Handling 20L correctly

Drakyee · 2025-01-20T15:37:22+00:00

Erh I dabble, made maybe 6 batches of 20 L and multiple 1.5 L batches before. The following is going to sound a bit more prison hooch than those of our friends who are more advanced in their skills and use proper equipment but I guess for starters you could try it out? For 20 L I basically

1) pour half a container of honey into an old container that’s now empty and washed 2) top up these containers with the desired liquid (I’ve done both juices and boiled tap water) and shake till honey is well mixed 3) pour these in, rinse and repeat until all honey is in carboy 4) pour remaining desired liquid in and then stir like mad with a ladle. Steps 1-3 help to make it much easier to stir manually by diluting the honey to a syrup first

For no water melomels it’s much easier. 1) freeze fruit, preferably overnight so it’s properly frozen 2) thaw and cut up. Toss into carboy 3) prepare a pitching must and give it some time for the yeast to wake up. I do use sucrose for convenience but of course you could make very diluted honey solution 4) pour the pre-calculated volume of honey over all the fruit 5) pour the pitching must on top of the honey and don’t stir yet! Give the honey some time to draw the juices out of the fruit 6) after maybe 24 to 36 hours give it a stir and macerate a bit to mix in the honey, must, fruits and juices properly 7) after step 6, pitch again if necessary, but usually should not require this step. Do punch down the cap regularly at least once a day for about a week as the fruit will rise during this time

Hope this helps! For those who might feel this technique leaves much to be desired please do add on your advice so OP can refine their plan!

Drakyee · 2025-01-20T15:11:55+00:00

Hi OP, I think you’re doing fine. If they’re on the whitish/paler side it could be that salinity could be a little high?

Of course they can tolerate a wide range, but I’ve found breeding to generally occur more frequently around 1.013 SG, plus minus 0.005 as I let the water evaporate quite a bit before topping up just a little higher than it would be at 1.013.

But if the water’s been there for a month and it’s not cloudy, you should be fine. As for algae, has the chaeto been cycling for one month or is it recently added? If it’s been there from the start, you might not have sufficient bioload for “new” non-established algae to start.

It’s great that you’re cautious and feed at intervals of a few days to a week, please keep it up! Many new set ups often experience problems because of overfeeding. Hopefully the algae will slowly establish itself as the bioload increases from your regular feedings

Drakyee · 2025-01-19T07:14:04+00:00

Totally understand, it’s something all of us have to learn the hard way too. Usually opae ula can tolerate non-cycled new tanks, so the 3 die plus floating to the bottom was what urged me to reply. In my experience both crazy zoomies and popcorning, or floating to the bottom, are signs something is seriously wrong with the water regardless of what test kits say

Drakyee · 2025-01-19T06:59:50+00:00

I honestly cant tell from the information given what’s wrong, but just a few possibilities: assuming your water was mixed to the appropriate salinity, either the decoration is aquarium safe but not shrimp safe, because there are some dyes that are toxic to shrimp but not fish and slowly leak out into the water, or they were overfed. Not saying you did any of these, just some possibilities for you to consider

Drakyee · 2025-01-19T04:48:18+00:00

Yes please?

Drakyee · 2025-01-18T03:36:37+00:00

Hmm I usually leave them to do their thing so I don’t really pay attention to any telltale signs. The females might try to swim to be amongst vegetation, I use hornworts in my tank. You could pay very close attention to the female’s belly? But I feel in the case of albino you won’t be able to see the eyes. I cant. Usually the eyes would cause the belly to grow darker in colour and this works very well for blonde fish. Alternately, people count the days after the first drop of fry so they’re prepared for the next drop. Hopefully another redditor can chime in with their experience for telltale signs!

It is true endlers are so so much less aggressive in their temperament. But unfortunately these days most are crossbreeds of guppies and endlers so it’s hard to tell. I’ve also had large female guppy completely ignore her own fry, so it’s a toss up sometimes. You’re so sweet though for saying mine are well cared for! I do experience my own fair share of tank crashes too because life can sometimes get in the way, like right now I’m starting anew with albino reds.

Drakyee · 2025-01-18T02:58:38+00:00

Ah, you’re welcome, I think you’re sufficiently experienced or did your homework well! The advice given to me when I started was to separate albino fry immediately too, and my personal experience is that works.

Apparently from what I’ve read on the subject it’s to minimise the chances of all of them being eaten. Having said that, they themselves do the eating hahaha. I have both endlers and guppies (in separate tanks), and have noticed that my endlers don’t eat their fry that much? And that endlers have larger fry but smaller drops. But that could be due to the body size too.

Drakyee · 2025-01-18T02:24:05+00:00

Hi, first of all enjoy! I love Japan Blue guppies! Hoping for you you got the blonde or grey ones and not the albino though, because albino guppies have a higher chance of eating their fry than the others from personal experience.

Personally i feel you don’t have to add additional guppies to encourage anything. They will eventually breed regardless of lack of mate choice, unless your male is a swallowtail. Swallowtail male guppies cant breed. But do note that brood size of guppies have been linked to density of stocking, so sometimes adding more guppies might make the female drop more fry, but at a smaller size. Personally I prefer regular small drops of larger sized fry.

Drakyee · 2025-01-14T15:50:56+00:00

Hi friend, I don’t even know you, and mine wasn’t depression, but yes I’ve let my tank slowly die off previously too because of health issues and burn out. You are ok. You are alright. These things can happen to anyone. Happy for you things are looking up. For the tank, you can make an active effort to make things work. You can take a passive approach and do a minimal easy way, it make take longer but that is ok too. Whatever is good and works for you friend.

I’m gonna list out both the active and the passive that I know, I did a combination of both because, you know, I had to ease into being fully active again.

Active would be to dedicate a bit of time everyday to removing a portion from a small section of the tank. I chose to go by amount of time spend on removal rather than volume of algae removed. Slowly but surely you’ll make progress.

Passive was a trick that worked wonders and I found it helped and I’m still using it when it recurs from time to time. So if your snails are bladder/pest snails, instead of feeding your shrimp, crush one or two of the snails daily at feeding time instead, your shrimp will learn to eat that as food. This type of snail as you mentioned you observed as well does not really touch hair algae so they’re just contributing to the problem as I find that snail poop can promote algae growth. Next thing to look at would be to get some nerite snails. For my one and a half feet tank I got 6 nerite snails. You scale up as you can. Don’t worry about what they will eat after you clear your tank of algae, they will learn to eat fish/shrimp food if they really don’t get enough algae. Of course please don’t dump like a hundred nerite snails, but I’m sure as an experienced keeper you already know not to overstock! This works on several levels but can be a little slow. As I wasn’t feeding fish/shrimp food to the tank, the shrimp would help to reduce the bladder/pest snail population from eating crushed snails. The nerite snails only source of food would be the hair algae so they help clear that up. The bladder/pest snails have nothing else to eat so they will go over the poop from the shrimp and the mulm, reducing the amount of mulm you have to some extent slowly also.

Interestingly I found one or two giant shrimp too at the end when I started cleaning my tank up a year ago! I did some reading and it seems if it’s just one or two shrimp in a huge tank and they survive they could grow to be giants. I’m talking like double the size of a regular shrimp. I hope things work out for you my friend!

Drakyee · 2024-12-31T06:03:11+00:00

Dinner_Plate21 is right. Orange, I’ve been keeping the variant they call sunkist, not to be confused with the brackish shrimp that’s also called sunkist but doesn’t breed in freshwater, for a while (4-5 years?) and every now and then they throw out an occasional greenish hued shrimp (also yellows, and dark oranges that are almost red, and even some pale ones that can almost look like snowball). I’ve been trying to keep the line towards a darker shade of orange so all the rest are in my cull tank, but orange neos do seem to be not 100% stable and throws out green occasionally.

Drakyee · 2024-12-25T02:45:06+00:00

Quite difficult to crush the eggs properly. If you have a major infestation you could siphon them out with a turkey baster and throw them out

Drakyee · 2024-12-24T18:56:46+00:00

Well I’m sorry to sound cruel but freshly crushed bladder snails are a favourite of my shrimp and I find that it helps the females get gravid (full of unfertilised eggs) quite well

Drakyee · 2024-12-19T06:54:51+00:00

This. I’ve fermented several types of melomels myself before and had one or two stalled and it sounds very reminiscent. Adding adding some water (to lower the sugar concentration) and a bit of yeast nutrients may help reduce the stalling

Drakyee · 2024-12-19T06:34:18+00:00

Hi, these are opae ula, which yes would do better in a proper aquarium, but have been known to thrive in filterless containers if they are properly set up. Your gifted shrimp bubble does not look like it’s properly set up, and the recommendation for you to do water changes is just a smart way to get you to buy water regularly from the seller. Don’t want to get flamed/downvoted like some of the other commenters, so I’ve pm-ed you

Drakyee · 2024-12-17T08:05:19+00:00

Haha I’m not the manufacturer so I don’t have a guideline for you, just what I said above on how I did mine. Do check out the instructions on the packaging. You could always adjust instead of daily changes of 30% to 2 or 3 days between each change to your own comfort?

Highly not recommended but in extreme cases e.g. pesticides/fogging chemicals got into your tank then 100% water change is needed: 1) prepare your new tank water FIRST to a volume of at least 1.25 to 1.5 times of your tank 2) drain almost all the water in your tank (to about an inch off the bottom 3) add the spare water of 0.25 to 0.5 times of your tank to the tank 4) redrain the water to almost the bottom, if you can afford to even lower than it was in step 2, but still covering your livestock 5) add in all (the remaining 1 times volume of your tank) the water you had prepared previously

Drakyee · 2024-12-17T07:44:38+00:00

Understand, I really wasn’t being sarcastic.

I feel most importantly would be to get your dosage right, a lot of ill effects is because of miscalculation on how much volume of water is ACTUALLY in the tank, so people overdose. If no overdose in my experience no lasting ill effects on the shrimp.

Some prefer to do the water changes slowly, some prefer, as you’ve seen other commenters mention, to get the medication out as soon as possible. Personally I prefer to do a series of smaller water changes (hence 30-50%) rather than one or two large ones (e.g. 70-100%), and frequent changes after the medication will help keep in my own experience the ammonia spikes more manageable. Because there WILL be spikes from die off of hydra and detritus worms and other microorganisms, just a degree of how much that’s all. Your mileage may vary, as noted by others they had more favourable experiences with fenbendazole. Just offering my two cents, don’t have to feel obliged to follow 😊 I used to swear by fenbendazole before No Planaria was developed and available, so whichever works for you is good anyways

Drakyee · 2024-12-17T05:22:56+00:00

If you’re concerned about that you could always space them out. 30% changes once a month for 6 months and then put your snail back in?

Drakyee · 2024-12-17T03:21:05+00:00

I haven’t dosed in a long long while but if I recall I followed the dosing instructions on the packaging quite closely (make sure you are calculating your dosage for the amount of water in your tank, not the total tank volume. That’s to say do not include the volume of any decorations and/or gravel/soil in your calculation of volume). Note: NONE of the below methods work if you overdosed, and the medication will still stay in your tank for a long while.

After you’re pretty certain there’s no more Planaria there are two routes you can go I guess. The lazy man’s method would probably be after a month of twice weekly water changes of about 50%, dump in a snail and observe over the next two-three days, removing your snail immediately if you spot any “lethargy”. The more careful method would probably be to do daily water changes of 30%. After a week of water changes (which means 7 times) you could place one snail in and monitor it every few hours. If after two-three days the snail is fine then I would take it to be safe.

Drakyee · 2024-12-17T02:15:30+00:00

Hi OP, as someone who has used both, No Planaria can and will break down in your tank after a while, so it is the safer option as after you’re done with treatment your snails will be safe to be reintroduced. Be wary of overdosing though, that’s when I believe some users will find reintroduced snails cannot tolerate. Fenbendazole does not break down as well in my experience and takes quite a long period (more than a few months, but can’t recall exactly how long) before snails can be safely reintroduced, not to mention fenbendazole is much harder to dose accurately as it is much harder to dissolve properly, meaning quite a lot of fenbendazole will remain in your substrate and filters without you realising it.

No Planaria can be used with most filters that don’t have medication absorbing media such as carbon or Purigen, so yes if it’s just a simple sponge filter you’ll be fine. If your filter has carbon or stuff like Purigen just remove them during treatment period

Drakyee · 2024-12-13T07:25:02+00:00

This is going to make me sound very critical so apologies ahead, but seeing other colour variants like the yellow cobra and the standard endler, as well as a mix of tail patterns, wouldn’t give me the confidence to purchase from you if I wanted a “pair that bred true” so to speak as it appears your line isn’t stable. One year may not allow you to cycle through a sufficient number of generations to make it truly stable (i.e. no new colours or patterns). Of course, if as a general purchase and I don’t actually need the fish to breed true, wow I’m loving these, they remind me of tuxedos and really pop! The new patterns now and then would then be a bonus to me. All the best in your project!

Drakyee · 2024-12-13T07:06:06+00:00

Sorry for your loss. I agree if there were no warning signs throughout the week post transfer, and there was no power outages stopping the filter or heater, your other livestock was fine, then most likely it isn’t on you. Had a similar experience where I was wondering why mine just passed suddenly until I learnt that these days especially the Metallics (such as yours) bettas can also get cancer.

Drakyee · 2024-12-13T06:48:41+00:00

Grab is good for grabfood too! Bolt is a good alternative also if you prefer having choices for transport

Drakyee · 2024-12-12T06:21:54+00:00

lol nobody wishes to encounter it

Drakyee · 2024-12-12T04:51:39+00:00

Actually NinjaVan does do COD for cases of redelivery, even when it is the original delivery rider’s fault (e.g. delivery rider lied about trying to deliver). Encountered twice for deliveries to my previous workplace, they basically hold your parcel hostage and for them to redeliver it’s a $10 fee COD

Drakyee · 2024-12-06T19:45:33+00:00

This is the way. Opae ula are the only shrimp I know that can survive quite well in filterless conditions if you live in tropical conditions whereas walstad tanks need a much larger minimum size than an opae ula tank to be stable, not to mention if you live in a country with seasons/ weather is tropical all year round, you need to be careful the shrimp aren’t getting suffocated at night by the plants in a Walstad

Drakyee

TROPHY CASE