Hello everyone and questions

[GeorgeDK]

[quote="jacksdad" pid='40711' dateline='1571867687']
My lfs got some male bettas delivered last night, they were placing them in tanks with suitable fish when I called in this afternoon. They range from £12 to £22 each, they had crown tail, fan and standard I think, but they all look the same to me! I fancy getting a male and 3 females for my Shrimp Tank The shop has a stunning red male @ £22, think that's the crown tail, and some red/burgundy females, would look great with red shrimp but I'll need to save up for a while...
[/quote]


I have to agree with plankton, they are nearly impossible to keep in the same tank and very difficult to breed. I suggest you get one male and give him a 10gal or larger home, this will help if you plan to breed him because the female needs to have places to hide when they get together.

If you are interested in breeding bettas the best source of wisdom i found is a youtube channel called mark’s aquatics. The guy is great and has many many years of experience, seriously one of the best sources of information in the hobby i think.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[GeorgeDK]

An update on some research ive been doing.

So as you all have seen my tanks are very different to eachother. Tropico is a heavily planted tank that i believe is overstocked and BHC( blackhill crossing ) has few plants and is lightly stocked.
Reading through Walstad's book i believe i accidentally achieved a balance between planting and fish stock because the filter ( that frankenstein thing i made ) is not growing considerable ammounts of bacteria like BHC. Both filters are transparent so i can easily see inside.
The water from my tap is basically very clean liquid stone, it tops out the hardness measurement on the JBL test strips i have almost immediately but i have been keeping a close eye on what is happening in the planted tank. It has been 12 days since my last 15% water change in Tropico and 4 days ago i added 6 corydoras.
Today's ammonia reading was still under 0.05 but what surprised me is that the hardness went down from 21+ to 14+ dGh and i have been seeing steady increase in nitrite and nitrate since adding the new fish so that tells me that i have surpassed the plant's capacity. Tomorrow plants will be trimmed and replanted in an effort to restore that balance.
The final goal after all this is to carefully see if i can '' deplete '' my tap water and get the hardness down to 3-5 dGh where the fish will be much more comfortable and try to keep it there with a blend of distilled/tap 15% biweekly water changes.
The purpose of this research is to find out if the guppy tank i want to create will be able to provide water for the other 2 by achieving a balance that will not foul the water and slowly take out the hardness reliably.
If i had very very precise testing methods i would be interested to see and document how much each species of plant would be able to clean the water but alas..... i have no means of doing that at the moment .

[Vale!]

[This is a back-track, upthread, where I was playing about with a DIY extension to an Eheim Pickup filter]

@"jacksdad" : yes - isn't it confusing when we're not immediately familiar with narrow-field technical terminology!  I couldn't ascertain the authority of your source (from Yahoo Answers' Physics Group?) but Maria[sup]TM[/sup] and Philip seem to have sorted it out between them!  So I think we're all agreed : low modulus = stretchier but weaker ; high modulus = stiffer but stronger.


Anyway, my faffing about with tapes eventually produced a promising result.  Electrical insulation tape was by far the best, in that it peeled away from the cured silicone very easily. However it was too thick. I hadn't envisaged that I'd be going this far ; if I had, I would have realised that I needed to leave a far wider gap between Eheim and glass into which I could more easily force a bead of silicone all the way round. That would have worked much better than the tape I ended up using - for which a wider gap would still have been better  - which was humble Sellotape!

Getting the Sellotape off the Eheim was simply a matter of putting the whole caboodle into a bowl of water ; after an hour or so I was able to wiggle the filter housing free. This left the Sellotape clinging to the silicone but it came free with a bit of persuasion :





The resulting seal was nearly OK, but not quite perfect where the Eheim actually touched the glass :




The Eheim appears to fit very snugly into the extension and I'm not sure that extra measures, such as cable-ties, would really be necessary if a wider seal were made. 

If I could have incorporated the Gripseal idea, so that the whole front pane of the extension could be dismounted, then I might have been able to get neat lines of silicone within the extension. I did contact a Gripseal supplier to ask if they'd sell me a bit without polythene already welded to it but, so far, no reply. I wonder if the polythene can be burned off?*

Anyroad, GDK - have your thread back!


*[Edit : I've just looked that up. Apparently polythene may be soluble in acetone. I've got loads of that! I might give that a go.]

[GeorgeDK]

@Vale! Truely your passion for the hobby shows when going to this extent.

Please feel free to post any updates on the build on my thread , this kind of rnd is what makes our hobby grow and evolve.

My version is really doing well and i am thinking of designing my own filter from scratch. More updates on that as i progress.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Tycho]

@"GeorgeDK" og @"LadyDay" og så var der tre ? ??

I'm originally from Odense but haven't lived in Denmark since 92.

I'm new here so been ready various threads and have enjoyed reading your thread... really like the idea of the spray bar and love the Jim Beam bottle lol although must admit you've completely lost me if some of the diy stuff!

Just wanted to say to be careful with the snails, once they get out of hand it gets little crazy! I ended up emptying my old tank to get rid of them!

[GeorgeDK]

@Tycho

Aye always good to meet another [emoji51]

The snails to me are a welcome sight, they keep the tank clean but they spread like the black plague. It still blows my mind to think that i started with 3-5 stray snails on the leaves of a few plants and now around 200 have been married off to someone else and i have 200+ in the tank. Ill have to take down their numbers again soon but i will add a single assasin snail in there as they are not hermaphrodytes so breeding will not be a problem. A second one will go into my second tank to make sure there is not a single snail in that one.

I did perform a little experiment today, added the betta to my planted tank for an hour. The transition should not affect him in any way as the water and temp is the same. At first he showed a little dominance toward the tetras but as they all calmed down i found he was approaching the corys to look at them and nothing else. They didnt seem to be too bothered about him doing that and he would just go very close to them as if he was simply curious, then it struck me.

What if agressive bettas are just a myth ?

As you may know male bettas are separated at a very young age to prevent fighting. From then on they are kept in single tanks, sometimes with no other fish around them and most of the time in tanks with painted sides. Yes they are naturally teritorial and slightly solitary but the true question is: can they be educated to become friendly neighbors with other fish ?
Ive been monitoring Big closely and he never showed any signs of agression and never chased any shrimp or other fish relentlessly, he never puffed his gills and never displayed until shown a video of another betta. Once the shrimp in BHC got used to him having no sense of personal space they let him get close and he would stare at them for minutes just hovering there at 1-2cm from them, pointed at them like a blue arrow. Maybe he just found them fascinating given he had never seen them before.
I moved him back into his tank just so nothing unfortunate would happen overnight and to prevent unnecesary stress.
This really got me thinking about what is happening inside his little mind. The first image that came to me was a simple peasant child seeing the big city for the first time, frightening, overwhelming but mesmerising at the same time. Another side of this hobby i will probably never have the chance to research extensively...

[plankton]

Aggressive bettas are not a myth, however....they do have different personalities, and some may not be bothered by other fish.
It does normally need a tank 4'+ to achieve this, but it has happened in smaller tanks, but is much rarer.
I've never had much luck trying to keep bettas with other fish. Either the betta get shredded or he attacks the others.

[GeorgeDK]

@plankton maybe you are right, mine seems to have the mind of a pug [emoji1787]

Update on the tanks:

Tropico is now fully cycled. It took about 5 weeks with fish in and fully planted. Plant growth is great and the inhabitants all look happy and healthy. Zero algae due to the explosive snail population that i decided to reduce, took out about 300 that i had to put down but unfortunately no other solution until i get an assasin snail.

Big’s tank is also fully cycled, that took a week with bottle bacteria and fish flakes as an ammonia source and he was added after cycling. Brown algae is slowly growing but it is feeding the shrimp and pearling slowly so im not too bothered by it. Very small worms are also growing and i found this out during today’s water change. I came home at 7pm and went to feed Big but he wasnt very interested which is odd, he ate a few pellets and i did the water change after that which disturbed the sand. Went in to fix the sand and saw that he is eating these little worms off the rocks and glass. They are 2-5mm long and white, microworms maybe ?
I am a little worried that they can be parasites but he loves eating them, i really don’t know what to say and getting a pic of them is nearly impossible.

Any and all advice is welcome.

[Benville]

The worms could be Planaria or Rhabdocoela. I have no idea if Planaria can harm a Betta, but Rhabdos are harmless.

All depends on the head shape. Planaria are wedge, Rhabdos are round.

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

[GeorgeDK]

So it's been a while

A little update on the 2 tanks

Tropico is doing fantastic ! The last water change was 14th of oct and its been so interesting to monitor the water and see it change. The plants grow like crazy absorbing all that ammonia as the tank is slightly overstocked and i plan to add more and slightly rescape soon.
Today's reading is :
No3 ( nitrate ) - 50 ppm
No2 ( nitrite ) - 0 ppm
dGH - 7-8
dKH - 8-10
ph - 7.2 to 7.4

BHC is also doing great , no real bio load there with a single betta and a complete cleanup crew of snails and shrimp but it has developed brown algae that is under control for now with 2 water changes per week. The water is clean liquid stone as is my tap water but Big seems happy and healthy. I added the janky situation to the output of the filter to break up the flow and keep it comfy for him. This tank will get a total rescape as soon as i can afford it.

Feeding wise the Corys get Hikari Sinking Pellets , The tetras get flakes from Tetra and krill flakes from JBL, the betta gets Hikari Micro Pellets and they all get brine shrimp from time to time.