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Blackwater guru

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I recently got into the aquarium hobby a month ago and setup my 145 blackwater aquarium that contains 15 cardinal tetras , 4 corydoras duplicareus catfish and 3 octocinclus catfish, plus 6 marbled hatchetfish and a pair of german ram cichlids.

I use a couple of bags of roibos tea to add tannins and I also have dried oak leaves on the bottom.

IMG_20200219_195031.jpg


Here is my first video so far and it recieved way more views than I ever anticipated and currently it has reached 70 + barely within a day of uploading it and I hope to reach 100 views on it in a week or two.


*update* here are some new photos along with my newest video also my first one got over 300 views which is quite a lot for a channel this small.

IMG_20200313_193734.jpg



On sunday tomorrow I will upload a new video.



It has been 5 months since my aquarium got set up and 4 months since this thread got created so I am gonna update with my latest video which I hope you will enjoy.

So I have finished filming my next video after being fairly inactive mainly because I had to work on an assignment but also because of me playing different videos games like wow or the professor Layton games and when not doing that I was mostly practicing stuff like malware analysis or even game development.

Unfortunately when I had finished editing in filmora and I was about to export it Filmora started to nag me about buying their expensive subscription so I had to uninstall filmora and now that school started for me I have even less time to make new videos.

Rest assured though that this next video will come out eventually during the scheduled time which is 18:00 cet Sundays.

I want to show my white tip tetras as well because I have yet to show them on video
I know that twitter might be more suited to this but I don't really use any other types of social media besides traditional media platforms like forums or YouTube even though I have accounts on Facebook and twitter I never use.
 
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Gorgeous tank!
 
Great fish combo too. Duplicarus are one of the most attractive corries IMO. Could maybe put a few more in?
 
Munroco said:
Great fish combo too. Duplicarus are one of the most attractive corries IMO. Could maybe put a few more in?
Click to expand...
Yeah I was thinking it might be a good idea but I am afraid of overstocking my tank by accident and they seem to be doing just fine and they are displaying normal corydoras behaviour such as quickly swimming towards the top then quickly swimming downwards again.
 
Very nice..the whole world of tetras is open to you now. Or stay with Cardinals. I never have had any luck with them or neons for more than a few months. Even kept in their own aquarium..the fading disease hits them every time.
I wonder if they should be kept like Discus? bare bottom,low light and very warm water? One day try again.
 
Stan510 said:
Very nice..the whole world of tetras is open to you now. Or stay with Cardinals. I never have had any luck with them or neons for more than a few months. Even kept in their own aquarium..the fading disease hits them every time.
I wonder if they should be kept like Discus? bare bottom,low light and very warm water? One day try again.
Click to expand...

In my experience even though I never kept neons I do know they prefer cooler water from 20 to 25 degrees celsius while cardinals prefer warmer water from 24 to 30 degrees celsius.

Tetras and small schooling fish in general need places to hide like driftwood , plants and possibly dried leaves like the dried oak leaves which I use in my aquarium to release additional tannins besides the tannins from the roibos tea that I use.

As for the lightning neon tetras and cardinal tetras appreciate a lower lightning enviroment which can be achieved by using floating plants along with tannins from either using dried leaves and seedpods or tea or why not use both.

Using low lightning can also help achieve that darker look and for the best effect I recommend using a dark gravel or dark sand or atleast the darkest one you can find at the lfs along with a black background which can look amazing like in my photo.

The reason as to why these fish prefer lower lightning is because of the amazonian rainforest enviroments where these fish live natively where the surface is often covered with floating plants and where the bottom is filled with decomposing organic materials like leaves and fruits like the native Guava fruit causing the water to look like tea or black coffee.

One possible explanation as to why you have struggled to keep them is that they are quite sensitive to diseases when not in an enviroment like that of their native rainforest containing tannins which have antibacterial and antifungal properties but it can also reduce stress in the fish although some just find it unsightly and they think it looks dirty.

If you still want to get the benefits of tannins and not the color there are actually ways to do this that I cannot remember at the moment.

Recreating what the fish species native habitat would look like and doing tons of research on it is the best way to keep fish healthy especially these sensitive species like blackwater fish.
 
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Agreed. I have 30 cardinals, along with 15 glowlights. They are in soft acidic water with plenty of plants and no bright light. They get a 60-80% water change every week and I have never even seen a sick one.

There have been a couple of threads recently about weaknesses in neons. Many years ago I decided that I did not want neons but loved cardinals. I honestly can't remember the reason but that may well have been a factor.

Edit: All my tetras are wild caught. Not intending to start a "caught vs farmed" debate but it means I don't have to contend with generations of inbreeding.
 
seangee said:
Agreed. I have 30 cardinals, along with 15 glowlights. They are in soft acidic water with plenty of plants and no bright light. They get a 60-80% water change every week and I have never even seen a sick one.

There have been a couple of threads recently about weaknesses in neons. Many years ago I decided that I did not want neons but loved cardinals. I honestly can't remember the reason but that may well have been a factor.

Edit: All my tetras are wild caught. Not intending to start a "caught vs farmed" debate but it means I don't have to contend with generations of inbreeding.
Click to expand...
It's the same thing with my cardinal tetras and the reason as to why I chose cardinals is that I find them to be prettier than neons and they are also hardier than neons.
 
Some of my neons have the lumps/ cysts disease that don't respond to treatment. I must admit I am not providing all the requirements highlighted in post #7, I have them in a community tank. I was thinking of getting cardinals instead of more neons. But then I saw a thread where two cardinals had lumps on their mouths so am now thinking they are susceptible to the same disease as neons???
 
Blackwater guru said:
I recently got into the aquarium hobby a month ago and setup my 145 blackwater aquarium that contains 15 cardinal tetras , 4 corydoras duplicareus catfish and 3 octocinclus catfish, plus 6 marbled hatchetfish and a pair of german ram cichlids.

I use a couple of bags of roibos tea to add tannins and I also have dried oak leaves on the bottom.

View attachment 97974

Here is my first video so far and it recieved way more views than I ever anticipated and currently it has reached 70 + barely within a day of uploading it and I hope to reach 100 views on it in a week or two.


*update* here are some new photos along with my newest video also my first one got over 300 views which is quite a lot for a channel this small.

View attachment 99240


On sunday tomorrow I will upload a new video.

Click to expand...
 
Well I have some bad news and it's that one of my hatchetfish recently died because it jumped out of the aquarium during feeding time and it flew a meter away from the aquarium because these fish have wings.

I made a video about this that will have it's premiere today.
 
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