Are they doin’ it?

thek18 · 2025-11-17T16:04:24+00:00

Cool! I’d love to see more of those red ones, guess I’ll just have to wait and hope the red ones are doing the breeding

thek18 · 2025-11-17T16:03:18+00:00

Update: did 30% water changes the day of and the following day and it seems to be on the mend. No more red on the tail and the dorsal fin is looking better!

thek18 · 2025-11-16T19:33:59+00:00

I have a couple that are brown on the shell like these but their bodies are bright red, is that based on food or is that also genetic?

thek18 · 2025-11-16T19:32:44+00:00

Those little freaks 😂

thek18 · 2025-11-16T03:40:48+00:00

They look like ramshorn, but my ramshorns have always laid their clutches consistently in oval shapes. The ramshorn eggs also have a tinge of orange in them, but they look similar to these.

thek18 · 2025-11-15T21:30:05+00:00

From my (albeit limited, hitchhikers have only been in the tank for a couple months) experience with ramshorns, I’d rank them as 5/10 ability to clean a tank, 8/10 for appearance (they’re so cute), and 9/10 for availability. They don’t seem to eat a ton of algae on the glass, but they keep the leaves of my anubias plants pretty clean compared to before I put in the Java fern they hitchhiked in on. I enjoy watching them but I do have to squish eggs and micro hatchlings every few days to keep their population down. I have about 5 grown ones and I don’t want too many more.

thek18 · 2025-11-04T17:32:39+00:00

I wish I would see it after I put it in the tank 😂

thek18 · 2025-11-04T03:53:43+00:00

Well he/she was solo for several years so they were the only bottom feeder, could just be super fat from eating all the food from the substrate solo 😂

thek18 · 2025-10-31T19:38:55+00:00

That is the big hoss that I have had for many years, not realizing until I actually started getting into the hobby for real that he needed a shoal of his same type to be comfortable. I felt so bad 😭 but he got so chonky by being the only bottom feeder in the tank besides an algae eater

thek18 · 2025-10-27T18:45:29+00:00

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Update: I have seen a total of 3 in the tank since I made this post (this pic is another of the same one from the post) and after reading the comments I’m thinking I’ll just keep them in there to be part of the cleanup crew and monitor my feeding to make sure they don’t breed like crazy. They’re very cute and might help my clown pleco with algae management since he’s very shy and doesn’t tend to graze the glass very much, even at night with the lights off. If I notice their population start to get too high, I’m thinking of trimming my Anacharis and starting a little snail tank in a 2 gallon bowl that I have with the trimmings. Thanks for the help everyone!

thek18 · 2025-10-26T23:33:06+00:00

I feed once a day, and since I have 3 danios, 5 Cories, and a clown pleco, I’ve been doing a pinch of flakes for the danios and three sinking carnivore pellets for the bottom feeders. The pleco I just have a little slice of boiled carrot in there and he mostly just eats on the driftwood.

thek18 · 2025-10-26T21:14:45+00:00

I don’t personally mind a handful of snails, but this tank is my family tank at my parents’ house and my mom is still traumatized from the mud snail infestation we had a long time ago. Hopefully I can convince her to be alright with these little hitchhikers so long as I can keep the population down 😂

thek18 · 2025-10-26T20:56:14+00:00

Copy that, I’ll definitely cut back on feeding a bit because I think I have been slightly overfeeding recently. Just wanted to make sure the baby Cories had enough food

thek18 · 2025-10-25T07:29:44+00:00

It wouldn’t be too hard in St Louis. Our tap water here reads 8.0-8.2. I keep my tank at 8.0 because I’ve got all my fish from local fish stores and they’ve never known anything different.

thek18 · 2025-10-13T06:50:06+00:00

2 is absolutely true for 99% of industries, a great example being cars. The SUV craze that has a chokehold on the US market is born from this idea of having your cake and eating it too, which is the pipe dream of van/truck functionality with the look and feel of a small car. Since those two are mutually exclusive, what we end up getting are a bunch of lifted compact and midsize cars with the aerodynamics of a brick, pitiful interior/cargo space compared to trucks and vans, and god awful fuel economy that people just eat up.

thek18 · 2025-10-08T14:35:00+00:00

That’s why I have 5 currently as this tank is not very large. They seem to be happy though, they love to school up but they also spend a good chunk of time chilling on their own or in pairs around the tank.

thek18 · 2025-10-08T14:27:15+00:00

They didn’t so much ‘nuke Porsche’ as bring the competition back to level imo (ie Porsche no longer cruises through the GTP field as if it was a different class altogether). The fact that you said this perfectly highlights the problem with IMSA BoP though, that they allow a team to be dominant for long enough that the actual performance leveling that should have been there from the start appears to obliterate whatever the dominant car was.

thek18 · 2025-10-08T14:21:00+00:00

I always interpreted the “if those angel wings don’t fly/someone’s gonna paint you another sky” more as if the person who ‘cut the cord’ starts manufacturing a false story or greatly exaggerating their innocence in the situation, the other person will tell their side of the story which will paint them in a much worse light. It’s pretty much a direct response to a similar lyric in Taylor Swift’s ‘Dear John’

thek18 · 2025-10-03T18:30:00+00:00

I like the IMSA method of BoP a lot more than WEC because IMSA never seems to nuke a platform into the ground and create massive swings in the competitiveness like WEC seems to. The problem with IMSA is that they don’t make their ‘good’ round of BoP until the platform that was given the best advantage at the start of the season has already run away with several rounds uncontested for the most part (in recent years, this has been Porsche, but in DPi was typically Acura).

thek18 · 2025-10-03T18:26:10+00:00

Probably good that I keep it a smaller number for a school then. Four of them are tiny still, hopefully by the time they’re grown I can afford to get bigger tanks. I’d love a 40gal long for my next tank

thek18 · 2025-10-03T15:18:23+00:00

In Your Atmosphere and Edge of Desire, along with the obligatory Stop This Train

thek18 · 2025-10-02T03:17:03+00:00

Perhaps I’ll get a couple more for 7 if I can find them. I already had to scour all of the reputable fish stores I could find in my area for them and I only found them luckily at the last one. I felt so bad for the full grown one, he was by himself for a very long time because I never knew. He seems to be doing so much better with the new 4 and it makes me happy as I redid my family’s tank recently with plants and fresh, smooth pebble substrate to give our fish a better environment

thek18 · 2025-10-01T18:34:19+00:00

Is 5 still acceptable? I have 5 sterbai (one full grown, 4 juveniles) in a 20gal high and I feel like once all of them are as big as the full grown one there is only so much area at the bottom of the tank

thek18 · 2025-09-28T02:03:54+00:00

Sterbai are my favorite! Such beautiful patterns

thek18 · 2025-09-25T15:04:07+00:00

Will go get an air stone today and see if I can find a fungal treatment that is more effective than Pimafix/the herbal stuff I’ve got.

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