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 Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 12:25 am
Technicalities Setup date: Feb 9, 2009 Fish added: Feb 25, 2009 Tank10 Liter, 2.5 Gallon 10 Watt heater (10-20 L) LED underwater spot Seperation sheet ParametersPH: 7 KH: 8 Gh: 12 Temp: 27°C, 80°F (summer time) 24°C, 75°F (winter time) Fauna2 Honey Gouramis (Colisa Chuna) 4 Amano shrimp (Caridina Japonica) 1 Ghost shrimp (Palaemonetes sp) 1 Dwarf Otocinclus FloraJava moss Cabomba Marimo moss It's been over 7 months months now since this tank wad setup. Over the time the fish matured and needed to be separated, and I've expeimented with a lot of plants to find out what would do best in a low light and low nutrient tank. I also got a new camera, so I can show pictures now :3 Murphy and Sod, flaring at each otherSod is the dominant male, probably the oldest. He's still kind of human shy, but very agressive towards whoever is on his side of the tank. Fingale and the amano's often briefly suffer the burnt of his frustrations. I initially thought Murph was a female, but it seems he's just a younger male. He's not so agressive, but he's not as shy as Sod eighter.  Fingale and an AmanoFin is my otto. I never planned on buying him, but when I saw they were housing otto's with tigerbarbs I had to get them out. The lady thought they were leftover fry. Out of the three I bought only Fin survived. I feel bad for not having a school for him, but he doesn't mind hanging with the shrimp. He loves the Marimo, but usually lives in a coconushell, since Killer owns the Marimo. The devider has holes cut in it that are a little larger then him, so unlike the gouramis he can come and go as he pleases.  KillerIs not actually a killer. He's just a bad tempered ghostshrimp. He's about the same size, or even a tad larger then the gouramis, and the two front feet you can see in the picture are actually two of his claws. No one can take his food or Marimo, tough Sod may try, and fail. At first I was afraid he might harm the fish, but he's extreemly slow, and his long limbs and antena keep getting stuck on the plants in the tank. He's the least manouverable of all in there. He's also a night kritter, so catching him out during the day for a picture was a surprise.  I've had a black water tank once before, a 10 gallon 2 or 3 years ago. Back then I used a Kwihi branch (south american tree) to create the black water, though it turned more reddish. The fish I had in there were a pair of honey/blood gouramis (C. Chuna) one ram cichlids (Microgeophagus Ramirezi) and a school of Cardinal tetras (Paracheirodon axelrodi).
In my experience this wasn't a particular hard tank, and it took less care than the larger goldfish tank.
My main problem was that the plants tended to rot and algae was prone to grow the first few months.
Probably because of the low PH.
The tank failed when I went on vacation for a month and I left the tank in the care of the maid. So probably overfed the tank and when I returned the water vas spoiled. One tetra was the sole survivor.
It still lives on with the goldfish.
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Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 6:08 pm
i say dont do the chocolates
VERY hard to keep and pretty aggressive to each other
mine died
one lasted one day the other lasted a week (would not eat...very picky fish)
and i gave them everything they needed as far as temp. softness, acidity, and food. they ship poorly, are always wild caught and will probably die in your tank if they lasted for any length of time in the dealers tank : ( very sad. i think a 10 gallon would be better as a small setup so your water parameters can be easier to keep PERFECT
a pair of rams would be super cute and so would honeys...so the honeys, rams or betta would be the best, easiest and less heart breaking choice
they have tiny cory cats (i think they are corys) that get to be one inch long and ottos (small algae eater catfish) grows to be 2 inches. as for the loaches i think they are just juveniles of a loach and kuhli loaches actually do come in just black/no stripes
as for plants...i keep fake ones to be on the safe side. nothing worse than a bunch of rotting plants especially in a small tank
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Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 4:49 am
Today I bought the tank and some bog/driftwood. I ordered the heater and I estimate that should arive over a week. This is the heater I'll be using: http://www.everythingforpets.com/newattino_heater_stat.pet/use.id.5.item_id.3640.dept.0/The tank before the water was added:  Sadly I could only find mostly cork wood, so it will be a while before that mess stops drifting. I also added some duckweed from the store's plant aquarium and am hoping that they caried some good bacteria to jumpstart the bio filter. I was also doing an experiment with aging water, to see wether or not adding an almond leaf would affect the parameters, and how. The results were thus: -Fresh pipe water Nitrate: 25-50 Nitrite: yes dGH (hardness): <21 dKH: 10° PH: 7.6/8 -2 day old water Nitrate: 50 Nitrit: yes dGH: >14 dKH: >15 PH: 7.2-7.8 -3 day old water with almond leaf Nitrate: 50-100 Nitrit: notacibly more dGH: >21 dKH: <20 PH: 7.2-7.8 -comination of both the almond water and the plain aged water, one hour after conditioner and dechlorinator was added: Nitrate: 50 Nitrite: yes dGH: 14-21 dKH: >15 PH: 7.2-7.6 My experiment was to determine wether or not the leaf would help with lowering the PH, but since both normal aging and leafed aging give the same results there, I don't think so. I think the Nitrate and Nitrite are higher with the leaf because the decaying leaf must have jumpstarted the nitrogen cycle, or sped it up at least. What surprised me though was that the GH and KH were highest with the leaf, can anyone explain me why this happend? I though that rotting leafs were supposed to soften the water? And where did that buffer come from?
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Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 5:02 am
Happy Skittles Lizzy i say dont do the chocolates
VERY hard to keep and pretty aggressive to each other
mine died
one lasted one day the other lasted a week (would not eat...very picky fish)
and i gave them everything they needed as far as temp. softness, acidity, and food. they ship poorly, are always wild caught and will probably die in your tank if they lasted for any length of time in the dealers tank : ( very sad. i think a 10 gallon would be better as a small setup so your water parameters can be easier to keep PERFECT
a pair of rams would be super cute and so would honeys...so the honeys, rams or betta would be the best, easiest and less heart breaking choice
they have tiny cory cats (i think they are corys) that get to be one inch long and ottos (small algae eater catfish) grows to be 2 inches. as for the loaches i think they are just juveniles of a loach and kuhli loaches actually do come in just black/no stripes
as for plants...i keep fake ones to be on the safe side. nothing worse than a bunch of rotting plants especially in a small tank °sigh° You are right of course. They are very tempting fish, and they looked quite relaxed and healthy in the tank when I saw them. I'm sorry to hear yours died sad Are you ever going to try again? I think I'm probably going for a betta or a ram pair. The honeys look like they've been there for a while, listless, pale and worn out, even the bettas that I see in their minitanks look more active. The rams are also quite pale, but they react. They still have their curiosity and interact with eachother. Same as the bettas. I'll see what's in stock next month. I think that's the fish I saw, though it was darker in color and had not a singel patch of white. Thanks for the sugestions, I've concidered those, but I've never been a huge otto fan, and I prefer to keep corries as larger group. I think i'm going to try shrimp. I just hope they won't become a meal. It's a gamble. I will be introducing the shrimp first. I still prefer lives, and I think I'll try some javamoss. In my experience, that plant is pretty hard to kill, so I don't think it can go wrong. It's also a good place for the shrimp to hide, and if I take a pair of fish it will provide more hiding space I suspect.
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Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 8:44 am
i will try chocos again only because my tank is so big and my parameters are stable and have been stable for a while. but only if the fish looks SUPER HEALTHY> dont buy a healthy looking one...buy a REALLY FREAKIN HEALTHY looking one.
and maybe the chocos are new ones to that store? it doesnt make sense the more hardy fish are looking poor compared to the fish you would have to buy 40 of to maybe have a group of 5 live. i will see chocos in my fish store that look good but i hold off. later in the week, they are all covered in ich and there are a lot less.
what is your substrate exactly? that might have to do with the hardness. at least thats the only thing i could thing of. the leaves should lower the ph and its weird it isnt. i had just gotten a bottle of that black water extract since there is no way i would find almond leaves in the city XD
oh and bad news D: my mother decided to try and feed my puffers. she did say however if they died she would buy me new ones -_- i hope they DONT die
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Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:25 am
Happy Skittles Lizzy i will try chocos again only because my tank is so big and my parameters are stable and have been stable for a while. but only if the fish looks SUPER HEALTHY> dont buy a healthy looking one...buy a REALLY FREAKIN HEALTHY looking one.
and maybe the chocos are new ones to that store? it doesnt make sense the more hardy fish are looking poor compared to the fish you would have to buy 40 of to maybe have a group of 5 live. i will see chocos in my fish store that look good but i hold off. later in the week, they are all covered in ich and there are a lot less.
what is your substrate exactly? that might have to do with the hardness. at least thats the only thing i could thing of. the leaves should lower the ph and its weird it isnt. i had just gotten a bottle of that black water extract since there is no way i would find almond leaves in the city XD
oh and bad news D: my mother decided to try and feed my puffers. she did say however if they died she would buy me new ones -_- i hope they DONT die Glad to hear you'll try them again someday. These choco's were indeed new, but it's a different store. Tom&Co has the gouramis and the rams. Ledeganck has the chocos. That store has more and healthier fish, it's not as commercial, but it specialises in large cichlids. The substrate is just that mainstream comercial colored gravel. The cheap stuff. But it could not have been the substrate because there was no substrate in the jug I used. Just water and that leaf. But I think I may have a theory. I got the leaves from an Indian/tropical almond tree, but the location was very close to the sea. About 20 m at most? Also the ground at my old house was mostly limestone. Many plants did poorly in our garden because of that. So maybe the leaves had more ph, kh and gh raising substances and minirals in it than the average almond that grows more inland? Could those have been released by the process of decaying? I don't know much on botany, so I have no idea if my theory is correct. Oh dear, I really wish you the best of luck :/ What is she feeding them?
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Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:40 am
Parameters of the day:
Nitrate: 25-50
Nitrite: yes, though lessening smile
dGH: >14
dKH: 15
PH: 7.2
Everything seems to be dropping, if only slight, so I'm content. I think it might be the bogwood is having that extra positive effect.
I'm planning to kook those roots/twigs to get them to sink, I just hope it won't break them.
If I find my PH and GH still too high next week, or not dropping anymore I think I'll add a leaf again and see what happens. I just hope that once the PH and GH are a nice level the KH will rise again and give me a larger buffer.
Or is the current level high enough?
If I can't get the PH <7 and the GH <14 I think I'll go for the betta. If I can I'll concider the ram.
How do shrimp react to these parameters anyway, will their escoskeleton suffer in soft water?
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Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 7:45 am
ya know what
the shrimp might be an issue now that i think of saltwater shrimp and the fact i cant keep snails (my tank is soft and acidic)
AND you are using tap water? and even if you use a conditioner you may still have copper which kills invertebrates
the only way to REALLY get rid of copper is to use an rodi unit which is i think an unnecessary expense for freshwater really and the betta may eat the shrimp. mine tore up those ghost feeder shrimp when i had em in there. i was trying to test if they would eat shrimp and well....they did
so maybe try a ghost shrimp? will be cheaper and you can test to see if it will ok.
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Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 11:31 pm
I think I'll look around for a tester kit for copper. I have half a mind to buy the betta from Tom&co, depending on how healthy the new stock looks, because they raise their fish in comunity tanks. Which contain shirmp, amongst others. I don't know if it will leave the shrimp alone in a more peacefull set up, but I'm hoping. They don't sell ghost shrimp, they used to, but now I only see amano's. They do look alike though. The amano's are cheap anyway, but the cherries are 3 times as expensive. And much smalled. That's why I was thinking that I'd better only keep them if I take chocolates. The ghost shrimp has a distinct hump on it's tail.  And the amono doesn't. It's also slightly darker and has small black dots on it, most prominent on the tail.  And the cherry. 
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Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 5:42 am
i had seen some black diamond shrimp at the one pet shop i go to and i wanted them so badly but i think my betta and gourami would have eaten them...especially the wild type betta
I'd say with the betta, try the cheaper shrimp
or if you could do the honeys (you find better ones), i think you could try the cherry shrimp
i cant wait to see it all done with the shrimp and fishies! i had a sexy shrimp saltwater tank but i dunno...they just wouldnt live : ( all my parameters were perfect...i loved those little things...inverts are just hard to take care of in a smaller tank and that was with rodi water
my mom fed the puffers frozen blood worms. i told her she doesnt need to feed them...that they can live ofr 2 days with out food...still all lookin good so far
and i think the limestone did it. people put hunks of that in their saltwater tanks to keep the calcium, kh, and ph stable without buying a kalk reactor
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Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 11:37 pm
Parameters of the day:
Nitrate: 100
Nitrite: yes: it rose.
dGH: +/- 14
dKH: 10-15
PH: 7.2
The N's are rising again, but I'm confident that that will drop again, eventually. The other parameters are still dropping, so I'm content there.
Yesterday I cooked half of the corkwood, in a desperate attemt to sink it, with obviously no luck. I do think it might have helped with softening the water?
I have half a mind to take out the water and supperglue them in place. I've heard a rumor that salties use supperglue to secure their coral, and I wonder if this is true and safe? I saw some people swear by it on other forums :/
I'm also looking at the murky water, and realizing that without a lightcap, it doesn't look quite right. So I'm thinking of two options; eighter I find a way to install a lightcap, or I'll have to remove the yellow/brown taint. Best way to do that is by a carbon filter right?
@Skittles: Ah those shrimp are soo pretty! I prefer the red variant. Diamond you call them? I've useually seen them under the name Bumblebee or Chrystal.
You know, this thread got me thinking, setting up a shrimp tank would be pretty cool too...
But you may be right about it being too hard. Appart from brineshrimp I've never kept shrimp over an extended period of time.
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Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2009 7:26 am
im not worried about it being too hard...though what you have is too hard...that dkh is good enough for saltwater inverts. heck, its actually a bit higher than what marine inverts need. you might wanna buy something to maybe soften it a bit?
that might be too hard for anything fresh water...especially something thats supposed to live in black water type environment
im worried about water being soft for shrimp
isnt black water supposed to be soft? i know shrimp and snails need minerals or their shells wont form. i have lost many a snail in freshwater tanks. their shells literally dissolved.
and yes carbon will removed the color
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Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2009 8:30 am
With that mineral content right from the start you could add some buffer and marine salt and have a good salty tank. You would have pretty stable minerals. A clown goby would be awesome. fish in a small tank like that would work well. even coral like zoos and mushrooms would be good. but no shrimp cuz they are tough to care for in little tanks.
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Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 2:49 am
Ah, starting a salty would be so sweet, but they don't sell saltwater fish/invebrates here.
I might be able to find some in other cities, but I'd have to get there by train, and I don't feel comfortable exposing fish to more transport than needed. Especially since it's winter now, and under 5°C most of the time.
I'm thinking of going for peat filtration, since it has less minerals than carbon. And appearantly still leaches the color away.
I looked up the shrimp and appearantly they can cope pretty wel with a PH from 6 to 7ish. They are 'soft' water shrimp.
I can't quite find information on the GH and KH though. But if worse comes to worse I can always throw in some sea shells. Can't get a get a better mineral boost than that.
I never had that problem with snails, I actually quite often could not crush the snails, or got cut when I tried to. The best substrate for keeping snails is beachsand, if you live near the sea try to get it from an isolated patch and early in the morning when it's fresh.
It takes a lot of cleaning to get it ready for freshwater, and often you have to deal with an algea explosion for a while, but once that's over it's worth it. Just make sure you keep those burrowing snails so the sand stays 'ventilated'.
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Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 6:00 am
you're kh right now is too high
dont add shells or it will buffer it and keep it high
PH is acidity not hardness or softness
gh/kh is hardness
i had to measure this stuff for saltwater
i dont know much about freshy shrimp so if they are soft water then thats really good because they will fit nicely into your bio type BUT
your water is too hard for anything soft water because the gh is too high and will cut any critters life span considerably. and inverts are especially sensitive to water parameters...so if those shrimp are true soft water shrimp then that gh will be really bad for them if you dont lower it. you can buy things that will make your water softer...just like how they sell water conditioner...at least over here they do. you will need to add that always to your make up water as well if you get it from the same place
Hardness chart for a better idea of what you want to aim for smile
0-3 0-54 soft<------
3-6 54-108 slightly soft<---where yours should be
6-12 108-216 slightly hard<--------
12-18 216-324 moderately hard <--Where yours is
18-30 324-540 hard
PH
6 and lower is acidic
7 range is basic <---this is the range you are in)
8 and higher is alkaline
you can have soft alkaline water or hard acidic water. the ph and hardness dont necessarily always go hand in hand
what you want is soft acidic water and for saltwater you want hard alkaline
i hope that made sense >_< and i hope my silly charts helped
the water here is basic and fairly soft so when i got saltwater i had to learn about all this crazy stuff and so it helped me learn about fresh water as well. my large freshwater tank has a ph of 6 and a hardness of between 0 and 3. i have beta and gourami so you might wanna aim for that or somewhere around there.
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