Loaches Online Forum

personally, I don't believe in liquid fertilizer. I use a good soil, and that is it. The plants - mostly coming from a swamp - don't take up nutrients with their leaves, only real aquatic plants do that. THe only real aquatic plants on your list are Aponogetons, and I wonder whether they do it - aft...

Welcome,

With regard to an Asian biotope, you could restrict eventual plants to Asian ones. That would help

No Echionodorus, but Cryptocorynes, for instance

Quarantiane is always needed. I once swapped half a tank of special fish with a good friend. My fishes were healty - that is, have not been ill for 6 months, just as his. But after the swap, all the fishes became ill - in my tank and in his. All died, and we concluded all the fishes must have been c...

I am quite often rather surprized with what many people think plants require. I give them nearly nothing, and it suffices I have 3 tanks measuring 150 cm * 70 cm * 30 cm, with a permanent devider in the middle They have 1 TL light, and I put some unwashed sand on the bottom, 2-3 cm. After a week the...

While I don't think fish will mind fake plants, I myself dislike them. Therefore I would have used real plants. But that is just my thought. I do think, however, your tank would look much calmer, and your fish would be much more happy with a dark background. The most easy way to accomplich this is g...

Your system was polluted by the dirty sump, which is now clean. Therefore it will not be polluted as fast as it used to be. However, due to the cleaning of the sump, it will, for a while, not work as efficient as you would prefer. In fact, were it my tank, I would feed the fish: nothing this week, a...

No Cleaning your sump was most likely long overdue, and from that I would suggest cleaning it once every 6 or 8 months However, what the sump basically does, is turning waste into nitrates - and if the sump does have a lot of waste, it will produce quite a lot of nitrates. I would, however, not chan...

Height is not important for them. Still, I wonder whether you should not better consider selling them - after all, the tank only measures 6 feet lang and one and a half feet from the front to the back, while clowns can reach a whole foot in length.

I never saw one over 13 cm. They are said to reach 15, however.

I saw Ancistrus sp cf cirrhosis, the common Ancistrus, which is not a loach at al, but a catfish. This fish comes from south America - in fact it originates from around Paraguay, prefers water of 20-24 C, pH around 7, DH around 6, and it will only eat algae. Your fish is too small to say whether it ...

You could use a PVC pipe: Put the pipe into the tank, so that you can put food into it, and after sinking the pipe will release the food near the bottom. After installing give the pipe a little rest, so any curious fish will have the time to see it is not for eating. Then, it will start distributing...

I have to disagree, Mike Rain is soft everywhere, and then the water hardens because of minerals in the soil. Therefore, using some limestone in the decoration of a tank would harden the water more or less naturally. Water changing would make the water softer - but in nature it rains too, so I think...

I live in Nijmegen, and we do have a rather good fish-shop (De Maanvis), but loaches is not what they are good in. Lamentably.

Do you know Utaka in Amersfoort? Not far from Hilversum, but a good choice, and not expensive.

However, for Asia they only have rather small tanks - therefore they will not have big fish.

I have not decided yet. The local fish store had not much, and in the next few week, I have not much plans for going far away.

I mean, Duisburg is 100 km, in Amersfoort one can find a good store, and this is 80 km.

For me that is both a bit far away