RO water with peat moss or Indian almond

I disagree with alkaline water. I believe their natural biotpe is soft and slightly acidic. I dont know of any apisto which are found in natural alkaline water in Amazon. I dont know of any upper bodies of Amazon River where water are alkaline. If there are, someone please provide some info/links.
Although will tolerate slightly alkaline water, I had higher success keeping/breed them in the environment close to their natural habitat.

First contact your supplier for water condition they were raised/kept in as well as water they were shipped. Most shippers who knows what they are doing should shipped their fish in slightly acidic water in order to reduce toxic effect of ammonia accumulating in the bag.
Upon their replies and actual test of shipped water, you can determine what water is best for them.

When I had these fish, they did best in pH of 6.5 (Range:6.2 - 7.2 was OK) provided they were captive bred, not a wild fish. In case of wild fish, closer analysis/preparation & attention had to be given to its water condition in order to increase their survival rate..

If your RO is 6.5 and soft, why not just use RO provided their shipped water chemistry is close to your RO water. No need to used tannins and/or other additives w/ RO IMO.

When you say trio, I guess 1 male to 2 female. Prepare to remove female not involved in spawning, especially in small tank. Even in heavily planted tank, she can be harassed to a point she may decline in health. And it may eventually lead to her death.

Furthermore, avoid feeding Brine & Mysis shrimps for f/w. I dont even use brine shrimp for any fish unless to inititate feeding of certain newly arrived/fineaky salt water fish from wild. If I can avoid them, would do so at first chance.

Fresh hatchling of brine (Artemia naupilli?) has its uses for raising certain difficult frys.

Try sticking to f/w fz food such as bloodworm, daphnia, mosquito larvae, etc, etc. which are more natural food sources for f/w fish.
If you are familiar with live blackworms (cultured), they were the best to precondition spawning pairs along wth live bloodworms and daphnia (latter two may be seasonal and higher risk of contamination).

Godd Luck with new family member! Looking forward to pics!

BTW, dont go too crazy with GH/KH in RO water. Since RO water may not buffer well, causing pH drop with time, just monitor pH closely in the beginning. At such time, you can run experiements when performing SMALL WC with RO as only new water or with just tap water and/or mixture of RO/tap in order to stablize the pH for longer period. Remember, small water changes at a time.
 
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*Correction*

Lee Newman (the author of that article...Fish Channel btw, is the website for Aquarium Fish International magazine) wasn't mentioning breeding in that article I linked to, so you may indeed need more RO water than just 50/50. Sorry about that, my fault - it was late and I was tired :o

Here's an article with an actual breeding account:
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/apisto_trifasciata.php
The water does seem to be extremely soft in that account.

The tank was filled with collected rainwater: pH of 6.1 and hardness near 0 and kept at a temperature of 80 degrees ....... Water changes were usually performed once a week, at about 40 percent with rainwater.

By the way, that article wasn't written today - I looked at other articles and they all have today's date on the upper right hand tab...huh.

Mike Hellweg, author of Culturing Live Foods (an awesome book - I was lucky enough to have my library special order me a copy, perhaps yours can too!) mentioned in his book that he feeds brine shrimp nauplii to his fish every day.

I do believe it's an excellent food for fry once they get past needing microscopic foods (in the case of very small fry such as Apisto and betta fry) - do you have a sponge filter in your breeding setup? If you can get one matured in another tank, by the time the fry hatch it should be already seeded.

Besides the obvious advantage that live food wiggles around and is more attractive, Hellweg mentioned that live food provides the developing fry enzymes which are missing from prepared foods. While these commercial diets might be nutritionally complete, they lack enzymes (which are destroyed by heat/freezing) very beneficial to the fry for proper development.

Just thought I'd mention that, since I never gave live food much thought except for conditioning the parents. It seems so much easier to just feed frozen BBS or Liquifry to fry, but if I were raising fry now, I would probably make an effort to obtain a BS hatchery and a microworm culture. Vinegar eels are another easy one :)
 
By the way, I believe Rachel keeps alder cones and IAL in her Apisto tanks, but I don't think she uses RO water. So she may have them in her tank specifically for water softening purposes.

The alder cones also act as an anti-fungal for eggs, they are used by many Cory breeders. I don't know if they are as beneficial with dwarf cichlids though, since they mouth and fan their eggs (unlike cories) so are able to keep them clean themselves, most of the time.
 
I can't thank you enough for all of your help! I thought I knew about fish before joining this forum lol :). I have tons and tons of brine shrimp eggs and an air pump, so live food shouldn't be a problem. You mentioned setting up a sponge filter. When the fry hatch, should I remove the parents or the fry? Will a 10 gallon do? I've only heard of people keeping the fry with the parents almost until maturity. I'll keep my eyes out for IALs, but at current, I'm using the remainder of my budget on plants to break up the sight-lines of the tank (I'm getting 2 males and 1 female). My concern is lowering the pH and hardness to a level where the plants can't survive.
 
Cerianthus, the fish are being kept at 80 degrees with a pH of 7.0- that's straight from the seller. What I'm wondering is should I use a 50/50 combination of tap and RO and then add IAL leaves? Those should soften it and reduce the pH, but the tap water would buffer the pH to keep from drastic swings. Or would the IAL just turn my tap water into the equivalent of my RO water and be useless? Thanks for the lengthy response BTW :)!
 
It does not have to be exactly 7, IMO.
If you desire 7, I would try different ratio. For example, 80% RO & 20% tap or 90/10, etc etc to determine what is best mix to reach you desired pH.

And make sure to drip acclimate new arrival. Remember that NH3 may have accumulated in the bag but toxicity efffect of NH3 is greatly reduce as pH drop below 7.4 thus as long as pH is 7 or lower in the bag, I would not worry about NH3.

Check for possible NO2 in the bag as well before acclimating.

In any case, remove portion of water from bag before acclimation and remove some water frequently during aclimation.

As water is drain from tank to bag, tank water level will drop. Do not fill back up yet.

When you think they are ready for transfer, do so in low water level, thus minimizing possible pressure issue related to depth of water.

One fish are well adjusted in the tank, sometimes for few days/weeks, in low water level, I would add water to tank very gradually giving fish to adapt to changing environment.

My main conceren would be cycling the tank with apisto??? which is not a good thing to do but not impossible. All depends on your efforts.

DO you have another tank where you can run filter for APisto tank?

Prepare another same batch of water in buckets & circulating at least with air stone for emergency. If you dont have all the equipment, you can heat the % of tap water to raise the temp of RO water in the bucket in case water in the bucket is lower than tank water. Always try to match the temp of tank before adding to tank thus ruducing temp fluctuation, especially sudden drop.

I dont hink pH will swing that fast but again I am not there. Check pH/NH3/NO2 regularly
 
The tank is fully cycled right now. I have several fish that have been living in it for a few days. I think a 3/4 RO to 1/4 tap makes a neutral pH. I think I will stick to this and eventually add IAL to lower pH and add tannins. That gives me a safety barrier to keep from killing the bacteria in the filter.
 
OK. I dont know how you actually cycled the tank but should monitor closely upon introducing new additions.

Good Luck
 
AnythingShiny said:
I can't thank you enough for all of your help! I thought I knew about fish before joining this forum lol :). I have tons and tons of brine shrimp eggs and an air pump, so live food shouldn't be a problem. You mentioned setting up a sponge filter. When the fry hatch, should I remove the parents or the fry? Will a 10 gallon do? I've only heard of people keeping the fry with the parents almost until maturity. I'll keep my eyes out for IALs, but at current, I'm using the remainder of my budget on plants to break up the sight-lines of the tank (I'm getting 2 males and 1 female). My concern is lowering the pH and hardness to a level where the plants can't survive.
Click to expand...

You're more than welcome! :D Hey, even the best of us have lots to learn. You know what they say, the more you learn the less you know! It's definitely true about fish :)

I would recommend removing the parents. Much easier to remove two fish vs several, for one, and fry are much less able to be withstand acclimation to different (even slightly different) water chemistry. That's why small, frequent water changes are best with fry - you don't want to do anything suddenly.

One advantage to live food is that it keeps the tank very clean. None of it goes to waste, since it is alive until it is eaten! Frozen food, and especially things like powdered egg yolk and such, are very messy.

I think a 10 gallon would do, bigger would be better in the long run. Just make sure the water chemistry is very similar. It would be helpful to make a tank log of water changes and such, when you are having to do something besides just add dechlorinator, it helps to keep a journal of exactly how much water you changed, what percentage was tap, what % was RO, etc.

Do you have a sponge filter? If not, I could probably sell you one cheaply:
http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=231686
PM me if you're interested :) I've lowered prices on all my remaining equipment that is still available for sale in this thread.
 
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