Pet Forum / Aquaria / Freshwater / April 2005

I have a 26g with a good number of plants.  Someone suggested that
it's hard to maintain a regular ph level with this homemade type
apparatus.
Are my plants actually benefitting from this?  It's designed for up to

i have 4 tiger barbs and recntly they have been floating with their head
down in unison. like hovering with their heads facing the gravel. they do it
alot, but dont seem sick. is this mating behavior.

I have upgraded to a 120 litre tank with a Fluval 3+ filter.  This is more
powerful than my previous filter and can cause quite a lot of agitation for
the fish (angels, silver sharks, tetras, gourami, platy).
I read in the FAQ that excessive water flow can be bad news but it doesn't

My friend is setting up a 5 gallon tank for some killies and he's not
planning on using any substrate.
My question is this: is substrate important other than for decoration?
Will he be able to cycle his tank without it?

Hi! I recently bought some live plants and got some pond snails with
them. I don't want the pond snails to eat my amazon sword (ever since I
put a plant food tablet on it it has grown some and turned greener -
thanks Ellaine!) or hornwort plants. The hornwort has grown relatively

If you go to my website and go to the gallery tab, the first picture is of a
couple of free loading snails.  Can anyone ID them and let me know if I
should remove them or not.  Also will they eat the algae growing on my drift
wood?

OK, here is a case for all you CSI fans.  I came home from work today to
find my single Chinese Algae Eater DEAD!  Not only was he dead, but he had
two big bites taken out of him.
The Suspects:

What happened to this group - there are only a handful of messages here
at all? The same thing happened to rec.aquaria.freshwater.plants and
who knows what else? Could this be a google only thing or did something
twilight zone happen? Later!

The salt question it seems to be a tricky one to answer.
I've been reading the newsgroups and it's a toss up between those that
say to add salt and those that say no way.
My impression is that adding salt is okay as long it is in small

I could never keep the blue rams (Elaine said the same) and suggested
the Bolivians many months ago.
Finally saw some at my LFS (under red ram name).  Bigger than german
blues (2 1/2") but just as beautiful and just as friendly.  Two

I just picked up a pair of Danner Mag-7 water pumps.  I'm planning
on using them in parallel redundancy on a 180G tank I'm setting up.
To test them I placed them in a 5 gallon bucket filled with water
and turned them on overnight.  The next morning, to my horror, when

Should this be happening
--
esandland

I'm just in the process of setting up two new aquariums, and I happened
to read the "directions" on the back of one of my bags of
"Estes'"gravel. I felt reassured to read that this gravel carried a
manufacturer's guarantee:  "If this product is found faulty due to

I am a newbie so any help would be appreciated.
My small newly set up aquarium has 6 neon tetras, a few small catfish,
two golden goutami (5cm) and one bala shark (4cm).
The bala shark has started biting the lager male gourami and has

I am concerned about one of my angelfishes.  Last week I was worried
that a different angelfish was sick so I moved it to a hospital tank.
I increased the temperature in my main tank up to 82F and things seemed
to be okay until yesterday.  As I was moving back my other angelfish