JMorgan
Member
I've got myself in a spot of bother in that when one pair of our angelfish spawned and I removed the leaf to a hang-on breeder box, 11 fry made it past the wriggler stage and are now growing out nicely in their own tank.
So when I removed a second leaf a few weeks later from a different pair of angels I was expecting similar results. I now find myself with 100+ small angelfish (and 11 much larger ones) and I need to move the 100+ spawn to a larger tank pretty soon. I managed to borrow a 65 litre tank (stop-gap) and I've had a small sponge filter in the main tank the breeder boxes hang off for the past three weeks. I also got one of those old-style plastic air-driven corner filters so I could put some of my external filter media in it (sponge and some Matrix).
Ages ago I read a post by Darrel about how long it takes a sponge placed inside an external canister filter and/or using filter squeezings onto a new sponge to populate with bacteria (and the archy-chaps I can't spell) but can't find the thread now for the life of me.
Having read so many Darrel-centric posts in the last 24 hours I'm convinced about the logic of removing most of the floss I had in my external canister to improve flow and oxygenation, so I now have a load of still damp, very smelly and slightly brown filter floss which I'm trying to figure out how to make best use of?
I can wrap it around the sponge (I bought another new one that's too big to fit in the canister) or I can squeeze it out onto the sponge or into the water (50-50 old tank water and fresh but with the TDS matched) . . . I'm willing to follow advice but squeezing this muck into the tank feels a bit counter-intuitive - should I be selecting the brownest nastiest bits to wrap around the sponge of the relatively cleaner bits of floss?
So when I removed a second leaf a few weeks later from a different pair of angels I was expecting similar results. I now find myself with 100+ small angelfish (and 11 much larger ones) and I need to move the 100+ spawn to a larger tank pretty soon. I managed to borrow a 65 litre tank (stop-gap) and I've had a small sponge filter in the main tank the breeder boxes hang off for the past three weeks. I also got one of those old-style plastic air-driven corner filters so I could put some of my external filter media in it (sponge and some Matrix).
Ages ago I read a post by Darrel about how long it takes a sponge placed inside an external canister filter and/or using filter squeezings onto a new sponge to populate with bacteria (and the archy-chaps I can't spell) but can't find the thread now for the life of me.
Having read so many Darrel-centric posts in the last 24 hours I'm convinced about the logic of removing most of the floss I had in my external canister to improve flow and oxygenation, so I now have a load of still damp, very smelly and slightly brown filter floss which I'm trying to figure out how to make best use of?
I can wrap it around the sponge (I bought another new one that's too big to fit in the canister) or I can squeeze it out onto the sponge or into the water (50-50 old tank water and fresh but with the TDS matched) . . . I'm willing to follow advice but squeezing this muck into the tank feels a bit counter-intuitive - should I be selecting the brownest nastiest bits to wrap around the sponge of the relatively cleaner bits of floss?
