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They my have snuck in on plants. What is in there?

The first thing to eliminate is overfeeding. That fish may have more serious problems, but it needs several days of fasting to see.

"Acara" is a local langage name for Cichlids like that. My favourite namewise is Laetacara dorsigera, known locally as the "Acara bobo" because it's so easy to catch.

If you have a degree of stacking, make sure you can easily get your hand in to work on the tanks. If they are too close together, top to bottom, as old bookcases tend to be, you can't do what's needed and the project falls apart quickly.

Snail eggs... Danios tend to scatter eggs all over the tank, while pond and ramshorn snails lay eggs in a gelatinous clumps.

It may be one local morph I have never seen, but that fish used to come in a lot, and I saw brown where he's yellow.

They are from Nigeria, and slightly into Cameroon. If the male goes in, there are no eggs yet. Once he starts guarding, and you don't see her outside, the deed is done. Don't look. That could end the broodcare. Patience...

I have seen a lot of metae, but I've never seen one even remotely that colourful.

This is true, and we are extremely well unpaid.

You don't think a squad of dryland Geophagus are sitting around waiting for rescues, do you? Banks, art galleries, fish importers...

Don't worry @connorlindeman , the TFF tunnel diggers are ready and waiting if it turns out badly. We'll want a fish of the month for fish that dig though. The highly trained dry land Geophagus are all set.

They are what I call once a year tetras - they show up, but you are lucky to find one import per annum. So they aren't rare, but they are uncommon. I also find when they are listed, what arrives are often not lacortei. They're often the more available palmeri.

Actually, Nanacara anomala is a sometimes common dwarf Cichlid that at a glance can be mistaken for the considerably larger electric blue acara. It's a 100% natural fish, and a great dwarf to keep. It tends more greenish than electric blue, but the fancy blue acaras are cheap imitations. The...

GMO fish are illegal to sell in many places, but a whole bunch of blue fish from radically different regions showed up in the hobby at the same time, from Asian fish farms. All are claimed as the result of linebreeding, but man, those electric blue sheens happened so quickly and in so many...

I'm going to do water changes this morning. It'll be one of the last ones where I can do the whole room - in winter I have the space divided into four units as my little water heater won't do the job against ice cold tap if I do too many. In winter, I do 3 early morning 40 minute maintenance...

I stopped using them years ago, then rediscovered them. They are the mainstay of my fishroom now. I fill them with wide pored sponge so they aren't wasteful (as they are with floss) and make them into little biofilters. When they were the main filters in the hobby, we didn't understand the...

I used to help run a poetry workshop, and had a couple of publications. I realized I wasn't good at it and moved into other writing - at the time, short stories. Stories and song lyrics. Poetry is a difficult craft, and a bit of a lost art.

For me, anything over flowerhorn any day, but Synodontis are great if you keep large tanks. They are really overlooked in the hobby.

Today, the fishroom windows are closed, and the dehumidifier is on. No more this year will the breezes from the sea drift across the fishtanks... The hatches are battened down, and the dehumidifier has already raised the temperature to 23.5c. On a positive note, the Pristella fry have doubled...

This is an African Blood Moon Tetra, or Red Cap tetra, Bathyaethiops greeni. It isn't common and the hobby hasn't settled on a trade name yet. It's from the Congo River region, and is a shoaler, and by that I don't mean sometimes. These fish are always in their group, which I hope will be a...

I'll bump this up - people who love African non Rift Lake fish are are. I'm one, but have never been into Synodontis, or any albino or xanthic fish. It figures, I see somewhere here who likes fish from the same region I do, only those fish are so diverse I'm into a whole other bunch. I've...

Bush fish have some of the same appeal as many Cichlids. They seem really aware. As for Nessie, Loch Ness isn't a very big lake. It's pretty, and the water is nicely tannin stained, but for it to support a few hundred large creatures (a breeding population) seems very unlikely to me. There are...

The natural long finned Corys have spines to support the fins. Domestic sports have no genetic shut off switch on fin growth, so it just grows and grows with no support, and tends to curl on itself in time. With fish that can live as long as Corys, I think that'll start getting ugly as they age...

It's now Osteogaster aenea, and has a temperature range of 62f to 78f, even if it's one with hideous fin deformities. ;)

Your best bet would be to give us some names. I can look up details easily. A fish I didn't buy this week, but thought about, is Gastrodermus napoensis - a dark coloured Cory that's easy to keep. They range from 72 to 80f, but when I researched them 20 years ago, I saw 76-80. But 20 years ago...

The Cory info in the hobby is full of relics. I had a book when I was a kid that asserted there were paleatus, aeneus, melanistius and julii, and no other Corys. We've learned a bit since then. What we haven't done is updated. paleatus was said to be the cool water one, and while that's true...

Most would be good with that. I'd suggest reverse engineering your search. See what's available from your sources, then check species by species. Seriously Fish is good and doesn't require a membership. Corydoras World is better, but I think you need a (well worth it) membership. There are so...

The eyespot would be confusing to predators who might miss their target as they attack the wrong eye. It's really a common camo pattern. Killies will breed true to location, and will Cichlids isolated in small streams. A lot of smaller streams are cut off by ridges, mountains, etc. They can be...

It looks like it could well be taeniatus, and a male. With that quick a clip, the other fish and the state of that guy, there isn't much to go on. The customer may be right. He isn't going to survive long in there.

This is a fun tetra taken in one of my quarantine tanks. It's entered the hobby as Hyphessobrycon sp Red Cherry, or Cherry Red. It's a small, undescribed species from the Amazon region. There are lot of red tetras, but the specific red of this one is very nice, and the yellow females are...

You don't find these noisy? I have two of those in reserve in case something breaks, as the WW 2 fighter plane sound gets to me. It may be the one you bought is higher quality though. My two are really loud. They kick air, but nothing I have tried quiets them. In my old house, I had them in my...

Almost all lower end rainbows are hybrids. When they first hit North America, they were sold as Australian rainbowfish and the farms bred them as such. It was a long time before they began dealing with the fact there's more than one species, and by then, they had a pile of mutts in the trade...

Am I the only one who thinks practicing the de-stinkification of elk skulls in peroxide makes you possibly weirder than a fan of druidic sacrifice opera tunes? Face it, we're all a bit weird here! Lankum is hard to take, as it is very depressing and very traditional murder ballad stuff. But...

Great news @Back in the fold . As for shelter dogs, we actually get 18 wheelers full of dogs coming up here from Texas. I'm kind of skeptical because the dogs seem to be all about the same age, and all about the same breeds. I smell a puppy mill system posing as a shelter, but I could be wrong...

I consider mine to be part of the room heating system. I use a very short length of reinforced tubing to go directly into hard pvc pipe, with the air outlets drilled into it. The reinforced tubing does get stained brown from heat, but a lot is dissipated as the pvc pipe runs for about 60 feet in...

It's normal behaviour. Odds are you have two males. The usual suggestion is to remove one - hard if you only have one tank. But left in there, the second male will die. They are territorial animals, and there isn't enough space for them to share.

15 years ago when I started my boesemani group, I paid $50 for a mop of eggs. It was a special price - the guy usually charged $100. Good rainbows, not hybridized, are very expensive fish. You can get hybrids fairly cheaply, and turnip coloured boesemani are cheap. The praecox and lacustris I...