L046 pleco setup

[Niki_up]

They seem to be doing well. I would offer a couple of thoights.

1 dg of GH or KH = approximately 17.8 ppm

Baby zebras need veggies in their diet more than they will when they get older.

A great food for both the adults and the offspring of any size are some of the Repashy gel Mixes. I use three for all my Hypancisturs. Bottom Scratcher. Spawn & Grow and Soilent Green. I mix the latter with the other two such that there is about 20% Soilent Green. The Spawn & Grow is great for conitioning for spawning and for fry growth. However, it is a high fat food and should not be used as the basic diet. The Bottom Scratcher is fine for regular feeding. I also have frozen cyclops, rotifer and BBS I feed for the smallest fry. Bigger zebras get frozen blood worms, brine shrimp and mysis shrimp.

I use TDS as this one measurement covers everything in the water. To stimulate spawning by doing a dry and rainy season the TDS should be 1/2 after the onset of the rainy as theywere at the peak of the dry.

Finally, the one thing to avoid with zebra fry is elevated nitrate.

I’m not going to lie I’m terrified to use frozen whole foods like mysis and cyclops as I’ve read about fry and adults choking on them.
The only gel foods I currently have on hand are morning wood and community.
I was planning to get some of the veggie one.

as for the nitrates I had no idea they were so high, I’ll be remedying that this week with small daily water changes. ?

 

[TwoTankAmin]

You really should get the three foods I suggested from Repashy for zebras. The morning wood is really for the wood eating plecos.

As long as you feed tiny foods for the offspring you can also feed larger ones for the adults. I have done this now for 15 years. I always put in the fry sized food first. The older fish will a;so eat the fry food, so do not wait long after feeding the smaller stuff to add the bigger food.

Cyclops and rotifers are fry foods just like BBS. But frozen BBS are expensive and I get the other two in slabs. I keep some of the frozen BBS despite the cost so that I can feed fry fast and easily and skip the rest.

 

[Niki_up]

You really should get the three foods I suggested from Repashy for zebras. The morning wood is really for the wood eating plecos.

As long as you feed tiny foods for the offspring you can also feed larger ones for the adults. I have done this now for 15 years. I always put in the fry sized food first. The older fish will a;so eat the fry food, so do not wait long after feeding the smaller stuff to add the bigger food.

Cyclops and rotifers are fry foods just like BBS. But frozen BBS are expensive and I get the other two in slabs. I keep some of the frozen BBS despite the cost so that I can feed fry fast and easily and skip the rest.

Oh I don’t fed my zebras morning wood, I have that for my other plecos ?

I have been looking locally for those rapeshy you mentioned but haven’t been able to locate them. I’m going to have to order online and I’m not sure what prices I should be looking to pay for them as all website have different prices. So I’m still researching them.

there’s no community fish with the zebras, just some bn pleco fry and shrimp. Once the bn fry go to new homes it will just be the zebras and shrimps so thefry will be able to eat their food peacefully.

thanks for the advise, alwaysenjoy getting advise from the experienced breeders!

 

[Niki_up]

+1

1 dg of GH or KH = approximately 17.8 ppm

I meant to ask if you could explain this a little better. I’m not very familiar with these readings and just posted the numbers that I came up with following the instructions on the test.

So for the GH I used 9 drops of chemical and did the math which gave me a number 180…is 180 not the ppm measurement?

what is dg?

 

[Niki_up]

So I got my nitrates down to 5ppm today! Ya
This little guy should be happy.

I may have mis calculated and this guy should be 3 weeks old on November 6.

 

[Niki_up]

So I took a measurement today

I use a wooden skewer and held it against a measuring tape and notched some marked in the skewer that are spaced 1/4 of an inch apart.

this guy will be 3 weeks old on Saturday

 

[TwoTankAmin]

dg means degree - 1 drop - 1 dg - I should probably have used dKH or dH (degree Hardness).

API uses 17.9 as the factor for converting dg to ppm



However, understand what this means. you added 9 drops. Using the API 17.9 that would equal 161.1 ppm. But if you had needed 10 drops that would convert to 179 ppm. There are 17.8 numbers between those two ppm readings. I use a tds meter and it reads in 1 ppm increments. So, if I test your water and the reading is 165 ppm how do you think this would read on the test kit as 9 or as 10? (This is not a scientifically correct example since a TDS meter reads everything in the water but a GH kit does not. But is is essentially a good explanation). I have never been able to get the answer to this. My assumption is that the GH would consider every ppm number between 161.1 and 178.9 would all read as 9 dkH but if the the ppm were 179 then it would read 10 dkh.

This may not matter much in harder water but it could be more important in soft water.

This is from the FINS site

Water hardness follows the following guidelines. The unit dH means ``degree hardness'', while ppm means ``parts per million'', which is roughly equivalent to mg/L in water. 1 unit dH equals 17.8 ppm CaCO3. Most test kits give the hardness in units of CaCO3; this means the hardness is equivalent to that much CaCO3 in water but does not mean it actually came from CaCO3.

General Hardness

0 - 4 dH, 0 - 70 ppm : very soft
4 - 8 dH, 70 - 140 ppm : soft
8 - 12 dH, 140 - 210 ppm : medium hard
12 - 18 dH, 210 - 320 ppm : fairly hard
18 - 30 dH, 320 - 530 ppm : hard
higher : liquid rock (Lake Malawi and Los Angeles, CA)

I buy all my Repashy online from Allen's site. From what I have seen everybody pretty much charges the same price for the Repashy foods. I just got 2 x 12 oz. Spawn & Grow, 2 x 12 oz. Bottom Scratcher and 1 x 12 oz. Soilent Green. I also use the Igapo Fruit, but I mostly give that to my clown loaches who love the stuff. I do have one food I make which is a mix of all 4 foods.
https://www.store.repashy.com/

 

[Niki_up]

Found a fry tonight, looks to be growing well

 

[Niki_up]

Three of the babies have been posted for new homes today

 

[Niki_up]

Last baby left of the batch