Swipe to the end to see where I started

I just wanted to buy some aquarium plants. I saw this guy's shop mentioned here and there, generally recommending it so I thought I'd go for it.

I placed my order August 18th. 2 weeks later nothing was shipped, which is fine, he said he was moving. Unfortunately I was going out of town, so we agreed he could hold it until I got back. I reminded him to ship it when I returned home and received no update for a week. He made a shipping label another week after that. Several days later, USPS still didn't have the package. He blamed USPS for not scanning it and he "reshipped" it another week later, but he didn't send a new tracking number. A few days after that, he claimed he watched them scan the package and put it on the truck. A few more days pass, and USPS still says they're waiting for the package. I finally get frustrated and tell him that if I don't get my package by Monday, I want a refund. After several surreal messages back, he refunded me that same morning and blocked me. I don't think he ever sent it. This has been a 2 month ordeal. I'm just happy I can finally buy from someone else.

TLDR: Skip to the last 3 pictures if you want to see the crash out. Maybe I'm overreacting and my complaint was too mean. I was just so fed up by that point and I was pretty sure he was lying to me about shipping it. I just wanted some plants.

Can anyone identify this amazing nano predator?

Fun fact: This species was only officially described as their own species in 2022! Making this one of the newer nano fish species in the hobby

Today i had to say goodbye to my beloved Marble. He was the gem of my tank for 11 years, i will miss him 💔

I went to my local pet store to purchase some corydora for my 75 gallon, I asked for larger specimens so that my tire track eel does not bother them. The lady said I have an unusually large one, but she thinks something is wrong with him. If I wanted him I could take him so I took him home and he is thriving. He is more active than any of my other fish but he is 3 to 4 times larger than any of my other Corydora. Is he deformed? Is this even a corydora?

I got her for a 10gal 10 years ago when I wanted to start tropical fish keeping. She's the mother to at least 5 of the other corys in my tank, has been through 3 tank upgrades, 2 moves and a whole damn decade. Im pretty sure her original mate is still alive too but I can't tell him apart from his kids if he is. She's been living her "retirement" in a peaceful 60gal for the past few years and honestly shows no signs of getting old at least in terms of activity. Cheers to all the senior fish out there!

The bucket has become its own ecosystem. It even has a resident frog who has claimed it. Yet I found this baby fish and am flabbergasted. I do have to pull out a shrimp out shrimp sometimes but I see lots of other creatures like damselfly nymphs and mosquito larva.

So first, this is a fish, right?!

Second: Should I just leave it out there until its big enough for the big kid tanks? Can I put it in the big fish tanks? Can it at least stay in this bowl overnight? How intensive should I drip acclimate considering the extent of water parameters of that bucket?

EDIT: I believe it would be a zebra fish or tiger barb as they've been throwing eggs like crazy. I have two tanks and the other one has cories and a few ember tetras. But ive raised cory fry so I know them. And I have doubts it would be the tetras.

It's been a journey and a lot of learning curve in this hobby. Hair algae and cyanobacteria took over because my lamp lost wifi while I was away and stayed on for 48 hours straight. I also lost 2 bettas in this tank, and then my HOB filter sucked up one of my poor fish.

But it's finally stable! And now my favorite part of the day is sitting in front of the tank after dinner and staring at it for hours. It calms my nerves, and it's a nice break from screens since I'm on one 8 hours a day for work. Someone on IG said that having a fish tank is like having a live wallpaper, and I think theyre right…

Anyone else just sit and watch their tank like it's Netflix?

TLDR: Rebuilding my aquarium after the summer, how do I make it look better? My aesthetic sense is not my strongest suit.

Hi! This is my aquarium. Back when I was still super enthusiastic, I pulled a driftwood root out of a river, boiled it, and put it in the tank... I bought a ton of plants, let the tank cycle for a month, and then bought some fish. Then summer came, and the tank heated up to 95°F / 35°C. I stopped using the lights so it wouldn't heat up even more and started putting ice in... most of the plants died, and only the strongest ones survived. The fish got ich, and soon I was left with only snails and shrimp. Then my lid broke apart 😫

I gave up and just raised snail colony for the rest of the summer.
Now I’ve decided to come back to it. I threw out the dying plants, trimmed the rest, and bought those tiny foreground plants that are a absolute pain to plant... I’m planning to get a glass lid custom cut by a glazier. But I’m sad because when I look at all your pretty tanks and then look at mine, I realize I actually don't know what I'm doing.
I love that piece of driftwood, but as soon as I put a black background on the tank, you can't see it anymore. So I'm running it without a background for now.
Once I get the tank together, I'd like to buy a few Stiphodon elegans (neon blue stiphodon gobies).

Could you please give me some advice on how to make an aquarium look nicer? 🥺
My aesthetic sense is not my strongest suit.

Heyo! My boyfriend has had this tank for around 3-4 years. I believe it's a 65 or 75gal. We're both fish novices, but we give it our best shot.

He's always had issues with black beard algae, but it got really bad over the course of this year. It has completely taken over every inch of available space in the tank — even the filters.

We've tried bleach dips for the filters and decor, siamese algae eaters, plecos, snails, reducing the light strength and timer, adding tons of live plants (which eventually got overtaken by the BBA & eaten by the Silver Dollars), and good ol' manual scrubbing. Nothing has seemed to stop the spread.

My last ditch effort is to completely redo the tank, but I don't know how to save enough good bacteria to keep the cycle healthy (if it's even healthy enough right now...). I need more help than my local fish stores can provide. I will accept any criticism if something we did has caused this, as ultimately I also want to know what happened so we don't repeat the same mistakes.

Thank you in advance for any feedback, whether positive or negative ❤️

Soaked paper towel drip to my new chili rasboras and cherry shrimp

Am I overstocked? 75 gallon tank

Why are there so many? (I know that the snail has died, but how so many amphipods?)Also these is jus less than half the total quantity, there are hundreds inside the shell 😭. Every second it appears that 10 more appear.

Hey everybody, I just found out the answer to a problem that I've had for almost a year that is the dumbest situation I have found myself in as an aquarist. And a kindly aquatics store owner just solved it for me.

Basically, I've been having problems with nitrate. I own African dwarf frogs, which are said to be able to be stocked four frogs per 10 gallons, and they are considered to have a low bio load.

Well, I had four frogs in a 10 gallon tank, and my API test has repeatedly told me over the last year that my nitrate has been reaching 40 plus in just under a week.

I thought it was crazy because frog owners with the same stocking told me that it's not necessary to do as many water changes as I'm doing. I was changing 50% of the water every week. Just to keep my nitrate around 20. And even then, during periods of low energy, I felt guilty as fuck every time my frogs had to wait 2 weeks for a water change. And when I was away for a month, and my family member was caring for them, I felt anxious as fuck knowing that the nitrate would be over 80 when I came back! I felt like the worst pet owner ever.

Well, I ended up having six frogs eventually, after I upgraded to a 20 long tank. I had bred them, kept a couple of the babies, and sadly I could not keep any more babies because my test kit told me that nitrate was too high for anything else! Eight frogs per 20 gallons be damned! I'm an outlier, I said! Why can't I keep two more babies humanely, I thought!

Well, I'm also having a problem with my minnows in their 5 gallon tank. I had six but two died and then the test kit was constantly telling me that the nitrate was getting up to 80 every week! And there's a couple shrimp in there, but don't shrimp have an extremely tiny bioload?!

I felt like a shitty aquatics owner, because I take pride in pristine water conditions, and I thought that maybe the two minnows passed away because of my awful aquarium maintenance.

I was feeling so let down and overwhelmed by how many water changes I need to do, that I started thinking that the aquarium stocking calculators were all wrong, because no way is my 20 gallon only 40% stocked with six frogs, when my nitrates are sky high within 7 days!

Well, five of the babies I raised were still quite small, but I needed to get rid of them ASAP because having them in a 10 gallon tank was also sending my nitrates through the roof! I couldn't let them suffer for much longer.

I even considered getting rid of my leftover four minnows, to spare them from the treacherous conditions that I was making them suffer in every day, instead of adding a few more and moving them into my 20 gallon tank so that they could have lots of room to swim.

I normally am against keeping fish with frogs to prevent accidents with fish being hunted, but I was feeling consumed by water changes and thinking that I couldn't handle the maintenance of even two aquariums. I didn't know what to do-- re-home the minnows and submit to the fact that I'm unable to properly care for my pets?

I love my minnows so much, but keeping up with all the maintenance of all these aquariums has been sending me over the edge. And putting them in the 20 long would obviously result in even higher nitrate, and I was frazzled with the idea of hauling buckets of water even more up and down stairs every week!

Well, today I packed up my five extra frogs, took a water sample from my 20 gallon tank, and I wanted a local fish store owner to test my water, because I'm having trouble getting my plants to grow, and I keep having issues with diatoms.

I felt so embarrassed bringing my water sample to the store, and I almost considered asking the owner not to test my nitrate, because I knew it would be really high after not doing a water change in 7 days, and the last water change I did was only 25%! I didn't want him to think that I'm a neglectful owner, even though I water change as often as I can now with a sore shoulder!

Well, I gave them the five extra frogs, and the owner wrote down all of his readings on my water sample, and he used some expensive testing equipment to do that. So he was able to test for things that my API freshwater test kit can't.

Lo and behold, phosphates are not the problem like I thought. None of the readings I thought he would get that could be off kilter even were.

You know what the problem is actually?

My goddamn nitrate reading is only 10!

My jaw fell through the floor when I saw that!

He straight up said that my plants aren't growing because there is not enough organic matter in the water column to support life!

Here I was putting one quarter dose of easy green into the 20 long thinking that I would have too much nitrate if I did the whole thing! Because the nitrate test told me that it was too much already!

And he told me that having six frogs in a 20 gallon tank is absolutely not enough bioload to grow plants when you're doing water changes of 25 to 50% once a week!

And he told me that the API test kit regularly has problems with overblown nitrate readings!

And here I was thinking that I'm a dirty little water person with a shameful problem that doesn't exist!

I was cleaning up microscopic bits of frozen food after my frogs eat because I thought that maybe the tiny flakes that escape from their dish are somehow causing a massive spike in nitrate!

After I drove home I sat there and I thought to myself, what the hell is going on! I can't believe I've been so bent out of shape over a problem that doesn't even exist!

I've spent the last 6 months feeling extremely guilty because I was wondering if I would be able to maintain my three aquariums without being told that I'm a piece of shit for having such high nitrate all the time! Because I was telling myself that I was!

And the whole time, I've been worried about NOTHING!!!!

Cue the aquarium mic drop of the century.

Well, I'm getting a few more minnows next week, the fish store owner ordered a bunch for me, I'm sticking them all in the 20 long, and I'm going to see how they get along with the frogs. 7 minnows + 6 frogs is 76% stocked according to the aquarium stocking advisor.

Maybe there is hope for my plants now that I will actually get enough nitrate to make some growth. He told me to keep it around 20 to ensure their proper growth. And now I know that a chemical test for nitrate that's not the API brand is in my future.

And now that I've downsized and will have 1 aquarium instead of 3, I'll be able to save my shoulder from a load of work. Woop!

And now I know that every aquatic frog expert that told me that 8 frogs per 20 gallons was always right, I cheated myself out of more frogs for nothing 🤣

Lo and behold....I'm free of the aquarium anxiety cycle!

Edit: just used the API nitrate test to test the 20 gallon, it's giving me 80 🤦‍♀️ Maybe it's just my kit, but I stored it properly, it's around 3-4yrs old, but literal 80 with actual 10ppm by expensive test is insane to me!! The other results in the kit have been accurate/stable, though. pH tests 7.6 and the aquarium store owner got the same reading. Seems I may need only a new nitrate test. Go figure!!

This one's grumpy because I keep filming her shamelessly eating the floating plants lmao

Hi everyone! 😊

I recently got a new 180L (47-gallon) aquarium and would love some advice on how to set it up. I already keep Platys and would like to include them in the new tank, but I’m still deciding on the substrate, plants and other fish.

1. Substrate

Would you recommend dark sand or dark gravel? I’m leaning towards dark sand because I love the natural look.

Would I need nutrient-rich soil underneath, or would plain sand with root tabs and liquid fertilizer be sufficient for a low-maintenance planted aquarium?

1. Plants

I definitely want a large piece of driftwood as the centerpiece, along with plenty of greenery.

I’m considering:

- Waterweed

- Hornwort

- Vallisneria

- Anubias and Java fern attached to the driftwood

- Cryptocorynes

I’d also love to create a carpet-like foreground that looks like a little underwater lawn.

Which other low-maintenance plants would work well in a 180L aquarium?

1. Fish stocking

I’d like to keep Platys as the main fish and add a few compatible species to create a peaceful community tank.

Which fish would you recommend for a 180L aquarium with Platys? For example...

A school of X-ray tetras (Pristella maxillaris)

A group of Corydoras, depending on which species would suit my water parameters

Possibly one bristlenose pleco

I’d also appreciate advice on appropriate group sizes and which species would be compatible with the harder, more alkaline water that Platys generally prefer.

My vision: A natural-looking, lushly planted aquarium with dark sand, a large driftwood centerpiece, lots of easy-care plants and a peaceful, well-balanced fish community.

I’d love to hear your experiences and recommendations. Thanks in advance! 🌿🐠

My cats regularly lay and jump on my tank lid and today the trap door where you drop food in broke.

Photo of the culprits on the other tank for tax

The one they broke is a plastic 29 gallon top fin lid

my Youtube channel

Hello. Trying to work out if this bolivian ram is male or female. Have two in my tank. Smaller one im pretty sure is female but bigger one i can't work out. Has a pretty pronounced vent which is throwing me.

Hopefully someone in the know can help me out.