Hello guest! Are you an Apistogramma enthusiast? If so we invite you to join our community and see what it has to offer. Our site is specifically designed for you and it's a great place for Apisto enthusiasts to meet online. Once you join you'll be able to post messages, upload pictures of your fish and tanks and have a great time with other Apisto enthusiasts. Sign up today!
Haha that sounds just like us - me with tanks, my husband with bikes! I am also a biologist and have spent time in the Amazon and Central America - so I can relate. I am not sure about the cephalopods in the vivarium though - aren't they all marine species?
Also I think if you use CO2 you also need strong light which is not really appropriate for a blackwater biotope. And you want to see all the twigs and botanicals, and not have them swamped by over exuberant plant growth that needs to be trimmed or thinned out every week.
I second the comments about CO2, absolutely not necessary, as well as the plants mentioned by MacZ I have found that Echinodorus species (the green ones) do perfectly well in a low tech set up with low light and no CO2, even if the tank is pretty well covered with water lettuce. Cabomba also...
My TDS meter measures in ppm which as others have pointed out is the same as mg/l. Press a switch and it changes to read conductivity in µS/cm, as Mike Wise said this is about twice the value of TDS. I can also read temperature in either degrees C or F.
I don't measure every time I do a water...
The orinoco dwarf was previously called C. regani "orinoco" now it is known to be closer to C. notophthalmus, but is a separate species, this is from the article I posted, the one in bold appears to be the species we have:
The type of C. notophthalmus is from the Rio Negro by Manaus and is in...
Here is a paper about Crenicichla species and relationships based on mitochondria DNA analysis. The Orinoco dwarf species is not maned yet but appears to be closest to C. notophthalmus.
.
I recently got some from Colombia and I believe they are C. cf notophhthalmus sp "Orinoco". They look just like yours. I will have to try and read that link as I have been assuming the ones wit the ocellus are females. But I think I read that the males of this species do not have the extended...
Same here except that I have never stopped giving them bbs. Now they will eat anything! But they still get Artemia and daphnia as well as a homemade food, bug bites tropical and occasionally other dried food as well. I recently got some dwarf pike cichlids, they will not eat dried food, they...
I’d be content with 8 or 10 initially, maybe they would breed in a tank for me!
Lucky…perhaps they will start to become more easily available and less expensive then, fingers crossed!
They don't seem to be very often available, I would love to find some but have never seen them for sale here, and if they did appear they would be fry expensive...... There was actually someone in the US who was breeding them a couple of years ago, on another forum, unfortunately no longer...
Never tried a matten filter, I have canister filters for the larger tanks and top filters (which basically act the same way) for the two smaller ones (though I would prefer canisters on these ideally). I have used sponge filters in a small fry/quarantine tank and use small sponges as pre...
Same here, I use them for a few days, meanwhile some more are getting ready to hatch in the second bottle. I even do this when rearing fry, not only for enrichment. To be honest I am skeptical that only newly hatched ones have nutritional value, they might be best, but after all they have...
I don't know what your hatcher is like, but I have my home made one made set up standing in a plastic container of water which I heat with a small aquarium heater. At my local fish shop they just use a heat lamp over the hatchery. Of course these also use electricity but I am sure not as much...
Of course I agree with this in general, after all the most interesting part of breeding any cichlids is being able to observe their parental care behaviour. In fact the Laetacara case I mentioned is the only time I have ever raised cichlid fry away from the parents. But if someone happens to...
Right, yes the Laetacara had a lot of fry, I only raised 20 the first time and over 40 the second. Most stayed with the parents in the big tank and not surprisingly none of those survived. I once tried keeping just a few in a breeding net in the main tank but that did not work. After raising...
Why is this the case - I have been successful raising Laetacara fry like this, I don't think I lost any of those that I separated from the big tank? They are very small, but perhaps Apistogramma are even smaller and more fragile?
Personally I would rather use smaller tetras or pencilfish, I like diamond tetras but they do get quite big for that size tank and might look out of proportion. They also seem to breed quite easily. If you really want the diamond tetras I’d agree that a larger Apistogramma and that prefers...
I am not sure but personally I wouldn’t want to try that. I would wait until the fry are free swimming and carefully siphon out some of them ( or use a turkey baster) to rear in a separate tank, using water, leaf litter etc.from the main tank in the fry tank. And leave the rest of the fry with...