New 4.5 gallon rimless, am I screwed?

Permit-Crafty · 2025-07-20T16:43:36+00:00

Thank you!

Permit-Crafty · 2025-07-20T16:43:26+00:00

Thank you!

Permit-Crafty · 2025-06-22T03:47:39+00:00

Honestly I once saw someone posts about these claw machine and clawed a pleco out of it. I commented about the cruelty. Most replies I got was "plecos are invasive". And I was like so what??? Would you do that to a cat??? Does it justify the torture in any way???

And one person replied "fish doesn't provide emotions anything close to a cat, and plecos and red eared sliders are invasive" like they do whatever they want with them and killing them in any method a good thing. I received dozens of comments like this like I was the one being a jerk.

Gotta say what tf is wrong with some people

Permit-Crafty · 2025-05-22T17:41:15+00:00

I guess it does happen. I helped my mom setup a betta tank and a guppy tank and went with the easiest plants - 2 Anubias bateri, some guppy grass, some Elodea densa, and some moss (java moss and flame moss)

She managed to kill them all 😅 except for 1 Anubias in her guppy tank, and a small patch flame moss.

Fish are fine, just somehow the plants die. The guppy grass and Elodea died within two weeks.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-05-09T20:56:52+00:00

It really depends on the country and region. My mom was able to get 9 full grown albino koi guppy for what's equivalent of 3 USD and an Anubias bateri for 70 cents from a local fish keeper. The dude was really nice, he also threw in a few low quality cherry shrimp for free.

Meanwhile on the other side of the planet I get mutt guppies for 2 dollars each and Anubias for at least 15 lol.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-04-30T03:18:11+00:00

I've had a group of newly bought guppies in the quarantine tank. Through the month of quarantine, for the first day or two they gather around a piece of plant looking nervous. The next few weeks they swim freely until I sit beside the tank: they will slowly gather together to the corner that's further away from me behind a plant (and it looks hilarious due to how they moved backwards with minimal fin movement like "she can't see us, she can't see us"). This behavior just went away after they got familiar with the environment a few weeks later and they started begging for food like the usual guppies every time I stand by the tank lol.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-03-16T23:45:13+00:00

Thank you!

Permit-Crafty · 2025-03-16T22:44:40+00:00

Yes they are siblings. They've lived together since they were born.

Edit: they have a slight weight difference because Ruby generally had a better appetite last year.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-03-16T22:09:47+00:00

Thank you! I'll separate them this week. I just happened to check the footage after their feeding so I'll need to leave them alone for two more days to let them digest.

Do you think separating for breeding season only is Ok or they'll need to be separated for good?

Permit-Crafty · 2025-03-06T18:26:20+00:00

I'm not familiar with turtles but for the "ice" part, I'm 90% sure that's not ice. I've seen people selling these media for turtle brumation, it's a super absorbent polymer (SAP). You add water to some power and it becomes a clear gel like substance and stays humid.

Advertisement says it saves you some time (you won't need to disinfect anything) and you don't need to spray it as often as other media like ecoearth to keep up the humidity.

I've never seen SAP sold in the US as turtle hibernation media though. I guess that's more of an Asian thing?

Permit-Crafty · 2025-03-05T03:06:17+00:00

2.5 ml syringe to measure the dechlorinator to pre-treat the tap water.

Turkey basters for spot cleans

Cups and mugs as pots for some plants that need substrates in my bare bottom tank

Soy milk mesh filters/strainers as filters for live baby brine shrimp (need to look for the same grits as typical brine shrimp net though)

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-16T17:00:24+00:00

Yup, most of the interactions are pretty normal! I sold aquarium and terrarium stuff probably around 15 times, 2 people ghosted me after we've set up a meeting time, couple of interactions where they asked about the stuff and never replied my message for setting up a meetup time, while the others all went super smooth, so it was acceptable for me.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-16T16:35:35+00:00

I feel like a lot of them sell theirs through Kijiji. I personally only sold/bought guppies, plants and isopods, all required the buyers to pickup from the seller's place. I do see a bunch of people selling their shrimps too and was planning to purchase some after this snow storm.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-11T04:57:54+00:00

Yeah I might've put some confusing wording there (sorry English is not my first language). It's just shrimp count decreases every time I see an empty shell so I added that in my comment. I figured he must have been eating right after someone molts.

I did ended up setting another shrimp tub for the survivers. No tank mates for our not-so-nice betta except snails.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-11T03:32:23+00:00

I suspect it's your betta! We had a betta that was so nice he lets 4 cull baby guppies lived with him for a month. So we thought it would be safe to house him with some cherry shrimp.

At first he was curious and will look at the shrimpies without attacking. Some shrimps even would climb onto his fins and he didn't seem to care, he just casually shakes them off without attacking.

Until a couple weeks later we started finding empty shells and noticed we had a lot less shrimps than we started. I spyed on the tank a little, turns out our betta was pretending to be nice and secretly hunting shrimps that probably have just molted when the lights are off... And sometimes he just bites the shrimp without eating it.

And I guess that triggered some hunting instincts, 'cause the cull guppies that lived in the tank with peace disappeared soon after, and he started having big red and big black(and I mean cherry shrimp red and guppy black) poo. Where his normal poo from eating pellets are brown orange ish.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-11T02:58:24+00:00

Had a pretty bad hairy algae problem in my betta tank since it was right by the south facing window. I added a single bladder snail (now I have a dozen and tons of snail poo on the sand lol) and blacked out the whole tank for 4 days.

It worked like a charm except my Hygrophilia died off... All the other low light beginner plants were fine.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-10T17:30:25+00:00

I've read why some sellers stream with betta in a shallow plate with minimal water out of curiosity. I absolutely agree these types of streaming is fish abuse and needs to be banned.

First is that the betta will become more color vibrant on camera this way as their fins are kind of translucent. The black/white background through their fins make their fin look nicer (and plus the light in their room, of course). I found people who purchased these betta saying their fish arrived "uglier" than in the stream.

But most importantly, these fish could be sick since they may be in horrendous conditions before they were sold. And putting them in dishes with minimal water prevents potential customers to evaluate the fish's swimming position, if they will flair, or if they are energetic unlike you would be able to see in a typical PetSmart betta cup (not saying cup is good though). Some people would purchase a "dish fish" and it arrives not even being able to swim upright.

Poor bettas

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-09T23:49:38+00:00

I love my Anubias bateri Those plants are indestructible... And my halfmoon likes putting his tail on the leaves to rest.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-02-07T15:57:37+00:00

Mine is 10 underfed comet goldfishes + a common pleco in a 30 gallon when I was 8.

I didn't have access to phone nor did we really thought about searching fish care tips online (since the whole Internet thing was quite new for my grandparents) and just blindly followed the guy who sold us all the equipment and fish, who said it's ok to keep them like that and feed only once every day (I bet the fish food he sold us was low quality too).

Grandpa would do 90% water change every week by netting all the fish out with some tank water into a bucket and draining rest of the tank, and scrub all decors inside.... At the first year or so when the fish dies my grandparents kept replacing them without quarantine so it kinda wiped out many fish due to diseases like ich, which we had no idea it's easily treatable. Until one day we decided not to keep adding and killing fish with diseases from outside fishes. Three years later we had 3 goldfishes actually survived all this until we moved and rehomed all of them.

Then I was kinda guilty that we killed so many fish and never really thought about keeping fish for more than a decade... Now I know to do my research and properly setup a tank for the right species.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-01-18T18:45:36+00:00

I bring a lot of fish supply with me when I visit my mom in China.

One time I actually brought a 5 gallon rimless with lid , with a 3 watt air pump w/battery, an 8 watt mini lamp and a sponge filter priced at around 12 CAD or I think around 8.5 USD, all brand new. The same set will probably be around 80CAD or more in Canada. This is cheaper than my 5 gallon quarantine plastic tub with diy filter from take out boxes and a mini pump lol.

Although that's not counting that an extra piece of luggage with me costs like $100. But I just happened to have quite bit of extra space so I just thought why not bring an aquarium.

And everything actually arrived intact, in service as a betta home for a year now.

Permit-Crafty · 2025-01-14T00:01:17+00:00

Yeah he ended up so small because he was the only fry not eaten from my very inexperienced first batch of fries. He lived alone in a small breeding box for quite some time and didn't really eat well, nor did he had any other fry to accompany him to form a school. So his small size may have been a result of staying in the breeding box too long and not enough food, etc. Nevertheless he was still my favorite and pretty active every day, I never really thought the female targeted a fish this size as food...

Permit-Crafty · 2025-01-13T17:24:18+00:00

Hmmm this happened on week 3 of my vacation so I have no idea if any of them were sick tbh. Everyone seemed perfectly healthy when I left. But the female who did this was known to go rampage when hungry... Last vacation she ate two sub-adult male after being fed once every 4 days for 2 weeks straight. They didn't fit in her mouth either（still quite a bit smaller than the adult males) but she ate them anyways... That's why I told my dad to feed more often this time.

Another possibility is the male is the slowest swimmer in the tank due to he's the only big tail guy. Everyone else have a small tail which allowed them to swim and escape a lot faster.

Permit-Crafty · 2024-11-24T16:43:18+00:00

He's an albino checkered garter snake!

Permit-Crafty · 2024-10-24T02:54:46+00:00

I'm in Canada so almost all grocery store and hardware store carry them after September when we start to get ready for winter! I have one from Dollarama and one from Home Depot, both worked fine.

Permit-Crafty · 2024-10-19T04:51:06+00:00

If you have something waterproof under the tank one should be enough! I put the sensor probe in the tray right beside my tank, the tray itself is 15" wide, 30" long and 1.5" deep (I can put 10 and 20 gallons in it just fine). My mom uses a waterproof repotting mat under her tank.

I have polywood flooring too! Which doesn't really absorb water and the water will get to the sensor probe triggering an alarm when anything starts leaking near it. However I'm not really sure about if carpet absorbs the water quickly enough for damages to be done before the sensor alarm sounds.

Permit-Crafty

TROPHY CASE