrients that I do add directly to the water as in some aeroponic growing systems for more...

By the way if anyone is interested, after a lot of searching I've found a source of high quality ceriodaphnia dubia ephippia. A company called microbiotests in Belgium can supply them to pretty much anywhere in Europe and I can testify that they are comparable to moina in terms of productivity...

Eventually I really must branch out into keeping these beauties and I'd really like to get D. hysignon again too. I've also heard that females of D.tigris are easier to come by and several shops when I was looking for female dario told me they'd never seen one but that they could supply pairs of...

Exactly as you say - If I'm not going to be culturing moina for a while I just let them produce ephippia by feeding way less. It's very easy to visually differentiate between an adult moina that's carrying embryos and one that's carrying ephippia and you can also see the shed ephippia on the...

If anyone prefers instead to debate global warming then obviously it goes without saying that things have changed since 2014 and the starting point for that conversation necessarily must be that Trump proved that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by satanic paedos and that he's still in...

I noticed that there is a very old thread from 2014 which raised this issue and the concensus seemed to be that it made no difference and/or wasn't worth the effort as the 400ppm of atmospheric co2 is more than adequate for emersed growth. That thread quickly devolved into a debate about global...

Not the best picture but check out the pectoral fins on this little guy! They're never usually this long and he's not even fully mature yet, I would expect him to colour up more as he grows and has the opportunity to establish his own territory.

I suspect that more of our fish are still wild caught than people might like to imagine but it's not as ethically black and white as we might tend to think either. Here's a couple of interesting articles on the topic "Buy a fish, Save a tree" Discover Magazine "Saving the Rainforest, One pet...

I was finally able to trade some of my scarlet badis for 9 sundanio axelrodi. I got nine sundanio, 6 females and 3 males, but one of the males was clearly diseased and passed away within 24 hours. It was suffering from fin rot on the tail fin and 3 small white masses were evident on its body...

This has also been my experience with scarlet badis. Fry and juveniles up to a certain size like to hide in thick moss regardless of depth, and even very close to the surface, but once mature they tend to stay low around the substrate. Adult males seem to love nothing more than caves created by...

what's your setup like? are there plants and snails in there and what size of tank are you using? I found a video on youtube recently where someone was reporting that contrary to conventional wisdom they found that daphnia cultures without snails were slightly more productive.

I'm still experimenting and fine tuning. There's obviously got to be an optimum ratio of carrot to water that would produce the best results. There may be better vegetables to use too. It was someone in Asia who tipped me off to this and said that they start all their cultures this way, only...

That's some kind of leech. Although there is a chance they could prey on shrimp or snails I think probably they will be in interesting addition to your kids ecosystems with a lot of scope for additional learning. The fact that some leeches suck blood might be engaging for them and you could...

I have no idea what these are but I have a major outbreak of something almost identical in my smallest outdoor pond at the moment. That shape almost like a grain of rice is quite distinctive. There was a deep freeze here and there was several inches of ice across the surface and following the...

In theory the opposite is true and moina are supposed to be much more tolerant of poor water conditions than the common daphnia species but there's so many variables to account for in any comparison. I think it's probably easier to maintain a stable daphnia culture because they tend to reproduce...

Here's a video of one of the carrot cultures. It's been about four and a half days since I added roughly 20 moina.

I've had plenty of copepods in most of my moina cultures as a consequence of using tank water for changes in the moina cultures but they don't seem to ever reach great numbers. I've never been able to culture freshwater copepods in large numbers but there are so many different species that it's...

Interesting catching up on the results from people experimenting with this. I've begun experimenting with moina culture again and I'm pursuing some different angles that might be of interest. I was able to get good results with the chlorella but as has been noticed my protocol was fairly...

That's really fascinating that you've noticed the same thing with females being marked after pairing in D. tigris and an amazing tank too!