Male Pygmy Sunfish in a Heavily Planted 10 Gallon Aquarium

Male Pygmy Sunfish in a Heavily Planted 10 Gallon Aquarium

A Pygmy Sunfish in a well-established 10-gallon aquarium heavily planted with Anubis and hornwort. An under-gravel filter and a small sponge filter provide biological filtration.

The plants are hornwort and anbius.+

I want a modern-day version of the Metaframe Dynaflow HOB.

The Metaframe Dynaflow filters were the best filters ever made for aquariums. Here is why/

They never leak because there is no hole in the bottom. A magnet drove the impeller.

They pump filtered water. The filter is fed by a siphon that puts the water on top of the filter media. The pump pumped the filtered water from the bottom of the media back into the aquarium. I never had an impeller jam or get clogged up with gunk.

They did not kill fry. If fry got sucked into the filter, they would hang out in the water on top of the filter media until you scooped them out. While they were in the filter, they were the best-fed fish in the aquarium.

Unless the siphons were broken when you had a power failure, they would always restart when the power came back on.

Dynaflow filters don't run over. Because it is fed by a siphon, the water level in the filter can never be higher than the water in the aquarium.

You can always tell when the media needs changing. There was no bypass so the flow would get slower the more the media clogged. When it got too slow, you changed or cleaned the media.

You could use any media you like. I use sponges and filter floss in mine. I used sponges well before there were sponge filters in the aquarium trade. A 1/2-inch layer of foam on top to catch the course stuff and filter floss on the bottom to get the rest.

The tubing on the Dynaflow filters was bent tubing for the returns and the siphons. It was a standard-size tubing that you could buy and make siphon tubes. Combine this with the adjustable returns, and you could almost eliminate refiltering the water that just came out of the filter. I don't know of any modern filter that can do this.  

Curved/bent tubing is much easier to clean.

Removing Amazon Frog Bit From My 300 Gallon Stock Tank

 

Three Gallon Bucket Packed Full Of Amazon Frog Bit

I have had Amazon frogbit in my stock tanks before. That variety was great. The frogbit grew like crazy and lived through the Florida Panhandle winters. Then one day, a local insect (moth) decided that they were good to eat and started laying eggs on the plants. Every day I had a new batch of caterpillars. My fish loved them but could not get at the worms unless they fell or got knocked into the water. Eventually, the caterpillars won. No more frogbit.

This year I tried again. I bought some plants and put a few in every aquarium and stock tank I have. It died in most locations or was very sickly looking. Then one day, the frogbit started to grow and spread in my 300-gallon stock tank. The plants got larger and grew faster until they covered most of the tank. The plants looked terrible, with dead leaves everywhere and roots that went to the bottom of the tank, causing problems for the fish. Finally, it got so bad that I could not see the fish and was interfering with the feeding. It was time to thin the plants.
 

The bucket pictured is 3-gallons and is packed tight with Amazon frogbit. I cleared less than 1/4 of the surface. A week later, it was closing in again. I'm going to pull it all out.

#aquarium #tubbing #stocktanks #rubbermaid #fish #aquaticplants #amazonfrogbit #floridapanhandle

Albino Corydoras Spawning

 

Lots and lots of eggs. There were probably 200 eggs in the aquarium when I took the picture, and the spawning was ongoing. On top of the powerhead, eggs are piled three to four deep.  There are eggs scattered around other locations in the aquarium as well.

There was heavy rain the day before. They seem to like to spawn after heavy rain. The only thing I have to do to get them to spawn is feeding them as much food as they can eat. Fish foods High in fat and protein will produce large spawns like this one. I am currently feeding them exclusively on Pruina AquaMax. Freeze-dried tubifex worms work as well, but I have not found an easy way to feed them.

#aquarium #corydoras #albino #spawn #eggs #fishfood #tubifex #AquaMax

Hawks Will Eat Your Fish In Out Door Pond Or Tubs

A couple of years ago, a red-shouldered hawk cleaned out all of my red gold guppy breeders and a few hundred golden mystery snails before I figured out what was happening.

 

Just by happenstance, I met a falconer who was also an aquarist and told him about the guppies and mystery snails disappearing, and he told me I had a red-shouldered hawk eating my fish and snails. We started watching for them, and sure enough, my wife saw the hawk two days later.

 

Now I like having the hawks here. I have a vegetable garden and have lots of varmint issues. The hawks eat rabbits and squirrels. If it were not for the hawks, the tree rats would destroy everything. I just wish the hawks didn't eat my fish.

 

 

Hunting For Frogs In the Hornwort

 

Note the frog in the net.

A bunch of bullfrogs got into my outdoor 50-gallon stock tank and devastated my mollies. They ate all but three of the mollies. I removed the plats (hornwort) and drained the tank, and caught four of them. I refilled the stock tank, added a few fry were added, and the plants were replaced. The very next day, I spotted a frog I had not caught.

Since I was convinced that the frog had been in the plants I had removed the previous day, I carefully laid out the hornwort and searched for frogs.

I did not find any frogs in the plants, but I did find two more in the tank for a total of six.

#aquarium #pond #stocktank #summertubbing #mollies #fish #frogs

Frogs Will Eat You Fish

 

One of Six Frogs I Caught In My Outdoor 50 Gallon Stock Tank

 

Six of these got into my molly tank somehow and ate almost all of my mollies. This is the smallest one. Since there is no water within a mile of here and the tanks are covered with wire screens, I think they came in on some plants. To catch them I pulled out all the plants and drain the tank. The tank was refilled and the plants (hornwort) returned. The next day there were two more frogs in the tank. MY guess is that they were hiding in the plats I pulled out.

They had a party eating more than 200 mollies. Lots of fry and all the adults. Only three were left. 

Densely Planted 50 Gallon Stock Tank With Hundreds Of Molly Fry And A Few Adults