ihatepavelbure
10-01-2005, 9:36 AM
Hi everyone, I'm new to fishkeeping and I have a question re: feeding. I tend to ramble, so question in brief first, followed by tank setup specs and background.
How much do I need to feed my zebra loach and two cories? It seems they eat the same food so I feed them at the same time from different sides of the tank so the botia doesn't get nippy. OK, now the circumstances... :coffee2:
Background:
I have two small tanks (1 five gal, 1 ten gal) containing:
In the 5 gal: 1 apple snail, 2 cherry shrimp to ride around on him
In the 10 gal: two cory cats (paleatus), two neons (remainders of a school of five that we bought now knowing how poor a choice they were for a new tank--beginner's mistake and now we don't know what to do with the remaining two), and 1 zebra loach. Hoping to get him a buddy eventually. FWIW, in this tank we splurged on the best filter and heater we could find, and it has one live plant (if that makes a diff).
At this time, this seems to be well-stocked. As the fish in the 10 gal grow, we hope to upgrade, but it seems this should be fine for a few months at least. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Well, we had all sorts of trouble cycling the tanks. I won't go into it in detail, but we successfully cycled the 10 gal with bio-spira but the filter developed a problem and we had to return it, and this knocked out our fledgling bacteria colony. Then we had the best filter available, and bought new B-S, but got two bad packages in a row or something :thud: (they didn't work at all, ammonia was near 2), and finally after much praying for our fish the tanks seem to be cycled for the last two weeks. Nitrate is between 0 and 25 ppm, everything else at perfect levels including ammonia. Temperature perfect all the time.
While this nightmare was going on we were hypersensitive about overfeeding. In fact, our LFS suggested (this was pre-loach) that we basically hold off altogether. We had cories, a snail, and neons at this point. Now we're trying to figure out what's appropriate feeding for all involved.
We have flake food, algae tabs, shrimp pellets as candidates. What to feed and how often to do it?
On a related note, these neons are eating everything. I feed them flake food in the afternoon, and then an hour or so later I drop in two shrimp pellets (1 for the cories, 1 for the loach) and return to the tank that evening to see two extremely fat neons. I'm telling you that it resembled cases of dropsy. These neons are eating the shrimp pellets on the substrate? They are even nipping at the fins of my loach. The zebra loach is terrified of these half-inch neon tetras?!? He runs from them. If they are hanging around his cave, he will not go into it! I've never heard of anything like this online...he's like four or five times their size. I know the loach and cories got some shrimp too because I saw (& heard, in the case of the loach!) them eating, but I'm wondering exactly how to handle the neons.
Don't know if I should get more neons or just bring them back to the LFS and get a school of white clouds or what....three of our original 5 neons developed what looked like neon tetra disease to me so we brought them to the LFS where they stuck them in a hospital tank, and resold them (if they survived).
Sorry for the ramble....I just have more questions than I know what to do with. Any critiques and suggestions are more than welcomed. :bowing:
How much do I need to feed my zebra loach and two cories? It seems they eat the same food so I feed them at the same time from different sides of the tank so the botia doesn't get nippy. OK, now the circumstances... :coffee2:
Background:
I have two small tanks (1 five gal, 1 ten gal) containing:
In the 5 gal: 1 apple snail, 2 cherry shrimp to ride around on him
In the 10 gal: two cory cats (paleatus), two neons (remainders of a school of five that we bought now knowing how poor a choice they were for a new tank--beginner's mistake and now we don't know what to do with the remaining two), and 1 zebra loach. Hoping to get him a buddy eventually. FWIW, in this tank we splurged on the best filter and heater we could find, and it has one live plant (if that makes a diff).
At this time, this seems to be well-stocked. As the fish in the 10 gal grow, we hope to upgrade, but it seems this should be fine for a few months at least. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Well, we had all sorts of trouble cycling the tanks. I won't go into it in detail, but we successfully cycled the 10 gal with bio-spira but the filter developed a problem and we had to return it, and this knocked out our fledgling bacteria colony. Then we had the best filter available, and bought new B-S, but got two bad packages in a row or something :thud: (they didn't work at all, ammonia was near 2), and finally after much praying for our fish the tanks seem to be cycled for the last two weeks. Nitrate is between 0 and 25 ppm, everything else at perfect levels including ammonia. Temperature perfect all the time.
While this nightmare was going on we were hypersensitive about overfeeding. In fact, our LFS suggested (this was pre-loach) that we basically hold off altogether. We had cories, a snail, and neons at this point. Now we're trying to figure out what's appropriate feeding for all involved.
We have flake food, algae tabs, shrimp pellets as candidates. What to feed and how often to do it?
On a related note, these neons are eating everything. I feed them flake food in the afternoon, and then an hour or so later I drop in two shrimp pellets (1 for the cories, 1 for the loach) and return to the tank that evening to see two extremely fat neons. I'm telling you that it resembled cases of dropsy. These neons are eating the shrimp pellets on the substrate? They are even nipping at the fins of my loach. The zebra loach is terrified of these half-inch neon tetras?!? He runs from them. If they are hanging around his cave, he will not go into it! I've never heard of anything like this online...he's like four or five times their size. I know the loach and cories got some shrimp too because I saw (& heard, in the case of the loach!) them eating, but I'm wondering exactly how to handle the neons.
Don't know if I should get more neons or just bring them back to the LFS and get a school of white clouds or what....three of our original 5 neons developed what looked like neon tetra disease to me so we brought them to the LFS where they stuck them in a hospital tank, and resold them (if they survived).
Sorry for the ramble....I just have more questions than I know what to do with. Any critiques and suggestions are more than welcomed. :bowing: