ulkoilla&fish

current project: 140 L (37 gal) tank improvement

[homunculus-argument]

So this time I did everything right! Made sure that my yeast was in order, the water was warm enough, added more than enough sugar, let it brew and activate before kneading in the rest of the flour, kept the dough bowl warm so the yeast wouldn't die from cold, kept the dough warm and toasty and covered while it rises, gave it plenty of time to rise, and followed every single instruction to a tee!

The bread is still fucked up. It's dead and it sucks.

[ulkoillafish]

Lmao replying this under my aquarium blog because I've been having the exact same issue with the yeast I used for my "akvaariokilju" CO2 system, where the yeast is supposed to eat away sugar to make alcohol and CO2.

Tips for waking up yeast in cold climate. This assumes you know the basic procedure but are facing weird issues and the yeast just won't activate

use warm enough water. Preferably measure the temperature. If not possible, test the temperature with your mouth, NOT with your fingers. The fingers will tell worse lies than the mouth. Use water that feels warm in your mouth

pre-warm the cup you use to wake the yeast up. A small amount of water will cool almost immediately in a cool cup, and the yeast will just keep snoozing

Find a warm place to put the cup, such as on a radiator (it you have a type this is safe), or use a warm water bath

Wait for the foam on form on the cup. If this takes a long time, make a new batch of yeast. Something has gone wrong

Look at your yeast immediately after stirring it in the water. It should cloudy up the water nicely. The exact color ofc depends on the amount of yeast and water you use but after you've failed and succeeded often enough, you can tell the difference between likely-to-succeed and likely-to-fail batches

Illustration: identical cups with the same amount of water (50 g), sugar (7g) and yeast ("wrong end of a Savonia tea spoon" - less than a gram).

The cupful at left hand side was made according to this instruction and is likely to succeed. The cupful at right hand side was made using "handwarm" water and is not likely to succeed but I'm giving it some but small chance of success.

(The amounts are what I use for my aquarium CO2 starter, if you are wondering xD)

[ulkoillafish]

30 minutes later. Just as expected

Left - nice foam, some yeast on top of the thing

Right - looks worse than in the beginning. Yeast non-active, fell the bottom of the cup

[homunculus-argument]

So this time I did everything right! Made sure that my yeast was in order, the water was warm enough, added more than enough sugar, let it brew and activate before kneading in the rest of the flour, kept the dough bowl warm so the yeast wouldn't die from cold, kept the dough warm and toasty and covered while it rises, gave it plenty of time to rise, and followed every single instruction to a tee!

The bread is still fucked up. It's dead and it sucks.

[ulkoillafish]

Lmao replying this under my aquarium blog because I've been having the exact same issue with the yeast I used for my "akvaariokilju" CO2 system, where the yeast is supposed to eat away sugar to make alcohol and CO2.

Tips for waking up yeast in cold climate. This assumes you know the basic procedure but are facing weird issues and the yeast just won't activate

use warm enough water. Preferably measure the temperature. If not possible, test the temperature with your mouth, NOT with your fingers. The fingers will tell worse lies than the mouth. Use water that feels warm in your mouth

pre-warm the cup you use to wake the yeast up. A small amount of water will cool almost immediately in a cool cup, and the yeast will just keep snoozing

Find a warm place to put the cup, such as on a radiator (it you have a type this is safe), or use a warm water bath

Wait for the foam on form on the cup. If this takes a long time, make a new batch of yeast. Something has gone wrong

Look at your yeast immediately after stirring it in the water. It should cloudy up the water nicely. The exact color ofc depends on the amount of yeast and water you use but after you've failed and succeeded often enough, you can tell the difference between likely-to-succeed and likely-to-fail batches

Illustration: identical cups with the same amount of water (50 g), sugar (7g) and yeast ("wrong end of a Savonia tea spoon" - less than a gram).

The cupful at left hand side was made according to this instruction and is likely to succeed. The cupful at right hand side was made using "handwarm" water and is not likely to succeed but I'm giving it some but small chance of success.

(The amounts are what I use for my aquarium CO2 starter, if you are wondering xD)

[fruit-dyke]

hello to any fish people out there, can guppies share a tank with a betta fish?

[ulkoillafish]

I wouldn't mix bettas as guppies because guppies are fish that in nature live in alkaline hard water and bettas live on acidic soft waters. Some people don't really care about this but personally I think it's something to consider dir the health of the fish

[oarfjsh]

thay should invent ssuction cups for aquariums that. work

[ulkoillafish]

Yes. YES! YES!

I’ve found one thing worse than the suction cups and it’s CO2 systems with leaks that come and go.

[ulkoillafish]

Honey gourami fry is small

Drives me crazy that I can’t hack down the surface plants if I even want to give these little dudes and dudettes a change

[cashipan]

【金魚】 商店街の一角に金魚がいました

[homunculus-argument]

Some people are "low maintenance" in the same way that fish are "easy" pets. They don't complain, they don't make noise, they don't ask or demand to have their needs met, a lot of the time you couldn't even tell if they were in severe pain. So you've got two kinds of people who end up having them in their lives:

The ones who are meticulous about keeping an eye on them, doing shit tons of research to double-check that this bug-eyed little shit is healthy and ok, learning to google every single weird behaviour just to double-check that it isn't an alarming sign that something is terribly wrong, and altogether going prematurely bald and grey (somehow in that order) from stress of trying to keep this creature happy, healthy and alive. Will physically fight you if you imply in any way that this task is easy.

The ones who figure that no noise=no problem. Will just randomly shrug "yeah they do that sometimes lmao" when their pet unexpectedly dies for no apparent reason.

[ulkoillafish]

A LOT has happened since the last aquarium post.

We had to move. Twice. The first apartment had moisture damage, which was only found after I started to wonder why sewer smell never went away, and found a patch of black mold on a wall.

Hence, I moved the aquarium twice.

It was not but everyone made it. I even found a baby cory, so tiny I hadn’t noticed it at all until I had only sand left. She - I belive it’s a she - made it and is getting so big it’s difficult to tell her apart from others.

The baby cory also has a bunch of younger sisters and brothers. I re-organized some stuff in the tank and it seems like the babies now have better chance to hide until they get big enough not be eaten.

I have a new job. I’m still adjusting to it but now I have some idea on what’s happening in it.

On a sad news, one of my honey gouramis, Kultu, got sick and I had to put her down just yesterday :( I’m hoping some of they fry will make it, as the tank has a nice amount of honey gourami fry hiding amongst the floating plants. The babies are the reason I’ve not cleaned algae from the glass in almost a month (usually I scrape it every other week or so), so I won’t be adding any pics of the tank :,D

[ulkoillafish]

My surprise honey gourami baby has died :,( I have no idea what happened. One day I just realized I hadn’t seen them for a couple of days and couldn't find them anywhere. It’s been such a long time I must admit defeat.

I’m really bummed by this

[ulkoillafish]

The tank today I’m not really feeling the way Aquatan is making it yellow , with some help from alder cones. But I’m dead set using humic stuff. (Although I’m not too sure Aquatan can be seen as such - I’d think humic acids are, you know, acidic. But they claim it’s not altering water parameters so I’m a bit suspicious) Anyway, things could’ve gone wors

[ulkoillafish]

We’ve had some temperatures too high for my fish and I had to limit the light to avoid excessive overheating of the tank but everyone is doing good. The “scape” is a mess though, 3 cory babies and then this one, a surprise baby who indeed is a honey gourami have stopped me from doing much decorative stuff.

The cories are now big enough to run with the rest of the gang but I decided I’ll let this one grow a bit before I go in and manage the plants with more vigour

[ulkoillafish]

Now - this out of focus, pixel sized (and clearly incredibly stupid) fish must be a young honey gourami. Because sure as hell it isn’t a young cory cat, and I doubt it can be a young cardinal tetra. As there are the options...

[ulkoillafish]

For such a tiny fish, this little fella has made a terrible mess of the tank :,D

I’ve been afraid to blind-vacuum. In fear that I’d vacuum them. (They are a bit more than 1cm now, in case you wonder why the fish is about the size of a a pixel...)

Yesterday I saw another one of these - a bit smaller than this one, so no blind-vacuuming in the near future either...

[ulkoillafish]

Resting on rose pe… um, lily leaf :)

[geraskier]

:D twins!

[ulkoillafish]

The cuteness when they do this!

[ulkoillafish]

The project tank has been doing... more or less ok. Not much has happened.

The previous leak in CO2 system resulted in some BBA but after many, many hours of work and frustration I was able to fix the leak. The system now works better than ever, and I’m watching with mild curiosity how some green algae (hair, I’d guess) and BBA wage war. BBA has more troops but the green one has been gaining real estate. I spotted a cory baby one day, a baby big enough that I have some hopes for it to survive - there is no longer anyone big enough to eat it. I think. Honey gouramis laid eggs again. I’ve been noticing that the eggs tend to disappear during night time. I don’t mind it - I’m not trying to breed and it’s probably better that Hani doesn’t stress himself excessively by trying to tend the young in a community tank. I was kind of thinking he starts to get stressed when he tends the eggs, and solves the issue by eating the eggs. But today I found out what actually happens.

The assassins don’t give a shit when there’s a bubble nest without eggs. Clearly, that changes when there’s caviar to be had.

[gremlinbearn]

Mostly writing this up for a friend, but maybe someone else gets use out of it or has notes on what I could improve.

I've had nothing but horrible luck with hang-on-back filters, and don't have the means to put in a sump spot inside the tank right now, so I made a jar-filter to sit inside the tank awhile back.

It was time to replace the filter pads, so here's a semi-guide on how I "built" it.

I may get a canister filter some day, but this has been doing perfect for about 4 months now and worked in the past for a different 20 gallon I had set up for a year.

I tried to mimic the way the Fluval tanks do their built-in sumps and how canister filters work. Sort of. You'll need a glass jar, some sort of large tube, ceramic/biological filter media, filter foam pads, an air stone, aquarium tubing, and an air pump.

(not shown: air stone, tubing, and pump)

For the air pump, I chose one that was rated for a 30-40 gallon sponge filter for my 20 gallon tank. It used to be used for a sponge filter years ago so any branding has worn off, but I believe most air pumps work all about the same regardless of brand.

My glass jar was a thoroughly cleaned salsa jar, the tube came from a spare gallon-bottle of lotion pump that was never used. The tube just needs to be big enough for an airstone to sit inside with at least 5mm all around the sides, and something you can drill into. I used a Dremel to cut slats into the bottom of the tube. Make them at least 2mm x 8mm big, the more you have the better the water flow. Because I have kuhli loaches who are notorious for getting into filters, I also glued a plastic net on the outside of the tube and hold it in place with plastic bands. Just small enough so that they can't fit their faces through it.

The tube sits in the middle of the jar, slat end down, and you can go ahead and put the biological media in there to hold it in place. This media is well-used so I don't have a picture of the box, but it's 250grams of Fluval's Biomax.

Next I take the larger filter foam pad, cut a hole in the center, then use the jar as a guide to cut the pad just a bit larger than the jar itself. Enough that it needs a slight squish to fit inside to hold it in place but not enough squish that it starts blocking water flow.

The polishing pad is cut just a bit smaller than the foam pad, and I use the foam pad as a guide. What you really want with this one is for it to not bunch up like in the second picture here, as that could block water flow or just look bad.

Put the biomedia on the bottom layer, then the filter foam on top of that, then the polishing pad. I use a thin needle tool to push along the edges so it sits flush because I've got fat fingers and they'd just smoosh everything. I like my layers to hit just at the mouth of the jar so that the lip can hold it better in place.

A step I also like to do but ran of of pictures for is to add tank water to the whole thing and let it soak for a bit before adding it. It helps get rid of a few air pockets. You'll want to soak your airstone for a bit too before turning the air pump on for it.

Once everything is ready to go and in place, put the airstone down into the tube and make sure it hits to the bottom of the jar. The closer the airstone sits to the bottom, the more water is pulled through the slats we made in the tube.

I keep an eye on the water parameters and have not had an issue or crash yet, mostly thanks to the very stable biomedia I believe.

Cleaning the filter is simple enough. The polishing pad gets thrown away every month and replaced, sometimes more often depending on snail poop levels. The black foam pad gets rinsed in tank water every month, and replaced every 4 months. The ceramic biomedia just gets gently rinsed in tank water every month, and I haven't replaced it at all yet - it's been ongoing bouncing around tanks for like three years.

[ulkoillafish]

Super interesting take! I’ll rant some random thoughts in here:

I have personal beef with filters that operate with air pumps. Not because they are bad but because of the noise. Oh my god the noise.

BUT! Nothing, absolutely nothing stops the very, very slightly modified concept being used with a water pump! Like, say, and old internal filter pump.

Why am I so interested in this?

I have gouramis and a DIY CO2 system with limited output (too little space for essentially any upgrade), so I don’t want to have excessive flow. Especially I don’t want to have excessive flow at surface.

I also have a lot driftwood and other crap that creates tiny debris into the tank. The debris tends to fall on the bottom and on plant leaves. I vacuum it with weekly WCs. But I’m a lazy person and I’ve been wondering how I could - up the flow on the bottom, and only at the bottom of the tank to mobilize the debris - have a suction at lower part of the tank to catch a bigger part of the debris - up the biological filtering capacity - do this without creating an eyesore

Canister filter could be a good choice, except that (a) I totally lost it with the previous one I had because it was a nightmare to clean, (b) I’m nervous about the canister siphoning essentially all water out of the tank if a seal breaks and (c) at more than 20 y/o, the tank is gaining age and I should be thinking retiring it, not investing in it.

So I’m saying it would be interesting to make a system like this, but water pump-operated. The system would locate in another can, and that outer can would be partially submerged in the substrate. See the awe-inspiring (not xD) paint drawing below

To hide this well, filtrate should obviously be at a high level. But the scapers do it all the time with different structure thingies. I’ve been happy with my bag method (see result also) for creating moderate slope. So that shouldn’t be a real issue in here. I realize this gets pretty close to an undergravel filter, especially if one wants to put stuff like a some rocks on it to hide it. Also yes, it wouldn't 100% reach the benefits of undergravel filter systems, but cleaning would be a lot easier and because of its smaller size, it’d be easier for bottom-dwelling fish. I’m seriously into this concept. I’m not saying I’ll do it, but the only thing stopping me is me having the substrate bags and plants already in the tank which dampens my will to mess up with the bottom. But I do have some spare internal filters for the pump...

[ulkoillafish]

Now that my cories are a bit older, I decided to give a new try for growing baby cories. While trying to find their eggs, I found this instead 

The white... Hammock-like things are assassin snail eggs. I’m happy to see them breeding!