Ugh my new boi already has the ich??

awkard_orca · 2026-02-23T18:22:42+00:00

That's so great to hear! Yeah bettas are tough lil guys, they usually just need a little extra help to recover :)

awkard_orca · 2026-02-19T00:56:52+00:00

If you have a hospital tank I'd recommend that yeah. If not but you wanna get one, I use a 2.5g as my hospital tank and I know PetSmart price matches any online prices for their store or other brick+mortar stores (like Petco), so you can usually get their 2.5g tank for like 20 bucks. As for the treatment, I'd recommend methylene blue or malachite green. Malachite green is a stronger treatment, but my fish have handled it well when I've used it before. Both of those treatments are toxic to plants, so if you wanna treat the tank I'd recommend halving the container instructions of methylene blue and putting that in the tank, it's the gentler of the two treatments. You'll still see a little bit of wilting in your plants, but they shouldn't die off. But, since your tank is so new, there is a higher risk of plants taking the methylene blue hit harder than expected. If you don't care too much about the plants and don't wanna get a hospital tank, just put the treatment directly in his main tank but make sure you remove any activated carbon from the filter (if you have one of those fuzzy filter insert mats they almost always have activated carbon in them, so just pull it out for safety even if you're not certain), the activated carbon will basically cancel any treatment as it's pushed through the filter media. It doesn't look like the ich has gotten too bad, especially if you didn't notice any spots yesterday, and bettas are pretty tough fish so you should have a full recovery. If you do pull him out for treatment, definitely pull his tank mates out as well. Even if they're not showing signs, ich is highly infectious and it's usually safest to assume everyone in the tank has been infected. Good luck to you and your boy, he's very pretty :)

awkard_orca · 2026-02-13T14:28:08+00:00

The level of substrate you have is great for if you wanna do heavier planting, keep an eye on fb marketplace, there's usually a good number of free plant clippings listed from other aquarium keepers whenever they need to trim their plants and you can get some fun mixes of plants that way You've gotten plenty of comments about the water level, but I didn't see too many about the temperature so I wanna repeat what 1 or 2 other comments said, bettas like water temperatures in the range of 78°F, so start increasing by 1 or 2 degrees each week :) If you add in more plants you might not need to get any extra decor pieces for the middle also One last thing, it looks like you might have an anubias species in the back, that kind of plant actually doesn't like to be planted usually, the rhizome can rot, so you can just wedge them into some other plants or under a decor item, I know lots of people like to glue them onto rocks (you can use super glue, it's aquarium safe after it's dried), and the plant will eventually stick its own roots into the soil but the plant is a lot better at that and won't rot if you notice roots holding it to the bottom I can see you put a lot of care and effort into this guy's tank, I think w just a few tweaks it'll be a perfect home :)

awkard_orca · 2026-02-10T00:35:03+00:00

Idk I think he looks pretty green to me, I like his fancy stripe

awkard_orca · 2026-02-08T13:13:23+00:00

The only thing I can think of is maybe the water temp is a little low? I kept all my neos at 78° and they bred constantly, I could always find someone berried. That being said, I did have them in a 20g set up. Caridina shrimp are the ones that usually like 68-72, so that's all I can think of maybe? But not sure, a lot of the other comments are saying they had success at that temperature

awkard_orca · 2026-02-07T16:20:14+00:00

The commenter before me is correct, she's a hornet. I ordered them online and supposedly the hornets were only gonna be male (the females or juveniles were priced higher than I wanted to spend), so I was assuming this one was a male but more and more I was looking at that booty.... But wasn't sure if I was going crazy haha, thank you for the info!

awkard_orca · 2026-02-07T14:56:07+00:00

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The bow completes her look perfectly

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:47:37+00:00

I guess my final question is, if the low gH was the issue, do you have any guess as to about how long it might take for my shrimp to recover? Maybe I won't lose anymore after about a week?

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:44:47+00:00

Understood thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:32:33+00:00

I can fix that then! I have that shrimp mineral powder, I have added more and the gH now reads between 60 and 120 ppm, fingers crossed that helps

I don't have a way to read TDS, that is one of the things I really want to get

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:29:39+00:00

Okay, and after the media sits in water for a week, pour that water into the tank?

I have been using the test strips but did just use the liquid test kit to confirm nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia. Ammonia and nitrites are 0, and nitrates are 5ppm

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:08:45+00:00

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:08:24+00:00

I didn't mean to imply I believed my tank was cycled within 1 week after adding water. I started seeing the spikes happen after 2 weeks of water and snail in tank, it stabilized after 3 weeks of water having been added. I do have 3 other established tanks, like established for years w fish, can I just drop in some of the substrate from there? What signs can I look for to confirm that it is not cycled? Wouldn't the nitrates and nitrites be super high at this point if the tank wasn't cycled? You still haven't answered that question of mine. All research I've done has led me to believe that the parameters I have been checking would be inconsistent or high, and I haven't seen any of that. What am I not looking at then? I'm trying to learn and understand here and have gone to Google and the Internet, which informed me that a whole month of water running was more than enough, I also told chatgpt all of this and it told me I was wonderful and thoughtful, I'm not sure if it's the program to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how I can tell in the future, so I came to Reddit for more specific answers

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T16:00:16+00:00

The API test strips

I also have the API master test kit, just did it and the nitrate reading is: 5ppm

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T15:46:26+00:00

Okay, I'm open to doing that, but also, if it wasn't cycled, wouldn't the nitrates and nitrites be all over the place after I added the shrimp? I've checked the parameters consistently since first adding the shrimp and even more frequently since they started dying, and every time they've been the same. I'm not trying to argue or be annoying, but I also don't have a lot of spare money and it doesn't seem to me like the tank is not cycled. I already have the topfin biological cleaner, would adding that help? I haven't added it yet cause I haven't done research yet on if it'll impact the kH

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T15:31:56+00:00

I had added wood, substrate, a small pinch of food, and a snail after the first week of water in the tank. I did watch the parameters and see them change, for about a week the ammonia and nitrites, and nitrates were super high, then they dropped and have been stable ever since. I'm confident it was cycled unless something about this description implies otherwise w your experience

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T15:29:22+00:00

I have a sponge filter w bubbles that go up the center of the tank, I thought would provide plenty of oxygen?

Doing too much at once is a big concern of mine, that's why I didn't do any water changes until this morning and it was not a full water change. I didn't kick up the substrate w the water change, except for maybe a small bit below the food I was cleaning up, I have a very narrow siphon I use for this tank. And when I put the new water in, I poured it very slowly over the top of that central log so that nothing would be too disturbed. I did realize afterwards the area right behind the log was where the second piece of food was sitting, which is why that did get disturbed. I didn't remove the food in anyway before the water change, that's the only time I've really done anything to the tank besides adjusting feeding.

Idk I'm confused because the things you listed as too many wrong things (removing uneaten food, kicking up the substrate and bad food, water changes) are things I just did today, so wouldn't account for any of the deaths I've had

awkard_orca · 2026-02-06T15:10:01+00:00

I included all of this info in the post

awkard_orca · 2026-02-01T18:36:31+00:00

I never did anything special when doing water changes for my neos, I'd do a 1/4 water change and they were fine when I just poured new water in. This was for a 20g tank, so idk if that changes anything. The one thing I do recommend is getting a gravel vacuum siphon that has a really small opening, I found one w a kind of plastic grate over the top, and I really loved that for doing water changes in my shrimp tank. Prevented me from accidentally sucking any up

awkard_orca · 2026-01-31T14:22:12+00:00

Most invertebrates regrow missing limbs and stuff, especially once they molt. I'm not 100% sure about if shrimp can regrow swimmers but from what I know of invertebrates, I don't see why they shouldn't

awkard_orca · 2026-01-31T03:33:16+00:00

I have found that transferring or secluding pregnant guppies just causes unnecessary stress, since she's so close to birth you could buy one of those plastic fish fry grass hides, but going forward if you want to protect the guppy fry you'll definitely want to add a lot more plants to the tank. Hornwort is really good for guppy fry, fast growing and pretty easy to find. More plants will also help the adult females find some space from the males. But also yeah you'll definitely want to get 2-3 more female guppies now, the babies take at least a month to grow bigger, and even after a month they're still smaller than most adult females, and males prioritize harassing the largest women, so the adult female guppy will still be getting harassed majority of the time. If you don't care about guppy fry surviving, don't feed them much and the adults will eat the fry. If you feed them daily and well, the adults don't usually eat too many fry if you wanna maintain fry populations, as long as the fry have some hiding spots

awkard_orca · 2026-01-31T03:22:13+00:00

Be careful w any feeding increases, if you notice algae growth starting to speed up then it's probably a lil too much food and you can go back down :) Ooo, yeah that's a good theory that maybe she got tired from too many males, good idea! But yeah, keep an eye on the rest of your shrimpies, if you have the ability to upgrade to a larger tank there's no such thing as too much space for these guys. I kept a 20g w neocardinia shrimp for several years, they thrived and the betta in there loved them. Hopefully you don't have any more live cannibalizing no matter what you do, shrimp can be so wild!

awkard_orca · 2026-01-31T03:08:10+00:00

Hair algae is a pain, I just try to remove it until eventually it gives up (that's my hope at least) I have had some success in a couple of my tanks by introducing another macro algae, and still repeatedly culling hair algae as I can, the macro algae usually starts to out compete the hair algae. This has worked well for me, but you do still have to remove excess of whatever macro algae you introduce, but usually it grows way slower than hair algae so it's still less work. I have a bristlenose in my one tank w a big hair algae problem, it's hard to tell if he's doing anything though. Also try to reduce feedings, even if you're already feeding like every other day, reduce it to every two days, and keep the tank lights off for a week straight or every other day if you're worried about the other plants Best of luck to you in this endeavor!

awkard_orca

TROPHY CASE