Thanks for the info Barbie. I will look for that medication. Hoping to bring some fish back from Catcon and it will be good to have on hand. Seems like the woodcats were the last to go. Lost all of them. Other fish and corys look fine now and are all eating good. Keeping the system on quarantine for...

Still finding more losses. Found some dead Trachelichthys exilis in one of the smaller tanks on the system. Moved the portable UV over to that tank.

It was in Amazonas. The Whiptail issue.

The ones I lost to aggression were fine one day and the next day their backs were stripped down to the muscle tissue. This occurred the first time when I had 3 of them in the 40 breeder in a breeding attempt. One of the two largest ones succumbed this way. After that I had a large one and a small on...

I don't think this fish should be considered too specialized to keep in aquaria. It doesn't have an excessively large size or a specialized diet. Solitarily, I would consider them no more difficult to keep than a normal whiptail. That being said, I have learned quite a bit from keeping them that can...

Well I think it has worked itself out of the system. Fish are back to normal and I don't see any spots. Total losses were the following: 3 Gold Nuggets 5 x L226 4 x L180 (whole colony) 4 x L411 (whole colony) 1 x Longfin Blue eye albino BN. A really beautiful specimen 3 x Retroculus xinguensis 3 x G...

That's pretty funny.

Joe Gargas was speaking here recently.

I have used Vortex diatoms in the past and still run a Tetra Diatomagic for regular polishing. IME they are never effective at disease treatment. Prevention maybe. But in a 10 tank central system appropriately sized and functioning UV's work best.

I ran the ick medication with the UV off. After 3 days of treatment I did some large water changes and put the UV back on.

I generally try to avoid using medications and often just manipulate temperature to treat parasites. But in my central system it takes a long time to heat up.

Andy

Thanks for the encouragement everyone.

I have had a lot of issues with fish picking on my Planiloricaria from time to time. May be best to separate it and treat with an antibiotic to prevent further infection.

Well it's been a disheartening week in my fish room. I brought back some nice cichlids from the ACA convention and put them into a holding tank in my central system. It had been a long time since I bought fish from anywhere other than a local breeder and I was careless. My UV sterilizer lamp had bur...

All of the herbivorous plecos are messy. Ancistrus like bristlenose are your best choice.

If you are looking for plecos that are cool to look at but don't eat algae or plants then I would suggest Hypancistrus which are more carnivores or omnivores.

Andy

That will help. You can also use vacation feeder blocks (which are mostly calcium sulfate) to feed your snails to help with new shell growth.

I heard about this at the ACA convention yesterday. Very cool.

Cool

An HMF should not have any effect on TDS. It's an inert material.

Sorry, Can't tell you anything more about the new product. But I have been using several for a few months now and they work great. Sometimes it's really good to be in R&D.

Andy

I think you are justified in worrying about the pleco poop. I keep a large variety of Panaqolous in a number of tanks and I am also a big Aqueon supporter. But in my tanks with panaqolous the cartridges do clog very quickly. I would go with the mattenfilter myself. Use the 10 ppi foam. You can build...

Repashy Gel foods. I would suggest the Morning wood and Spawn N gro. Besides algae wafers and cucumber that has what I have been feeding mine for the last 4 years mostly. If you can keep it alive past the first 6 months you should be ok. They often starve to death in captivity from lack of proper fo...

I agree with dw1305. Although on this side of the pond we generally call them pillbugs. They were probably in the wood and drowned when you put it underwater.

A 30-40 gallon tank should be fine.

I currently have 3 Planiloricaria in a 125 gallon with 4 P. nigrolineatus and 6 Pterygoplichthys weberi that have been living together happily for 2 years. Never had any problem. I also have two Planiloricaria in a 40 breeder with a colony of Ancistrus claro for the last year without any problems ei...

Are you thinking zucchini or cucumber? IME zucchini stays together very well. Cucumber falls apart rather quickly. Although I feed a lot of cucumber because it grows faster than I can eat it in my garden.

Andy

Panaque are wood eaters and eat copious amounts of wood in their natural diet. Do you have a lot of soft driftwood in the tank for them to gnaw on?

I am thinking that the problem may be a lack of cellulose in the diet. I would go back to feeding zucchini on a regular basis.

From the white cottony growth it looks like you have a fungal infection. Possibly also with a secondary bacterial infection. I would suggest treating with Tetra Fungus Guard which should be available in your country.

I agree. I picked up 8 of them a couple of years ago when the local importers were getting them in. Still have 6 of them. They are about 6-7" long now.

Here is a paper on the ionic composition of various freshwater river systems. http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/T0537E/T0537E02.htm I wouldn't be too worried about the Sodium. If you look at the table on the blackwater rivers (Rio Negro is the S.A. example), sodium is 2-4X higher in concentration than c...

Jeff Rapps gets in interesting loricariinae on occasion. www.tangledupincichlids.com I too am sad that Ted is shutting down. I got some really nice H. lanceolata, S. panamense, and S. nigrirostrum from him. I got lots of spawns from the S. panamense and have yet to spawn the S. nigrirostrum. Andy

If you plan on keeping the fry only for yourself and not distributing them then breeding is ok. If your plan was to distribute the fish to others and you are not 100% sure of the identification of the parents then it is probable best not to breed them.

Breeding between the two could still be possible. They are closely related and names are just things people put on animals to help us identify them. Fish don't care.