HummingBird

What sort of snails are they? I would say they probably would, yes.

Almost definately yes. One of my males did this to every male guppy with a long tail, when I had him in with them.

To my knowledge, copper sulfate isn't available in any supermarkets unfortunately. Don't turn up the temperature until you have some treatment in the water, because more heat means they go through their life cycle faster - good when you have treatments because they get to the kill-able stage faster, but bad when you don't because your fish get re-infected more and more.

That sucks Liam! Glad to hear at least some made it. I've only moved a tank with fish once, and I used bags as suggested by Alan. The fish made it fine, so perhaps that is indeed the best way to do it.

As Caryl suggested, some plants, even just some java fern or java moss, would out-compete the algae for nutrients and prevent it growing. I never had a problem with Brown algae before I set up my rock-only cichlid tank, because all my other tanks are planted, but I put some moss in it a couple of weeks ago and the algae has noticibily gone down, not entirely disappeared but it's definately not as noticable as before.

Yeah, Valisneria isn't actually allowed to be sold in NZ.

The glass thickness should be fine if it's apropriately braced. For cleaning the glass, try vinegar. It's got acetic acid in it and should remove calcium deposits fairly easily.

But that way the old tank would be basically uncycled. Best to just swap media.

You don't rinse the whole filter at the same time, do you? You could be resetting the cycle of your tank.

If you can, you could try running the new filter on the old tank for a while, in addition to the old filter. If you can't do that, put some of the media from the old filter in the new one to seed it. You should transfer as much gravel as you can/want to. Don't bother with the water, it doesn't harbour much bacteria.

But does that interfere with the actual cycling of the tank? The bacteria wouldn't have anything to eat and it would just prolong the time it took to cycle, I would think.

Smart thinking with getting all males. Sword tails can change sex and Platties are closely related to them, I don't know if they can too, or if they can change both ways(male to female and vice versa) or not. Are the Minnows in the same tank with the Black Neons and the other neons? They might school with them, they're similarly sized and whatnot..

You could probbably take a sample of each type of water to a pet store and they'll test it for you for free or a minimal charge. If you ask really nicely they might even test their hardness too

Edit: double posted.

Great to hear, platties are pretty neat and don't be surprised if you have a number of platty babies in the near future :lol: From what I've read on the net though, I think White Cloud Mountain Minnows prefer to be in large groups. I'm getting 10 of them on the weekend that I'm going to try and breed, apparently they're one of the easiest egg layers to.

Yeah tap water should be fine if you remove the chlorine/chloramine first. Introduce the tap water slowly though, because it might have a different pH/hardness than the bottled stuff.

Yeah co2 acts as a narcotic on fish. In regard to the exploding thing though, I think the nutrafin cannisters have a guard against that, I remember reading something to that affect in the manual of mine.

Yeah I don't use baking soda either, just have an upside down bottle with an airhose at room temp. Just made it a few days ago, only had one hatch from it (going on two) but it was a fairly high hatch rate.

Tonic salt is fine, table salt is iodised so you can't use it.

Brine Shrimp are from salt lakes, not the sea, so tap water with salt in it is just as good as sea water could be.

If it's colder they'll just take longer to hatch. You could try putting the bottle in your hot water cupboard to keep the temp up.

Yeap.

Was the filter running during the two weeks? If it was, you might be lucky and some bacteria might have survived, enough to start a new population (that's binary fission for ya). Odds are higher if you've got live plants in there, because decomposing leaves are a source of ammonia. Do you have any other tanks? If you do, try putting some used filter media from it's filter into this tank's filter to seed it with bacteria.

Congrats snowman, it'll be quite a feat if they make it to adulthood, but here's hoping!

Male guppies have a modified anal fin known as a 'gonopodium'. It's shaped like a tube to deliver sperm. Here're some pics of sword tails (another type of live bearer) with the differences pointed out. Female: Male: