NatalieT

Sorry, no. Maybe I should try, but I'm not sure it would work: lots of algae on the glass. Actually, they both look rather like sections of swamp a lot of the time. Maybe that's why the guppies do so well--I heard years ago that wild guppies live in swamps

ianjones

haha i fight algae and cyano pretty hard too right now. its actually easier to see my tank from the top at present. i had it dwindling and under control but then i got a bunch of dead worms from the LFS and didnt know it. when i put them in those cups, it wrecked my water, and everything came back again. this tank is so easy to get out of balance and takes so long to put it back again. what types of algae are you getting? what do you think is the cause of your algae?

NatalieT

I haven't tried to figure out what kind of algae. There's the kind that makes a slimy green film on glass and plants but wipes off easily, and the greenish-black kind that sticks tight to the glass, and the brownish kind that sticks even harder to the glass and.... I just scrub some off the front glass every now and then, and leave the rest of it. The fish don't seem to care, so the cleaning is just because I want to see in.

When I got blackworms, I rinsed them well with several changes of water and looked them over for dead worms and anything that looked "different" (I found one that I think was some other kind of worm, and picked it out with a spoon). Then, when I was reasonably sure I had live blackworms and nothing else, I added them to the tank. (Besides, I just wanted a good excuse to look at the worms and do something with them, since they were my newest exciting thing at that time.)

ianjones

good idea. i need to do more of that. prolly save me some headache.

the green slime is called blue-green algae. it is not actually a real algae, but rather it is cyanobacteria. nothing eats it and it will try to suffocate the plants and even other algae. ive never had experience with the greenish-black kind but perhaps it is some sort of beard algae (though black beard algae is a form of red algae, not green). the brownish kind that sticks hard to the glass is called Green-Spot Algae. almost any herbivorous/omnivorous aquatic animal will eat this, including snails, shrimp, otos, guppies, etc. youve got some sort of over-abundance of a nutrient in your tank. or possibly a lack of a certain nutrient in there. one of my friends has a doctorates in chem and she told me about one of these rules that they go by and it stuck with me. i forget what the rule is called, but it states that no reaction can move faster than its slowest process. this would apply to plant growth and nutrients. for instance, if there are plenty of nitrates, plenty of CO2, and plenty of light, but hardly any phosphorus (which plants dont need much of but still...) then the plants growth is limited to how much phosphorus it can get, even though all the other nutrients are there in abundance. and algae is natures way of using up excess nutrients. in my case, i imagine that my plants growth are determined by CO2, since there is no CO2 injection. the aquatic plants rely solely on the fish's respiration for CO2. so when the tank gets excess nutrients, like the phosphorus thats in fish food, the excess nitrates and god knows what from dead worms, etc then the imbalance flares up. this is why i say that emergent plants are actually better for this kind of set-up because they can get all their CO2 from the air, and thus can use more nutrients from the water than an aquatic plant that is limited to using the CO2 thats in the water.

are you using any emergent plants? how are your aquatic plants doing?

NatalieT

For emergent plants, the answer is not really. I have duckweed and I think salvinia floating on the top (typically covers more than half of the top), but I no longer have anything else that sticks out of the water.

I started with a variety of plants including stem plants. Some of the plants died (must not have liked my conditions!), and some I later got rid of. One I remember particularly well was creeping jenny. It grew well and looked nice. Then it got taller and stuck out of the water. Then it laid itself over sideways and grew on top, supported by the floating plants. At some point it started sticking up through the screen cover on the tank, too. By that point, most of the plants still underwater had died or were suffering due to lack of light. Of course, I trimmed the creeping jenny way back, and replanted the top trimmings in the gravel, but the situation kept happening every few months. Finally, I just got rid of it all because I was tired of having to fuss with it.

Letting any plants stick out of the water regularly isn't a real option for me. I keep a screen cover on the tank to keep out kids' fingers and toys, the dog's nose, etc. It also provides a place to sit the lights. I use screen instead of glass so I don't have to open it to feed the fish But if I want plants to stick out of the water, I would have to keep a lower water level or make a custom raised cover, and I'm not willing to do that.

I finally settled on dwarf sag as the main plant in one tank. It tends to stay underwater which is where I want it, and it grows roots down into the gravel to use the fish waste. It also doesn't float around the tank, and also helps keep some of the other plants from moving too much. When it gets too dense, I pull out a few handfuls so it's got "new" space to spread into. I also have some java fern, some kind of moss (java?), and the floaters. I really like the dwarf sag, but didn't want my two tanks to look identical, so I eventually settled on crypts to fill a similar role in the other tank. They make denser clumps instead of spreading outward by runners like the dwarf sag, but otherwise seem to be performing as I expected. That tank grows more algae, but I'm not sure if the difference is crypts vs. sag, or a different light fixture, or something entirely different.

I decided a long time ago I'd be much happier if I accepted algae as "a plant thrives in my tank" rather than treating it as a problem So I scrape algae from the glass, I throw out handfuls of duckweed, and I pull out handfuls of rooted plants. Each happens when there's too much of that kind of plant, but only if I'm also bored at the time and looking for something to do. I have "a variety of crypts" because I was too lazy to learn their names, and I have "a variety of algae" for similar reasons. I know the names of my other plants because they're easy for me to tell apart from each other, and because I was told what they were when I got them.

I did add some otos to one tank, but they didn't affect the algae much: maybe I didn't put in enough of them. Cherry shrimp appealed to me, but with so many guppies to eat baby shrimp, I never got a good population established. Snails hitchhiked in on some plants, and I let them be for a bit, but after a while there were so many I got tired of the sight of them. So I started picked out every snail I saw, and put my lone 2 platies in the tank that had the snails, and eventually the snails were gone. I mention the platies because I think they were instrumental in getting rid of the snails. My theory is that they ate either eggs or newly hatched baby snails. Certainly adding them coincided with the snails not increasing so fast.

My fishtanks tend to get ignored (except for occasional feedings) for weeks and months at a time, but every year or two I feel like "playing" with them, and then I go add something new--crypts, otos, cherry shrimp, cory catfish, neon tetras, new color of guppies, etc. (The cories and tetras didn't do well, the cherry shrimp did OK but their babies didn't, the crypts and otos were good choices, etc.) Right now, I'm going to be taking it all down soon, because I'll be moving. I don't think I'll set it up again immediately, but I might at some point in the future.

If I do set it up again, I'll start with dwarf sag, java fern, java moss, floaters, blackworms, cherry shrimp, and maybe otos. I would hope that if the plants and shrimp get well established before I add guppies, the shrimp might be able to sustain their population. I keep ending up with guppies because I had them as a child, because they do well with the conditions I'm willing to provide, and because they come in so many colors.

ianjones

good choice of plants! the only "carpet plant" ive been able to find so far is one little sprig of microsword :/ and your floating plants have a lot of the same functions as emergent plants, with the exception of that they get their nutrients from a different place in the water column. but most of my emergant plants dont reach the bottom anyway. ive been looking for duckweed since i started the tank, too, because ive heard so much about its water purifying properties.

this is the first tank ive ever kept by a window, and for whatever misgivings and misnomers there are about tanks by windows, i receive one huge benefit. the light source doesnt come in from only the top, it also comes in from the back, which means 3 things. the floating/emergent plants arent blocking the light from the plants underneath, the fish look like little light bulbs in the early morning when the light shines "through" them, and because my tank is almost twice as tall as it is wide, i dont need as much light intensity as a lot of "aquatic gardeners" use - plus the lower plants receive a more equal amount of the light intensity as the taller plants. i think from now on, all my tanks will be set up by windows i guess it also allows you to not use a top lol

i wish MY platys ate the snails. the ones that are breeding in my tank are live-bearing snails, so theres no eggs for anyone to eat, and they are beginning to run amok. im planning on adding dwarf cichlids, and if they dont try to eat them either, im going to have to cull that species of snail out of the tank and only use egg-layers. im sick of looking at them too lol

ive been looking for cherry shrimp for a while too, but to no avail. the LFS stocks them every now and then but they get bought up the same day. ive not had much luck on here either with the breeders. same thing happens, although i did just recently purchase 8 crystal blue shrimp from joshvito on here. but im still looking for cherry and bee shrimp. if you do acquire some, and get them breeding in your tank, id be willing to purchase about 10 of the offspring, as well as a couple of your plants from you.

NatalieT

My dwarf sag grows as tall as the tank (which is a 20 gallon long, so it's only 12 inches deep, and part of that is taken up by gravel). So I'm not sure I'd call it a "carpet" plant--it's more of a "fill the whole tank" plant in my case I am aware of the benefits of emergent plants, but I decided that I didn't like them getting too long out of the water, so I'd do without. I got the duckweed from the local fish store of a town I rarely visit--just stopped in one day and looked around their tanks. I think it was actually a mix of duckweed, salvinia, and bits of some stem plant that I never identified. (It started as a little piece, then grew big and healthy, then became too much.)

Well, I'm not positive that my platies ate the snails, and I can't remember now whether I ever saw snail eggs or whether they must have been livebearers. I know for a fact the platies didn't bother snails that were big enough for me to see easily, but I suspected (no proof) that they were eating teeny tiny baby ones. Since this happened at the same time I was pulling out every snail big enough for me to see, it's hard to sort out which things had how much effect. Maybe I happened to put in the platies just when I had removed all the snails big enough to reproduce, and then misunderstood what caused the "no more baby snails" condition.

I originally bought cherry shrimp from someone on APC, and they did well for a while (they were protected from guppies by a mesh tank divider at that time.) Then my life got very busy for a while, and I can't remember what happened next, but a year or so later there weren't any shrimp anymore. I tried to get some one other time, a year or so ago, via aquabid. The shrimp I received were young and apparently healthy, but when they grew up, they were all female! (It was only 8-10 of them, I think.) Anyway, I never got around to ordering yet more in hopes of having a male, so that was kind of a dead-end shrimp introduction.

Sorry, I won't be having any new shrimp, or any plants for sale, anytime soon: I'm going to take the tank down to move in the next few days, and I don't have the time to ship plants right now. I did give plant names in some of my earlier posts, which could help you find some through APC or aquabid or somewhere else. (I know duckweed can be shipped, because that's how my Mom got it--I sent her a selection of everything I was growing at the time, and some of them died while others thrived. I think duckweed and dwarf sag were among the ones that did well for her, too.)

A funny thing in my tank is that fish will completely disappear, and I'll never see bodies. I've "lost" at least a half-dozen platies and at least that many cories over the last 5 years or so, and I don't know how many guppies. I rarely or never find dead fish, and I've never seen one that looked half-eaten, but certain fish just are no longer seen. I suspect the blackworms, because I've never introduced or seen in my tank a fish big enough to actually eat the others!

mariannep

I remember fish dissappearing, too, back with my old tank. Like you I never saw ill, dying or dead fish. Very weird! If anybody has any idea why this may be, I'd love to know.

NatalieT

I can think of several explanations:
a) fish jumped out of tank (but not in my case, because the tank was tightly covered)
b) fish was eaten by a bigger fish (but I didn't have any)
c) fish died and rotted (maybe, but I would expect a bad smell)
d) fish died and was eaten by small scavengers, possibly including blackworms, snails, or shrimp (I suspect one of these in my case, probably the blackworms: although I never caught them at it )

ianjones

wow thats spooky! there are a couple of aquatic insect pests that catch and eat small fish like hydras but they would have to be pretty large to eat the full grown ones. aquatic worms mostly just eat mud and organic matter and wont eat your fish. with that many gone i am surprised you havent found at least one half eaten body. i wonder if anyone else could shed light on this one. im stumped!

my shrimp and fry dont get eaten even when they hang out right in front of the fish. eggs dont get eaten either. if this continues, it will bother me a little because i dont want so many offspring living and crowding out my tank. especially once the livebearers start giving birth. but im leaving for a week today and hopefully they will get hungry enough to chew up some fry or some eggs or something. sheesh! thats strange how our tanks have such different dynamics even though they are very similar.