Leaderboard

Here is a picture of my Betta, not very interesting in terms of colour but easy to see in the tank as it is quite dark! He is with some high grade red cherry shrimp and it is fairly densely planted (sounds better than the truth - overgrown) but I am sure he wwill be eating some of the baby shrimp when he sees them. If you get to the stage of having a cull tank for poor grade shrimp then putting a betta in that would be ideal, otherwise it is a risk keeping shrimp with a betta so only try it with your least favourite shrimps in a well planted tank. Betta are fairly easy to keep (as other tropical fish) and interesting as they will interact with people who go near the tank and at feeding and tank maintenance time. For creating carpets of moss, I used to use pads/squares of stainless steel mesh, on which I put the moss then wound fishing line to hold the moss in place. For attaching plants/moss to wood or rock though the superglue is much easier, it may need to be a certain type/make though??? I always buy it from my shrimp supplies supplier. I saw my friend earlier and the apistos seem to be doing well so most likely I will try those in the 35L aquarium, so won't have many. Not got any further than that at this point. I wouldn't even consider putting shrimp in with apistos. What you have been reading about 'ageing' water I suspect is to get chlorine from the (tap) water? The friend I saw today (with the apistos) bought a 360L aquarium about 10 years ago so we had to modify/strengthen his sideboard to take the weight. His floor is concrete so that wasn't an issue. Even with just the 3 tanks before I moved the wiring was crazy with each tanh having, heater, light, filter - looked a real mess, but it didn't actually use much extra power as only the heater(s) were >10W.

Great! That's what I was thinking. Thank you for that. Honestly I was so worried about being on rainwater when I first started cycling my tank. Now though, I much prefer it.

Not if you are using rain water. No need to age water that's been on earth for millions of years.

Oh and Simon, I keep forgetting to ask you, your Betta! What type? Colour? Name? What shrimp is he/she with? I had a betta years ago, and I sadly didn't know what they actually require. I did upgrade him to a bigger tank but it didn't have a heater. I didn't realise everything that was needed to correctly house one. There wasn't much internet then and we just went off what the pet shop said to do. I'm really ashamed I didn't dig deeper, but one of these days, I'm going to buy another and give it a proper home with everything it needs. Does your betta pick off many of your shrimp? I would love to try and house the two together.

Yeah its probably best to get 1 male and 3 females but also got to think if they breed- do you need to be careful of inbreeding? I just had a look. Dennerle tanks are only available in Europe. I'm now just looking at Petworx simple glass cube tanks. They have them on ebay for just a smidge over $100AUD. Here we have a lot of LFS's in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, AdelIde, Perth, and a couple in Canberra, but not much if you go rural. I'm discovering more and more LFS's in Sydney though, that have a great range of things. Annoyingly, I'm 2hrs South. I'm headed to Sydney on Wednesday though so I'm going to see if I can drop into one or two stores and see what I can find. I would love to buy a bonsai driftwood and I can then slowly start to prepare for the next few tanks. What filtration do you run on your tanks Simon? People say for shrimps to just use a Sponge filter. What size is best to go for with a 30L tank? I want to buy one now to seed it in my current tank. I'm also looking at buying the fluval 107 for my 60L tank. I found a great deal on it too. Sorry for all of the questions. Yourself and Jason are an absolute wealth of knowledge!! Thank you!!