finally got an aquarium running

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akane

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Ugh water nightmares around here but finally some progress. In the meantime I bought a nice blue line of bettas from someone and have been trying to breed them.










Over the past 2 weeks I actually got a tank running without toxic water. I bought 3 platy to test it out and over the weekend added 6 baby bristlenose plecos. I found the lava rock won't stack all the way up on it's own. I didn't want to take the time to glue sections together so I did a half wall and curved the right side some. The sad twigs in front of the filter are aquatic mint that got frosted on the way here and is already leafing up. Lamiaceae species are so hard to kill no matter where they grow. :lol:







 
Pretty! I want to get some live plants for ours. We have one ball of... something that the lady we got it from had bought for it. We're going to Petsmart today for a Kong for our dog, I think I might go ahead and get one of those big snails you had mentioned when I was asking about our new tank a while back.

Love the blue Bettas! How do you breed them? Like rabbits? - keep them separate, but put them together when it's time to breed?
 
The betas are beautiful! I'm going to have to show this post to my daughter when she gets home from school. She currently has a 5gal with a beta and a snail but is hoping to get a larger aquarium soon.
 
Bettas have to go through a little bit of courtship. You put them next to each other carded. That means they have something solid between the containers. You let them see each other for a short time every day. Exact method varies after that but you setup a shallow tank with plants and filter on one end and the other end is where the male will make his bubble nest. When the female is showing submission to the male and is plump with eggs you add one and then the other to the tank. Hopefully the male gets a nice bubble nest built and the female likes it so she follows him under. They make fertilized eggs and then you remove the female and the male tends the eggs by blowing them into his nest until they are free swimming fry.
 
Oh I love them! I miss my fish tanks. But after moving them across the country with disasterous results I swore never to have fish again til I had a permanent home. Oh wait...hmm I do have a permanent home now.

I used to keep my bettas in small tanks with a pair or two of guppies. Live food every now and then. The betas loved it. The guppy parents, perhaps not as much :lol:
 
akane":1g07cssm said:
Bettas have to go through a little bit of courtship. You put them next to each other carded. That means they have something solid between the containers. You let them see each other for a short time every day. Exact method varies after that but you setup a shallow tank with plants and filter on one end and the other end is where the male will make his bubble nest. When the female is showing submission to the male and is plump with eggs you add one and then the other to the tank. Hopefully the male gets a nice bubble nest built and the female likes it so she follows him under. They make fertilized eggs and then you remove the female and the male tends the eggs by blowing them into his nest until they are free swimming fry.


Fascinating!!! :D
 
beautiful bettas! I love fish tanks but I have no luck at all with them. :( I had a betta for about a year, decided to get a 10 gallon aquarium for him. I got it all up an running, cycled it and he was fine in there until I decided to add some platys and corys, had them for about a month they came down with ick and everyone died except for 2 platys. I treated and cleaned the tank couple of months later I decided to add a betta, again he was doing great had him for 3 months decided to try adding 2 golden mystery snails and a couple more platys, again tank came down with ick :evil: this time though couldn't use the medicine because of the snails. Lost every fish except for the 1 original platy and the 2 snails. A few months later 1 platy and now about 50 snails. Today I have 1 platy and about 10-15 baby snails, the bigger ones died. I really want to add more fish but I am afraid to since every time I do they die!

I feel like I should just get rid of everything in the tank, decorations and all and start over, but I would feel bad about killing the 1 poor platy that has survived so much :oops: but I don't know if she is carrying anything that could be passed to any new fish I brought in.
 
Healthy tanks don't get ich and ich doesn't kill snails. Sometimes you'll get some fish carrying ich but they should recover with good food and good water except the weakest ones. I used meds my first round of illness in like 2000-2001 and never again. I keep a little melafix on hand to reduce infection in injuries and sometimes wild caught fish will need dewormed but that's it. If you keep having ich spread and fish die, especially if non-fish are dying, then you have a water problem somewhere.
 
Are you getting all the fish from the same place? We couldn't keep fish alive from one store (ick), but they were fine from another - same water, same tank, same everything. Just took the dead ones out and added new live ones. I spent probably $50 at the one store - 2 or 3 separate trips - before I gave up (splurged on cool fish the first time, of course). DH's aunt told me where she got hers and I tried them and they were fine. We couldn't kill those things! :lol:
 
You don't have to sterilize a tank that had ich. Just pop the temp up into the 80s or as high as is safe for your surviving fish and the ich will go through it's lifespan and die. It needs the fish as an intermediate host and then the dots you see will release more back into the water. If you force it through it's life stages with only healthy fish that show no sign of ich or no fish then it's not a problem. (I spell it ich because originally it was shortened from the scientific name Ichthyophthirius multifiliis but many companies have gone to calling their treatment products ick)

When you get new fish try to avoid putting water from the store into your own tank. Most stores have several if not all tanks connected to one system so anything ill or newly added to any tank may contaminate the water.
 
akane":3t7hrnot said:
When you get new fish try to avoid putting water from the store into your own tank. Most stores have several if not all tanks connected to one system so anything ill or newly added to any tank may contaminate the water.

I read this after getting a couple new fish on Monday... :roll:
 
I tried 2 different stores with the same results. Could be the water we have city water, maybe I should try bottled water? I really want to get another betta!
 
They are beautiful! This makes me miss having fish!
A few years ago I had 3 aquariums and enjoyed it so much.
I didn't like the maintenance. Ha. That was before starting our rabbitry.
Now that would seem like nothing. :lol:
Both are worth it though.

Enjoy them.
 
WhWRabbitry":eg3bzgul said:
They are beautiful! This makes me miss having fish!
A few years ago I had 3 aquariums and enjoyed it so much.
I didn't like the maintenance. Ha. That was before starting our rabbitry.
Now that would seem like nothing. :lol:
Both are worth it though.

Enjoy them.

I kind of like just spending hours messing with aquariums and changing water. It is not a chore to me like other things. The guinea pigs are plenty worth it but I never want to go through feeding and watering them. With aquariums I hate when I'm finally standing there with nothing left to do. :lol: <br /><br /> __________ Fri Feb 05, 2016 9:58 pm __________ <br /><br /> Told you that you can't kill lamiaceae plants. I had to cut some rotting parts off the roots and moved them back to in front of the filter because some were trying to run away in front of the lava rock. Lost a platy but it hadn't looked good since I brought it home so no surprise. I think I have a big orange male and a little black tipped female who is getting plump. They are eating leftover bloodworms from the betta meals. The white is a bag of purigen. A chemical filtration method superior to carbon. Especially for planted tanks.

 
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