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Chymie, you have the right ammonia for a cycle, or a hundred cycles. I have that same bottle and have cycled all 26 of my tanks. The neck part that narrows down at the top is almost empty now but the wide part of the bottle is still full. I have a link in my signature area to a method many of us...

It sounds all wrong neilevo. The nitrites will pop up long before nitrates and it is very hard to have nitrates go off scale at all. That scale goes to 160 on my card. How much ammonia did you add and how far has it dropped so far?

Snails can be irritating and the common snails like in your picture can reproduce rather too well. They do clean up a bit of algae and do not harm the fish but I do my best to control their numbers. If I don't they reproduce to where it gets hard to see past them to view the fish.

Be certain that any gravel that you buy in a fish shop is not marked for use in a salt water tank. That kind will contain tons of shell which will drive your pH through the roof. I generally buy a coarse sand from myb local home improvement center. It takes a bit of extra washing to get it...

The tank is already stocked so no point to discussing it like it was in the future. If you can return any of your fish, do so. It will make the fish-in cycle that much easier. The tiny bit of carbon in a typical filter cartridge is good for maybe one or two days so ignore it. The function for...

It is not worth the risk housing more than a single male Betta splendens or a colony of females in a single tank. It is obvious that there must be some size that would be so big the fish would live like they do in the wild but 70 gallons is not all that big. For the rarer wild type bettas like...

Endlers will do fine in small numbers. I started my present breeding colony of them with just 2 pairs. Today it looks like this at feeding time. This guy shares their 45 gallon tank.

The female in your last picture is well along but could still be a week away from a drop. She is starting to square off. The others may be carrying but it is not obvious.

Sale price is purely a local variable. If you are the only person with them in the area and the LFS thinks they will sell well, you might get $1 each from that LFS. If you sell them directly to people, you might well get 5 times that for each one. The problem with direct sales is finding that...

The speed of growth is mainly influenced by how often and how much they are fed and by the water quality. A recent lecture I attended was given by a commercial fish breeder. He feeds floating pellets so that the fry can nibble on them until they are gone, which means he doesn't need to worry too...

Well put nmonks. The case of water with low minerals or otherwise known to be quite soft can be a real problem for pet shop mollies. One way to add minerals is salt, but it would not be the best way with your other occupants. If you have soft water and snails, both the mollies and the snails...

She is a bit thin but that is to be expected right after a drop. When you are accustomed to seeing her with a bulging belly, she definitely will seem funny looking but she doesn't really look that bad. Have you tried any food with a bit of garlic in it? It promotes eating by fish that are not...

No fish should be added to a new tank. Chemistry will always test good before there is any fish load, so that part is meaningless with an uncycled tank that has no fish. We try to promote a fishless cycle here on TFF. It allows you to get the filter ready for fish without the need to do frequent...

Welcome to our forum Tabitha. I am afraid that you have been the victim of typical pet shop thinking. You now have a single small fish in your tank and if you do enough water changes it will cycle with him in it. Pet shop folks simply do not "believe in" the methods we use here. If you were to...

You are making the first step. Your ammonia dropping to 2 ppm and the nitrite rising to about 0.25 ppm indicates some minor progress but is not near the end of a cycle. You will get to the point that your ammonia addition will be gone by 12 hours in and at that time your nitrite will probably be...

Let me try this Jenni. You have a tank, heater, filter, lighting, fish food, testing kit, dechlorinator, substrate. You also have cycling supplies. After that everything is optional, not required. I am guessing that you plan everything that you do, much as I do, but it is really not that...

I have kept harlequin rasboras, not tetras, in my local tap water. That means they saw water with a pH of 7.8, a very high mineral content of around 225 ppm of TDS and very hard water with both the GH and KH values around 12 degrees. I run a tank temperature of about 24C so even that parameter...

Dead leaves will add to the biological load in your tank. That means that the dead plant looks just like more fish to your filter. If you remove any dead plants you can remove that source of nitrogen.

I would stuff more plants than that into a fairly small tank. First off you need to recognize that a plant, in the mind of the seller, may only be a bit of root with 1 or 2 leaves on it. Now just imagine 75 individual leaves spread around your tank. I bet that mental picture looks a bit sparse...

Squeezing a sponge will not harm the bacteria. Bacteria are tiny and you can't possibly squeeze hard enough to affect them. Ice cubes seldom contain much water and water up to about 10% of the total can be changed with no dechlorinator at all, if you are willing to risk it. Lots of people do...

Whenever I have a chemical problem in a tank, the first thing I do is drain the tank so far that the fish have trouble staying upright in the remaining puddles on the tank bottom. I then refill with temperature matched dechlorinated water. The fish never seem to mind in the least. They always...

Just hover the gravel vac a fraction of an inch above the surface of the sand. Rather than plunge it into the sand the way you did with gravel, you will just use it to move the waste from the sand while keeping it far enough above the sand to prevent picking up much of it. I lose a tiny bit of...

The mollies would be far better off at around 22C. Any recently set up tank probably needs plenty of water changes. Use cooler water for that and your fish will thank you.

Water changes, which you will be doing lots of, are usually done with the fish in the tank. Use your mixing faucet to match temperatures and be sure to use a dechlorinator, often labeled as a water conditioner before you add each bucket of water to the tank. The way I get a good temperature...

Well today I went into my fish room to feed and saw eggs all over the Aphyosemion tank's glass. I got all excited until it dawned on me that the little female in that tank could never lay the hundreds of eggs that I saw stuck to the glass. Then I remembered that the trio of albino cories in that...

You could try to fit one of those twisty fluorescent tubes into your hood. It gives you far better light but some hoods are a bit tight to easily fit one into them.

It seldom takes more than a few hours for a molly to finish a drop.

Welcome to the forum 1975durban. Those fish will be dropping fry within the next day or two.

Always check the bucket when you have fry. I picked up 2 Ataeniobius toweri, blue tailed goodeid, fry that way when I was half draining their tank to make a new water mix of RO and tap for some new to me killies. I had already caught most of the adults and other fry because they were to spend...

Endlers are about the most peaceful fish in any of my tanks. I seriously doubt they are causing any damage.

He may be trying to say that it is the second generation since they came to the US. The seller is located in California.

Full mature color in a guppy often takes well over 4 months although they will have plenty of color well before that.

I should probably go one more step. There are over 20 species that are called mollies as a common name. It is the P. latipinna, P. velifera and P. sphenops that adapt readily to salt water, not all "mollies" can do that. Pet shop mollies are mostly a mix of sphenops with the latipinna or...

At 22C a betta would definitely be at a big disadvantage. I don't think I would try that combination in your place.

A betta in decent enough water conditions will heal completely in just a couple of weeks. If your fish is not recovering quickly, it is time to explore further problems.

What is the chemical condition of your tank rubbly? I am not really a betta specialist as such but I am well versed in tank cycling problems. I am a bit concerned that you are ignoring the need to properly cycle a new tank, at least as I read it. I really don't care how many sites support your...

You can expect that there is not going to be any reliable way to sex molly fry at less than 2 to 3 months old, even if you have ideal growth conditions. If your setting is less than ideal, expect an even longer time to sex the fry.

No need to move the thread. I find that betta people simply disregard where a thread is located and express their opinions. On the other hand you have a thread questioning bubbles in a community tank. In this case it is more likely to be the bettas than your mollies. The mollies will simply...

It is not at all too complicated, at least to me. A nice meaty addition to a feeding regime along with a more or less vegetarian feeding is a good way to mix things up. Your fish will prosper beyond what about any single food enthusiast will ever expect.

Sorry Fisgh48 but I got that requirement right from an expert at an ALA convention presentation on the group we call goodeids. I am not ready to try to challenge him on what he said about fish dietary preferences but have found his classifications quite reliable. Since his other material has...