You can add a little fish food if you’re worried about starving the bacteria, but really, microorganisms can live pretty well off their dead brethren.
ETA: It is super important to test for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate at least once a day if you add fish food and live fish to a new tank, even when using established filter media. It doesn’t take much fish food to crank the ammonia up to a point where it’s hard to get it back under control.
No, large water changes will not typically crash an established cycle. The vast majority of the bacteria that break down nitrogenous wastes live attached to surfaces: filter media, hardscape, substrate, and plants. Filter media are designed with surface area in mind: the hang-on-back (HOB) filters using the plastic cartridge covered with fiber floss has lots of slots to allow water to pass through and over the fibers, which are frizzy and are easily colonized. Canister filters hold stacked baskets of media like porous, ceramic rings that are designed to maximize surface area and house a ton more helpful organisms than even the fiber-covered plastic cartridge.
When starting a new tank, it’s a good idea to throw some of your existing, healthy tank’s filter media (or plants or hardscape) in to jump start the community of microorganisms that keep your aquatic buds safe. You can use a friend’s, but only if you’d trust them to care for your fish at least as well as you do, as harmful organisms can also attach to surfaces and be carried along.
It’s true; we love the dwarf shrimp for their looks, not their abundance of caution.
Squirt it right on top of the algae, not in the area. Peroxide’s not a dangerous toxin that lingers, but it’s reactive oxygen that disrupts bonds. (That’s its sanitizing super power.) It can chemically burn if left in contact with skin for too long, so I wouldn’t risk using it on hardscape inverts are sitting on or too near your fish. (The burns aren’t serious for humans but I don’t know how a fish or snail would do before the peroxide dissociated.)
If you need to, put some tank water into another container and treat your hardscape in that so you don’t risk anyone’s safety.
First thing to do is remove as much as you can by hand. I usually twirl it around a barbecue skewer and pull gently until I get a good wad of it, like getting cotton candy onto a cone. Keep doing that until you can’t find any more clumps.
Next, do a water change to reduce available nutrients in the water column. If you use plant nutrients heavily or tend to overfeed like I do, 50%+ is a good place to start when it comes to starving out hair algae. Keep doing water changes on a regular basis (I shoot for 10-25% every week, but in reality it’s usually every two or three weeks) to keep the overabundance of nutrients in check.
You can spot-dose store bought hydrogen peroxide (the regular 3% kind) with a dropper onto remaining patches of algae; they should start to die off immediately and change color to red or brown. Those bits can then be pulled out or siphoned up. Used in small amounts (like a couple droppers’ worth, not a quarter bottle), peroxide shouldn’t hurt anything in your tank and will quickly break down to water and oxygen.
After those initial steps, keeping control of hair algae involves getting your plants to outcompete it for food. One really easy way to do that is to add more plants and keep using the same amount of fertilizer. You’ll know when to increase your dose when the plants start looking like they’re deficient or not growing as well as before; make small changes and wait at least a few days to see how they respond.
Aside from more plants, a nerite snail is a great addition to your cleanup crew. I’ve never had one try to escape before, but a female nerite will lay eggs on your hardscape. They’re small and white and look like sesame seeds. The eggs won’t hatch in fresh water or harm your tank.
Good luck! I know hair algae is a hassle and hope this works for you.
Bettas are big on personality and intelligence in general. I’ve had some chill bettas who’ve shared a ten gallon tank with shrimp, and ones who have eaten all the shrimp in a couple days. Some ignored the other fish in the tank, and one had to be put in his own 5 gallon tank because he would chase everyone and stress himself out.
My favorite betta would refuse to eat the pellets I got him unless I ground them up into smaller pieces with a mortar and pestle. He totally could, he just didn’t like to. Once he found that I would break them up into smaller pieces for him because I didn’t want him to starve, he stopped responding at all to whole pellets and would stare and wait for me to grind them up before swimming to the surface. “Pardonnez moi, mademoiselle, these are unacceptable”
Cats can have a little salami
We’ve done it, everybody! We’ve got an actual Cat Facts subscriber!
There’s at least some truth to it: a little disturbance (like wind or someone talking to them and riffling the leaves) helps plants grow stronger stems. I don’t know if there’s any data that differentiates between the effects of a fan or someone telling their plant that they’re loved and appreciated, but who cares? Your plants do better when you talk to them instead of leaving them standing still. 👍🏼
I want a script that fills in other data brokers’ contact information!
Hahaha this face is one of my favorites that my cat makes. I am delighted to see pictures of other cats doing the same thing.
I <3 pudgy cats
This cat is perfect
The first time someone told me to prune basil back to 1/3 of its height, I was sure they were trolling me. How could anything survive that? 😂
You can be short-sighted and wrong, but it’s better to re-examine your beliefs and the way you understand the world. It’s a good thing to grow out of this phase.
Seems weird to me that you think helping marginalized people wouldn’t help everybody. That’s the whole point, finding solutions to problems that work for everyone, not just those in the middle of the bell curve.
As someone with a learning disability, a history of trauma, neurodivergence, and is part of a racial minority, I really don’t give a fuck if the majority are kept quiet for five minutes lol
What this means in this context is considering the viewpoints coming from many different groups–people of different races, religions, disabilities, neurodivergence, etc., so issues that affect men with disabilities, for example, are as important as issues that affect men without disabilities. They don’t get ignored or sidelined in favor of more mainstream conversations.
I have that problem all the time. The most consistent way I’ve gotten around it is to click on any post within that community. There’ll be a subscribe button in there, too, and that one always shows up for me, unlike the community page’s. I haven’t found a way around this problem if a community has zero posts, so if I don’t have something reminding me to go back, I just forget about it. If you’re finding new ones to subscribe to through New Communities@lemmy.world (or similar), you can save the post advertising the community and go back to it later.
Cultivating live food for your fish friends is a great idea! Research, trial, and error are going to be really important in the process, so it’s better to do it in a separate tank to keep your fish safe. We don’t have the ability to bring an entire complex ecosystem into our homes and put it in a glass box; the best we can do is mimic one as best as possible. This means that an experimental tank won’t have as many of the same “redundancies” nature does when nutrient, light, or oxygen/dissolved gases get out of balance, and population crashes can happen a lot more easily. (Even if it’s just the food creatures that die off, the decaying matter can cause problems like ammonia burns for your fish.) Rather than trying to establish a sustainable colony of food animals in your fish tank, starting a tank with food animals and slowly adding fish to it will give you a much clearer picture of how large a population they can sustain.
Some tips to help you build as robust a system as you can:
This sounds like a really cool project. If you decide to do it, I hope you’ll post updates!