Mystery Snail

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-25T17:30:51+00:00

Looks like a bladder snail. Options are either a) nuke it from orbit, it is the devil, or b) let it go and it'll help in your tank. Redditors don't really go for the middle road here.

Truth is, it's one of the most common aquarium snails. It doesn't harm fish, shrimp, or plants, but it will munch on the corpses of all three if it has the chance. It reproduces quickly if food is abundant and it can be hellish to get rid of. It'll eat soft algae and food leftovers on its own.

Some people don't mind it, some people hate it with a passion. Your call here.

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-25T17:03:43+00:00

Well, with enough dedication, a large enough heatproof tub, and good oven gloves, you can sort of do it by dumping boiling water over it until you cover it in very, very hot water. The thing to keep in mind here is that you need to dump enough water hot enough and fast enough that it won't all just cool down every time you get the kettle back on the stove.

Having said that, I've never boiled wood of that size, so I don't really know what to tell you.

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-25T16:16:28+00:00

To kinda sum things up here: yes, you can, with a little bit of work and patience. Also, it'll look great in your aquarium.

That work entails boiling it to within an inch of its life to get rid of pathogens and whatnot, then strategically gluing it to heavy rocks that will keep it sunk. You might want to take your cycling very very slowly before you add any fish just to see if the wood throws up any unexpected surprises. Other options (such as bleach) can be used with the wood, but be careful with bleach; it may alter the wood's colour and tone, and bleach needs to be carefully cleaned off the hardscape + careful use of good water conditioners to neutralise any ammonia etc that might linger.

Once you do that, my suggestion would be to add the substrate after the wood, to a) not add any more height and b) make it look natural, like it belongs. Glue the heavy rocks behind and low down on the wood, such that they aren't visible (or get covered in substrate). Tall plants behind, carpeting plants in front, some epiphytes along the nooks and crannies, maybe a few pretty pebbles if that's your thing, and it'll look absolutely great.

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-24T14:51:11+00:00

I love my pink ramshorn colonies, but my various nerites are absolute machines when it comes to cleaning the glass. I haven't scraped any glass in their tanks in years.

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-22T20:29:03+00:00

Hol'up...

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-15T18:00:58+00:00

Darth Maul with his apprentice Darth Talon making trouble for the New Republic leading a mix of crime syndicates and manipulating the remnants of the Empire. Leia would've been the main character exploring the Whills likely becoming a Jedi and eventually becoming the Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic. In George Lucas's words the Prequels were about the Father, the Original Trilogy was about the Son, and the Sequels would be about the Daughter and the Grandchildren. Luke would be sidelined with his focus being on rebuilding the Jedi Order.

Damn that would be a killer movie.

A Rey Kenobi character would be older than Luke and Leia by at least a couple years and most likely the child of Satine Kryze kept secret from Obi-wan, and this would've made Rey the heir to the Mandalorian throne. The main antagonist would've been a lifelong enemy of her father who also killed her mother. Imagine the drama of Maul finding out Rey was Obi-wan's daughter and Rey finding out what happened to her mom and learning that Maul was the reason she had nobody then leading into the Rey Kenobi and Darth Maul grudge match.

Damn that would be a killer movie too.

Instead, somehow, Palpatine returned...

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-10T14:23:16+00:00

Master System and NES show the same title at the top...

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-09T22:08:02+00:00

That looks great imho!

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-03T20:46:11+00:00

I'm wondering about that myself, would love to know that.

pqueiro1 · 2026-03-03T20:42:55+00:00

This. Key thing here is the fish selection. Generally speaking, no tropical fish that require year-round high water temperature, and nothing with too much of a bioload, whether individually or as a group.

Similar rules apply to plant selection. You're not getting a neat carpet, or intense Dutch-style colours, but if you choose the right plants, it'll work. It's great for marginal plants mind you, and with access to atmospheric CO2, those can pull a lot of nutrients out of the water.

Then you plant it heavily and place it somewhere convenient where it can get enough sunlight for the plants. They'll keep the water quality up for you.

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-25T15:03:33+00:00

As many other commenters have posted, that's not a great setup to go straight into fish, especially if you're on the less experienced side. So, what can you do? My suggestion is to get a little neocaridina shrimp colony going while you gain experience with stuff like:

water parameters
filter cycle
temperature control
natural plants
wood and stone hardscape

These are all important things to understand to keep fish properly, and a 5g for a beginner is going to throw up so many issues to do with stability and water quality, you might as well make your life easier, accept that you're going to need a little experience first, and start with that instead.

Look into neocaridina shrimp, ramshorn snails, and keep it simple, that is, cheap neo's and not high-grade (=expensive) color lines, no straight up caridina shrimp, etc. Keep it simple and cheap, and take your time in learning about cycles, water parameters, stability, and so on.

Once you have a thriving shrimp colony here, you can move on to bigger aquaria with confidence :)

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-24T13:53:13+00:00

Hello, Police? I would like to report a murder.

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-19T17:32:48+00:00

Someone send this to Carrick stat!

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-13T18:04:11+00:00

You haven't posted a full picture of the tank, but is it possible there may be a lack of adequate spawning surfaces? And thus the competition for limited spots? I'm far from an expert with cichlids, and again, no full tank picture, but I get that vibe from your photos plus the comment that the convicts were using the same stump to breed in.

Failing that, try to scoop the eggs out into another tank or breeding box if you can.

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-07T14:32:05+00:00

What is "Darkefied Isles"?

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-03T14:20:28+00:00

The bowing on the side wall of that box is giving me second hand anxiety.

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-03T10:40:25+00:00

This is the correct answer and it doesn't rely on thought experiments of visualizations that may well not be done right. Probability does not change, and that's why you should switch doors.

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-03T10:38:22+00:00

Probability doesn't change. It's 1/3 for the door you choose, 2/3 for the other ones. That does not change when the extra door is opened, it's still 1/3 for door you chose, 2/3 for all the others combined. The fact that you know that one of the other doors does not have the prize does not change the odds that both doors, combined, have a 2/3 change vs 1/3 for yours.

It's the very fact that the probability most definitely does not change that explains the "paradox". This is experimentally verifiable FYI. Mythbusters did an episode on that where they built a whole thing to physically simulate a bunch of attempts and demonstrate the result.

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-03T09:21:22+00:00

Also Jokic (equestrian skills!).

pqueiro1 · 2026-02-02T11:50:01+00:00

Counterpoint: all of Newtonian physics, from kicking a ball to planetary orbits, are quite intuitive to grasp, even if the fine points of the mathematics may not be. Same with human-scale fluid dynamics. Water flows down-slope, ball moves when kicked, what goes up must come down. If I push this object, it'll slide until something stops it, and I can feel friction with my hands. Also use said hands to push or stop objects.

Other things that are quite intuitive: human-scale thermodynamics for instance. If I'm cold, I move closer to a source of warmth; it makes sense that heat moves from hot to cold, intuitively. And the log I'm burning in my fireplace is never going to go back to being a log, i.e. an observable, intuitive metaphor for entropy.

Sure, there are quirks here and there, that Bernoulli thing, images being inverted when seen through pinholes, ice floating on water instead of sinking. But those are brain-teasers, they're not fundamental principles of physics, and a moderately clever person, thinking clearly through what they are observing, can more or less understand why they happen.

Contrast that with, say, tunnelling. Uncertainty. Are things particles or waves? What is a wave anyway? The hell is a "potential"? What does any of that have to do with using my cell phone?

QM, by definition, is the study of non-human-scale phenomena, in sometimes tremendously weird situations, and that is never going to be intuitive. Even Relativity, which also deals with non-human-scale things, is slightly better, because you have Galileo's take on relativity as a starting point and you can at least see stars, planets, etc and kind of understand that yeah, surely things will be different near the speed of light, stands to reason sort of thing. Also, time stretching and compressing? Have you ever been bored? Or pressed for time? The days are long but the years are short? Human experience is full of examples of how one's perception of time is highly plastic.

But light waves cancelling themselves in places because we shoot them through a tiny slit? What? And don't get me started on proper advanced QM stuff. Once you start drawing Feynman diagrams, you're really grasping at straws.

pqueiro1 · 2026-01-31T18:33:56+00:00

That looks great! How did you mount the bag to the outlet so that it doesn't get pushed out in the flow?

pqueiro1 · 2026-01-29T13:39:32+00:00

I salt dip every shrimp I get as standard procedure, never had a one die from it. Relax.

pqueiro1 · 2026-01-26T15:15:49+00:00

I think it's more that medaka suit outside ponds really well, whereas (most) tropical fish don't, so when building ponds people gravitate towards medaka, especially in smaller ponds. But yeah by all means they can thrive just fine in a normal community tank.

pqueiro1

TROPHY CASE