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I find this cool. It's a few days after the first photos, and the Pristella maxillaris are a bit over 3 weeks. Once you get past the brine shrimp pot bellies, look at how the dorsal already signals it's a Pristella. That's cute, but earlier than I expected.

The thread's from 2020, but the info is still good and it was great to see it resurface. Interesting info.

If that smoked salmon story happens at your place, @Magnum Man , there'd be mascara running all over the tank. Do you know what the USA needs? I'll avoid politics and say 200 more fish buyers like you to keep the ball rolling on these weird and wonderful species you like. Way cool fish. Look...

This is like when you want green water, and nothing you do will make it thrive. Then, once the fry who needed it or all grown, or once the Daphnia have crashed, you get what you wanted and have a battle with the stuff. You can get snails going out of control if you give yourself a few weeks to...

Deer all over the meadow behind the house are cute. Their parasites aren't. We have a tick problem too, as creatures from the south keep rapidly moving north. I've only had one bad bite, but it wasn't Lyme. It itched for months though. I'm happy coexisting with wildlife, but I watch closely to...

No video games for me. I've been peering into dark tanks looking for tetra larvae. I mean, the weekend is coming so who wouldn't be doing that? It's a catch 22 - the tetras I'm trying to breed are probably light sensitive, and when I just bred Pristella to learn their timing, it was 10 days...

When I think of fairies, I think "delicate", or "light". I see neither when I look at any Cory. Fairy Cory? Maybe it was the black mask, but the blackhead Cory? That would cover the spots.

Roman Legions didn't know the polka, or ancient battles would have been spectacular. My guess is it was probably described from alcohol preserved specimens that had lost colour. How else could you miss those polka dots?

There are a bunch of Cory cats that should be popular, but that fish stores are usually too conservative to stock. Here's one I picked up recently, an old favourite I hadn't seen in quite some time. They weren't expensive, but are something a little different. May I introduce a couple of my...

The active ingredient is a disinfectant, QACs (Quaternary Ammonium Compounds). They are considered safe for humans, but work on many bacteria and algaes by rupturing their cell walls. Based on what I just read (and as a source, I am not a chemist, or even close to one!), they have been cited as...

Yeah, but Corydoras aeneushimherit would be pretty bad too!

I've never tried venting angels, but I'm told it is imprecise and difficult. It's said to be easy to make mistakes. Plus the fins being what they are, it's very easy to injure them while trying. I knew an older man who battled alcoholism and built a hatchery to keep obsessively busy. He lived...

Sadly, you have bought fish with a severe bacterial infection. Without a laboratory to tell you what bacterium is doing the damage, you can't treat it effectively. Don't let the healthy looking fish feed on the dead ones - remove them quickly, or remove them before they die. This is why many...

aenea or aeneus?? You're an English speaker. Our nouns don't have gender, but in Latin languages, they do. So the species name has to accord grammatically with the new Genus name. It drives English speakers crazy, but not doing so would drive speakers of Latin based languages even crazier. It...

The truest, most effective trick is to watch them spawn and see who lays the eggs. I am very skeptical when people claim to be able to sex angels from photos. Most people planning to breed them buy 6, see who pairs and rehome the others. I know commercial angel breeders who have made mistakes...

Get a small, stiff bristled brush, take it out and give it a scrub. Algae will always survive and return, but you can work on the causes in the meantime. The algae is probably getting nutrition from the wood, so it'll be a process. Be careful with the algicide. It's a dangerous product to play...

That's the linebred cacatuoides orange. They are very nice.

It could also be a goldfish. But I don't think there are real animals in Scotland. I recently saw a comedian who noted they have coats of arms with unicorns, they talk about wild haggis and then there's the Loch Ness monster. Other than shrunken deer and big cows, they aren't to be believed...

The Acara group aren't easy going, in general. Some individual natural blue acaras are okay with fish their own size and weight class, but when they feel the need to assert themselves, it's best to have a plan B for tankmates. They aren't at the level of green terrors - they are a whole other...

I have seen some serious fast a loose play with names though. There have been exporters who catch the same fish over and over again, and put a new name on it for their lists every time. As long as the buyers weren't sharp, they'd get away with it. Or, they would make up one name and use it no...

Looking for a couple of grams here means submitting photo ID to the seller so they can pass it on to the police if questions are asked. It isn't worth it. I'll deal with the cyanoboys in blue green, but prefer to avoid the boys in blue. But if there is something that works the same in...

Electric blues are weird. I don't what they've done to them to get the colour, but it seems to have a side consequence of passivity and behaviour not like the species that have been modified. When you see a blood parrot, it wants to murder everything but its mouth is so deformed it can't. But...

Overstocking is a trick that works with east African Cichlids from Lake Malawi. When you say "Cichlids", that's what a lot of inexperienced fishkeepers think of. They don't realize yet how diverse the Cichlids group is, and that leads to mistakes. South American Cichlids like those two hate...

I don't use pots - is something in there buoyant? Did you pot them yourself?

She's growing and he isn't, and she isn't impressed. They don't mate for life, and if one partner is seen as unfit by the other, it's gone. If it won't go, it's killed. The pair seeks balance and and strong young, and if she sees him as a runt, they are no longer a pair. That's probably good as...

I'll suggest a deep dive on google. It is commonly done if you keep species that never dig (no Cichlids!). But it isn't something to do lightly, and it can go wrong. You have to learn how to treat the soil, and how to prepare the tank. Avoid gurus as well, as there are a couple of cult-like...

If you need to quick check on a lake, that's where test strips can be very very handy. I don't use them in aquariums, but if you keep them dry and well taken care of, they beat a test kit in the outdoors. You get more information. The cost isn't worth it for tanks, but their inefficiency is...

Calling all chemists.... In the past, dealing with a very persistent Cyanobacterial bloom in clean tanks, I was able to 'defeat' the problem with doses of Potassium Nitrate. Buying that has become a problem here, as it was used by right wing terrorists in the US in bomb making, and getting even...

The point is - we don't speak Latin. Very very few people do. That's where we're all equal, whether we speak French, English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian... it's no one's first language. That makes this well documented dead language very useful for science. When I went fish collecting...

The Cory one looks solid. They are divisions hobbyists had noted, more or less. Every once in a while, you see one like this that even a non scientist like me thinks was overdue. There was a division of Pelvicachromis cichlids like this - with the creation of Wallaceochromis for the northern...

"False julii" sounds a bit too much like a girl I went out with in my teens. At least I could count on Scruffy the Corydoras aeneus who is now Osteogaster aenea to avoid teenaged drama... English trade names for fish are a pet peeve, although many of the translated from Mandarin names we get...

No, but the 2 Cichlids, especially the Pelvicachromis, are sifters. They'll eat off the sand, and roll the pieces around a bit to scrape biofilm off them. I thought the yellow congos were surface feeders, striking at bugs, but they must eat more than that. I found when all were at ease after...

In time, the Alestopetersius caudalis/yellow Congos will become very pretty. Those ones are quite young. There are blues and bright yellows coming. I've always found wild caught pulchers shy and somewhat difficult. I prefer the smaller, less powerful P. kribensis, the real kribensis, to pulcher...

I was just on Corydoras World looking at the reclassification of Corydoras, and I discovered I have never kept a real Corydoras. The first fish I bought under the name was when I was 10, and he (well, I now know it was she) lived 12 years. I named it Scruffy. I thought it was a Cory, and to...

Those now smallish metae can get quite big - bigger than I'm seeing online although one site admits to 18cm being possible. Acaras are very heavy bodied fish, and with the exception of those strange, not typical electric blues, can be very aggressive. I used to unpack a lot of metae, and some of...

I enjoy watching their shapes. The Microctenopoma began as little round dots, the Pristella tetras were slivers, now developing rounder bodies, and the Sturisoma developed in large transparent eggs, coming out as miniature copies of their complicated looking parents.

My personal calculation for fish that move is one inch of fish, at full adult size, needs 10 inches of front glass. So those 8 inchers would need a huge tank. As for the first one there - they aren't well known.