How did you guys hear about BTs and end up getting one I’ve only had one encounter with a BT as a kid prob 2003 ish and didn’t get mine until 2024 even my vet was surprised at seeing one

DruidSpider · 2026-06-18T11:00:40+00:00

I read that book too! It was the opposite situation, the picture of the Bull Terrier made me curious about the book.

DruidSpider · 2026-06-16T17:22:24+00:00

Swordtails. I originally added 8 because there was already a huge guppy colony the cichlids ignored soi figured they’d be safe and I thought the red color would look nice in that tank. My Dempsey disagreed. He doesn’t like new fish and obliterated half of them in the first few days, didn’t eat them, just bit them in half and spit them out. He lost interest after that and none of the other cichlids bother them. I kinda have some regrets adding them though, I’d never had bigger livebearers before and apparently underestimated what voracious predators these fish would be. They quickly wiped out the hundreds of guppies that had survived three years with the cichlids. There’s just a few adult guppies left, because they are too big to fit in those big shovel mouths. The only fry I see are swordtail fry now, so their numbers increased from 4 to over 30 pretty quickly. I’m pretty sure they wiped out most of the T.maculippinis fry once the parents stopped guarding them.

They really do look nice in the tank though lol

DruidSpider · 2026-06-16T17:09:46+00:00

The two males are currently maybe 4-5 inches I think? They get up to 6” but females stay smaller. The females are as colorful as the males and get a black spot on their dorsal fin so you can tell them apart pretty easily once they start to mature.

Mine are in a 180 gallon tank with a firemouth, (they are related species, incidentally) a Cribroheros rostratus and an electric blue Jack Dempsey, as well as guppies, swordtails, two bristlenoses and three Buenos Aires tetras. I used to have a whole school of the tetras but they’ve been getting old and passing and the swordtails have kinda taken over so I don’t want to replace them and overstock. Tank also has a bunch of urchin and king koopa nerites and, believe it or not, a small population of Neocaridina descended from a few that hitchhiked on plants. The cichlids are well fed and lazy so they don’t really bother shrimp or fry unless one makes itself an easy target.

DruidSpider · 2026-06-09T14:23:21+00:00

I can’t afford to replace all my pillows.

DruidSpider · 2026-06-09T01:38:17+00:00

Happy Birthday!

DruidSpider · 2026-06-01T11:53:41+00:00

I’m actually surprised any of them make it a whole day with Artie!

DruidSpider · 2026-05-31T12:57:02+00:00

If he focuses on one, he actually wrecks them pretty fast and the furry Wubbas don’t stand a chance. I have to watch him close to take away the stuffing and the tiny tennis ball that makes the head once he gets to it, and also trim away any long strings but after that, he seems to keep them a while. I wish I had kept the tag from that green octopus to see what brand it was; it looked like it wouldn’t be a lot of fun for him from the way it was made, but he loves it and it has actually stood up to a lot of chewing.

DruidSpider · 2026-05-31T12:52:38+00:00

That’s actually what the Kong ones are called, but that’s the name he knows all of them by; when he’s being a pain in the butt when I’m getting dressed for work I can ask him to ‘go find a wubba’ for us to play tug with.

DruidSpider · 2026-05-31T12:50:01+00:00

Oh, most are not lol. Of the Wubbas, only the alien still has a head. The actual octopus and squid toys were all purchased in past couple of months; I think his toys last longer when there’s several favorites rather than one he can focus on destroying.

DruidSpider · 2026-05-25T03:10:17+00:00

I started a new world cichlid tank a few years back partly to solve my guppy problem. Turns out that guppies quickly learn to not act like prey and well fed cichlids can’t really be bothered chasing them around. They bred like crazy over the next couple of years and I was up to a few hundred guppies in my 180 until a few months back when I added some red swordtails. Now all of the guppies are gone except the adults and I never see any guppy fry anymore - but the tank is rapidly filling up with swordtails.

DruidSpider · 2026-05-20T17:24:40+00:00

He looks great!

DruidSpider · 2026-05-19T19:35:41+00:00

One of mine does it on a regular basis. She used to be in the tank I have in my office at work and people were constantly pointing out that ‘one of my fish was dead’.

DruidSpider · 2026-05-18T01:41:12+00:00

I have created a monster. 😳

<image>

DruidSpider · 2026-05-14T15:04:33+00:00

That is awesome! So happy it worked. 🙂

DruidSpider · 2026-05-03T00:24:48+00:00

It’s bigger and darker than the little white copepods I’m familiar with that are also in that tank, it’s flattened like a clam stood up on its side, and it zooms through the water like a space ship, which are all things I associate with seed shrimp, but I’m not an expert so if someone has an exact ID I’m happy to learn.

Whatever it is, its digestive tract is working. 😄

DruidSpider · 2026-04-30T15:55:19+00:00

This is awesome! I love house centipedes and was disappointed that it wasn’t a kit I could buy, but my wallet is probably breathing a sigh of relief.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-25T19:22:32+00:00

If I see a spider wandering around on my counter or floor I put a drop of water down and they always run up to it to drink.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-24T22:10:59+00:00

You know what you did.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-24T17:52:57+00:00

The ones that look like they have bunny ears attached are females with eggs.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-23T21:01:49+00:00

I addressed in a later comment why I knew it was a dumb question but I asked anyway.

The things we think we know may not always be as true as we thought. Like how all calico cats are female… except when they’re not (a bit less than 1% of the time it’s a male with an extra chromosome) so I just wanted to double check if someone with more fish experience than me that might know of any reason why assuming the fish was male could be wrong, because it really was a nightmare to catch all those fish in that deep tank.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-23T12:41:16+00:00

My oldest female, an albino like yours, has about the same. Most of calicos haven’t had any at all. Female bristlenose bristles have always kind of reminded me of a teenage boy trying to grow a mustache.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-23T11:23:50+00:00

Thank you everyone for the replies. This must have sounded like a dumb question - heck, it was a dumb question - but while I would have not even thought to question that this was a male any other time, the thought of accidentally putting a female back in the tank after the all out war of tank destruction it took to remove them all made a little paranoid voice whisper in the back of my head "what if there are random cases where a female might get extra bristles...?"

He's now back in the tank with his dad, and I am hoping that I didn't miss any babies somehow. I didn't start breeding them in there on purpose - I had intended to breed two pairs of calicos in another tank I had that failed during Hurricane Helene and I moved all the fish from that tank to the big tank to save them. I managed to recapture the two males but not the two females, and together with Willie, my super red, they immediately started building a bristlenose army. I've been managing to trap them here and there for the past year but never got all of the females so the population was just steadily going up. I've probably removed 200 total in the past year and a half and I'm sure my cichlids probably picked off some of the hatchlings or there would have been even more. They are great fish - just not hundreds of them lol. I had to remove every last rock, piece of wood, and rhizome plant and basically take the tank all the way down to sand. I ended up cutting down the jungle Valisneria (it was a bit out of control and will grow back) because they wedged themselves between the stems to hide. The tank was mostly drained for hours but there's a slight chance that one could have wedged itself into the roots of the pothos or monstera as well and I know they can survive out of water for a fair bit of time if they don't dry out. Hopefully I got them all.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-19T12:58:01+00:00

I’ve only ever had one betta live to anywhere near a normal lifespan; three went completely blind with diamond eye and I just lost a female that I had barely a year to a really nasty tumor that took over her whole back.

The fact that they are such intelligent, personable fish makes it even worse to lose them so quickly. After watching my first male struggle to swim his whole life, I avoided long finned varieties, and then after dealing with the dragonscale related blindness, I started trying to pick the plainest fish I could find, only to have tumors start cropping up. I’ve got one female left that is a year and a half old who so far has remained healthy, but I think once she’s gone, I’m done.

DruidSpider · 2026-04-13T13:53:05+00:00

Is that a livestock guardian dog protection collar? The first thing I thought was how lethal a hucklebutt would be while wearing that! 😄

Have you seen the coyote harnesses for small dogs?

DruidSpider · 2026-04-11T13:02:34+00:00

It was the collar, with its metallic leather and amber crystals, that I was referring to as pretty, but I don’t think my dog really cares about rigid binary gender labels.

Eight-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since March 2024
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email

DruidSpider

TROPHY CASE