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Others above have already answered the details here, but from an evolutionary stand point, sponges, corals, etc... derive from right in the evolutionary split-point between animals and fungus on the animal side -- so corals and sponges are kind of the closest remaining animal cousins to fungus...

Congrats! Guess you should have fertilized with human excrement (I kid, please don't do that.)

The little rapidly proliferating "pest" snails actually rarely eat living plants, and can sometimes even reduce total poop load if there is lots of it around. While many people claim they have seen pest snails like bladder snails, pond snails, and Malaysian Trumpet snails eat living plants I...

First: are you talking freshwater or saltwater (...or brackish)? There are vastly different answers for each. I am only familiar with freshwater but in freshwater while larger snails can be interesting pets and there are more options that won't get out of control, they do less "heavy lifting"...

Wowwwwww. I mean I love me some planted tanks (and am probably too poor and not competent enough to run a proper marine tank), but you are right, the "everything is alive, moving, and of different colors and textures" really is an amazing effect that one just can't get in a planted tank.

Hornwort under water hyacinth is the biggest plant-based nutrient sink I can think of. Of course depending on where you want your sump and if it is also for display or not you could make a decorative display one with emergent plants. If you go that route let me recommend Cana, yellow iris, and...

That is a neat looking concept tank ! ... glad you decided not to fertilize it the traditional way :crazy:

^ I agree with Colin. Reduce the amount of CO2 you are putting in there, and add in a little calcium carbonate, that should bring the pH up a little and give you some buffering capacity. There is a bunch of ways you can do that: immediate adjustment would be various powdered thing and pills...

Oh that is interesting. I'll have to look more into that. Please et me know if you have any leads in these regards.

I am noting people in this thread are concerned about shrimp rock-piles and the like shifting and crushing shrimp -- a reasonable concern. To fix this you can treat the rock piles (with or without shrimp tubes and shrimp geometries) the way marine aquarists treat live rock and cement them...

The shrimp probably need a new tank, a 5 g will do and won't break the bank and can be found everywhere or ordered overnight from your favorite supplier. If, however, you want to try and keep them in the tank they are in currently (no promises this will work) they are going to need a spacious...

The temperature range is right, but isn't the water hardness between the Sulawesi snails and pretty much everything else especially the black ghost mismatched? The snails need hard basic water and the Black ghost knife fish are usually in soft acidic water. Besides the snails, everything you...

No problem, glad I could help. Interesting idea. I have never kept fish that large. I would almost be worried that the water meal might be so small that only tilapia fry would be interested in it. I certainly can't confirm one way or another, but I think people use full-on duckweed to feed...

Scientific Name for the genus is Wolffia which contains the duckweeds and the water meals -- I don't think there is a rigorous or scientific cuttoff point where the given species size causes it to transition from duckweed into water meal, but at some point it gets so small that it really doesn't...

Oh right, water meal is also interesting, I can just never get it established because everything in any tank I put it in seems to enjoy eating it too much. Its like the duckweed you don't have to worry about cleaning up or keeping under control.

"Other" -- my two favorites are not on there: Water Hyacinth and certain Utricularia species. Water Hyacinth = Water Lettice + pretty fragrant blooms. Water Lettice is nice and all, but if you can get pretty much the same deal + pretty fragrant blooms I find it hard to not want the "free...

This thread is old and dead, but for what it is worth that is absolutely not algae, corraline or otherwise. That appears to be a freshwater slime mold. The proof would be if it moves -- extremely slowly. Take a picture of it a few days apart and see if its edges have retreated like and inch or...

Has anyone tried to grow a Red Beard Sponge (Clathria prolifera) in their brackish tank? They are estuarine sponges that have been recorded living down to 15 ppt = 1.011 specific gravity in the wild (though admittedly that is pushing things pretty hard). One does see them exposed in salt-marshes...

I know Caridinia species are crossed frequently to produce many of the interesting dwarf shrimp species that are for sale. But has anyone yet managed to cross Amanos (Caridina multidentata) with other Caridinia? Some example possibilities being: -Bee Shrimp (Caridina cf. cantonensis) -Tiger...

What type of puffer? Was it one of those pea puffers? What was going wrong, aggression or just inability to thrive?

That's sad, those sound interesting. ... of course maintaining a tank with giant live bears also sounds kind of hard and high-maintenance.

They have to get big. I had a whole school of sword tails in a 75 gallon that was self-reproducing and self maintaining. But only that one velvet sword, which was one of the ones I actually bought instead of had spontaneously breed in-tank, grew to some fantastical size where he decided...

Wow, that is pretty impressive. I don't know what their limits are, but they are some serious survival bivalves, and I have always been impressed with what they shrug off. The Amano Shrimp are great. My only disappointment with them is that they don't long-term maintain their population in a...

Not a fish, or even a creature, but I have regretted a duckweed purchase before. In some of my "closed ecosystem"(ish) setups where they are appropriately being controlled via being eaten it works out well. But I have bought it and put it into tanks where that was not properly balanced and it...

Beautiful! It looks so lush and cozy.

I agree with WhistlingBadger, this is a perfectly interesting and fun conceptual planning thread I see no reason to discourage this discussion. I understand many people like the zen-like release that can be found in tank maintenance, but that does not change the fact that this is a interesting...

Sadly I actually know very little about keeping the plants you just listed so I can't fully comment. I think those are all tropical, but one of the secrets of most tropical plants is that as long as they can be kept from getting within a few degrees of freezing they can usually tolerate...

On its own, no it shouldn't. But, if there is a lot of protein and/or fats in the water column they can mix with the salts to form surfactant-like solution which can foam in the presence of a lot of aeration (and you do have a lot of aeration). So that might be what happened IMHO. You may...

Conceptually: yes you can, but even when you get to the level of small fish you need a pretty big and complex tank. There are small closed "ecospheres" you can buy but they don't get beyond dwarf shrimp. The ecosystem is a pyramid and so as the "height" of said pyramid goes up, the "volume"...

I am not sure you can have too much aeration, but I agree with the others both 1. if the bubbles are staying on top that is a sign that there might be something in the water and 2. the HOB is probably all the airation you need, your bubbler is just gravy. Common candidates for things in the...

If you wants some fun "riparium" plants to grow up out of the "back" (assuming you have a back and it isn't a middle-of-the-room thing) I recommend: 1. yellow water iris 2. cattails 3. cardinal flower They are all cold water plants and will happily grow right up through the lily pads into the...

One ... admittedly very controversial ... thing I would recommend you to consider are amphipods, a.k.a. Scuds. Snails may be helpful too, but Scuds will do an unbelievable amount of processing and cleaning that neither snails nor corys will do. Where Scuds are controversial is twofold: 1. they...

Assassin snails are considered shrimp safe. If you really dig people very occasionally have a video of a starving assassin snail attacking a geriatric or sick shrimp. So it does happen, but it is rare enough that no one I know of has ever had trouble having both shrimp and assassin snail...

I would go with assassin snails and wait. Both the regular snails and the assassin snails will continue to breed but over time both of their numbers should become much lower then where you are now. Also assassin snails look interesting and pretty (IMHO). The only other option with your shrimp...

Parrot cichlids have very low fertility but not *NO* fertility. Let them take care of the eggs and see what happens. A neat thing about hybrid creatures: most of them have some fertility however low. Each generation of offspring from two hybrids crossing is more likely to produce stable and...

Neat! I love the picture with the proud parents and their little swarm of fry.

For hair algae usually the preferred eaters are florida flag fish, mollies, and amphipods. With the exception of the amphipods you may need to significantly reduce feeding to get the others to eat hair algae; they need to be hungry enough to feel like eating it. If you are talking about beard...

You could tip your entire snail bowl contents into like a new 38L and buy a single pea puffer for it turning it into your new pea-puffer carnage tank. *EDIT* : as scavengers you could try to out compete them by introducing some shrimp into the tank. They won't go away completely but if you...

If the glass is really cloudy and vinegar + scrubbing doesn't really clean it up you may have full on "hazing," which is a small physical damage/roughing of the surface that can't be fixed with things as simple as vinegar. The only good fix for hazing is giving it a good polish with like cerium...

That is a beautiful little tank, congrats.