#the 5 gallon will then become the quarantine tank for the mollies

[theshrimpsquad]

Sometime this month or next month we're getting a 36 gallon :> It's gonna be the first "shared" tank between my fiancee and I, as in we're both gonna pick what fish to put in it (while making sure they're all compatible of course lol). I will be moving Udon, Ramen, and the kuhli loaches into it, but we're looking at maybe some black mollies or even guppies to put in.

And since the 10 gallon will then only have some (five) ember tetras in it, I'll be moving my shrimp from the 5 to the 10. Gods give me strength because I imagine that'll be the most frustrating and time-consuming move of all of them bdsjfh

[fishblr-blog]

New Aquarium Checklist

Today I’m going to be explaining the things you need and why you need them when you want to get into the hobby! This is a very long post so get ready for lots of words!

Money

Before you do anything, the first thing you need to make sure you have enough of is money. You can get an aquarium fully set up for as little or as much money as you are willing to spend, but that doesn’t mean your set up will be successful or more importantly, good for the fish. Spending money on the right supplies will save you from spending the money on something cheap that will stop working and cost you, even more, having to replace it or ideally, update with something less likely to fail you.

Expect to pay at least 100$ for a small aquarium, after buying all you need to set things up and stock the tank. If that’s too rich for your blood, I’d suggest a nano tank and a marimo ball. Betta fish should never be in nano tanks. The smallest you should keep them in is 2.5 gallons, 5 is vastly better.

A Place for the Aquarium to Live

For nano aquariums, it should be easy enough to locate a spot to place them and they’re light enough that you don’t have to worry about them destroying whatever you’ve placed it on.

However the larger the aquarium, the harder to find a spot for it and the harder it is to find something that can support its weight. A 20-gallon tank (which is considered small in the hobby) can weigh up to and over 200 pounds once you add in the water, substrate, fish, and decorations. Things only get heavier from here on out.

Once you hit 10 gallons I suggest getting specially made aquarium stands, which can cost you as much as the tank! You can sometimes get them as a packaged deal for a great price. I suggest checking Facebook, Craigslist, Letgo and other kinds of services for used aquarium stands, often, people are trying to sell the tank along with it too, be wary of used aquariums though as you can’t know what has been put in them. The risk of dangerous chemicals being used on them isn’t worth the money saved on getting a used one unless you trust the previous owner.

Do NOT just assume whatever surface you are putting a 10+ gallon aquarium on will support its weight. Trying to clean up the mess of a broken aquarium is an absolute nightmare. Not just for all the debris but chances are your fish won't survive the experience, even if you’re standing there when it happens.

Time

Aquariums aren’t something you can just set and forget, even if you’re doing a nano aquarium that just has a marimo ball, it will still require your time. Aquariums usually require weekly water changes (about 25%+ of the water), monthly filter maintenance, daily feeding, gravel vacuuming, etc. When you’ve got the aquarium set up it’s really not that much work, but you can’t just neglect it, or your fish will die.

Also, take into consideration the lifespan of the fish. Some fish can live for years... even decades. Make certain you’re on board with this before getting a longer-lived species, if you want to see how you take to the hobby start with a shorter-lived species, such as livebearers (Guppies, platies, swordtails, mollies).

Aquarium

This one seems obvious, no aquarium, not fish! But it’s not as easy as you might think. There are 3 kinds of materials used for aquariums, plastic, glass, and acrylic, each with their benefits and drawbacks (or in the case of plastic, mostly negatives). For those new to the aquarium hobby, I suggest glass aquariums. Acrylic is both very expensive and not as easy to come by (the big box stores rarely have these at all). I’ll go into more detail in another post about the choices and which is best depending on your commitment and desires.

Filter

No filter? No aquarium. You can not do a setup without a filter, even in my plant only tank I still have a nano filter. The only thing you can get away with not having a filter is a marimo nano tank, even then you need to agitate the water often to move the moss ball around.

Filters are tied at the top for one of the most important things you need to keep livestock. It isn’t something you should cut corners on and it’s always better to over filter than under filter (with consideration to water flow... you don’t want to put a fast-moving current in a small betta tank).

There are a variety of filters you can use, sponge, internal, canister, HOB (hang on the back), etc. Each one has its uses depending on your set up. Do your research into the kind of filter you’ll need based on the size of your aquarium, as that’s the most important thing to consider. I’ll be writing an in-depth post about the different kinds of filters and the setups they work for.

Heater

Growing up I never once heard about an aquarium heater but they are a vital part of keeping your fish healthy and happy. Freshwater fish are almost exclusively tropical and require water that is warmer than the typical house’s ambient temperature. Depending on the area you live in and the seasons the fluctuation in water temperature can straight up kill fish. Even here in Phoenix, Arizona the change in daytime temp to nighttime temp can be drastic, especially if the tank is near a window. This is non-negotiable, if you have livestock in your tank, you have to have a heater.

Substrate

While you can have a bare-floor tank (quarantine tanks usually work best with bare tanks) there are a variety of reasons why you should have substrate. The biggest one is they are great at housing beneficial bacteria! If you do a bare-floor aquarium and do a big water change and change the filter at the same time you’ve basically just killed all your beneficial bacteria. Why do you need bacteria? It helps break down bad chemicals, without them, your ammonia levels will spike and kill your fish. You’ll notice that’s a common theme of this list, when we bring dogs and cats into our home our environment is already tailored to their basic needs, but with fish, you need to create an entire ecosystem for them to live in.

There are different kinds of substrates, sand, gravel of different sizes and substrate designed specifically for plants. If you want to do a live plant aquarium you’ll need to spring for a lot pricer special substrate, but it’ll help keep your plants happy and healthy. This kind of substrate is also great for shrimp! I’ll make a substrate post to explain the different kinds and the benefits of them!

Live Bacteria/Starter Bacteria

When you first set up a tank you need to cycle it. Dumping water in a tank, even if you have everything else set up fine, even if you dechlorinate water... without beneficial bacteria your tank isn’t ready for fish yet. Some (not good sources) say you only need to cycle for ‘24 hours’ this is a complete NO. You should cycle for at least a week, and to do that you’ll be adding a liquid starter bacteria to your tank daily (smaller tanks it’s usually just one cap of the stuff). You’ll also want to get a large bottle of it (Unless you have a nano tank) as you’ll be using it even after your tank is cycled and set up. 

Water Test Kit

This one is ‘technically’ optional. Many places will offer free water checks (Petco and Petsmart offer them for free, local aquarium specialty stores will usually do the first one free then a small fee for each subsequent test). You could just take advantage of these free water checks but I suggest if you’re really interested in taking the best care of your fish you should get a water test kit and test the water regularly. You can also get test strips! They are not as accurate as the test kits are so shouldn’t be the only thing you are relying on. In my experience, Petsmart uses the test strips and local stores use the kits, the local stores can also give you better advice for what the water test results mean and how to adjust your parameters.

Decorations

Another ‘technically optional’. While you could keep a tank naked save for the bare essentials (filter, heater, tank, hood, and light)... that... isn’t what I would call an ideal set up. Decorations not only are visually appealing to use they are important to your fish as well! Many fish are shy and prefer to have hiding spots, they can grow bored without an environment to navigate. Territorial fish need something to demarcate their territory or they’ll become very stressed and aggressive.

Fish don’t really care about what color the decorations are or if they’re plastic, so don’t feel the pressure to get the really pricey decorations. While live plants have a lot of benefits they require their own focus and parameters and can get really complicated. Just make sure your decorations are fish safe. Never add wood to your tank without boiling and soaking it, fresh wood is never something you should put in your tank, even wood sold specifically for aquariums needs to be soaked to leech the tannins out. Tannins will turn your water brown/amber and make it murky which can work for a brackish aquarium but will likely not be appealing to a freshwater set up. Wood can also change the PH of your water. Like I said, plastic decorations don’t require any extra work other than a quick rinse off before adding them to the tank (never use soaps!), the natural materials take extra effort and thought.

Fish

This is so far down the list because you need to focus so much on everything above long before you get the fish. The most important thing to consider is the fish you want. A lot of fish sold at pets stores can grow to truly monstrous sizes (I have seen juvenile Silver Arowana sold at Petsmart! They grow to 3 feet long, sometimes more!) so you can’t just walk into the store and buy whatever strikes your fancy. The majority of the fish for sale are juveniles and the true sizes of them are rarely accurately listed, (the Silver Arowana sign at Petsmart claimed they only got 12 inches long) if they’re listed at all.

First consider the size of the tank you’re comfortable buying, as stated above getting a small setup (10-20 gallon tank) you’re looking at about 100$, if not more just for the base setup (My 20-gallon setup cost about 200$ because I use live plants and natural materials, it could have been half as much if I had taken it in another direction). Once you’ve picked out a tank size only then can you consider the kinds of fish you can put in it. The smaller the tank, the fewer the fish you can add to it and the smaller the fish must be. So turn your eyes away from the bigger fish unless you’re willing to invest in a tank that will fit them at their adult sizes. It’s about 1 inch of fish per gallon, and any other livestock you add count as well. Shrimp would be about .5 gallon per shrimp (as they have a lower load), snails also could towards the bio-load of the tank which is why getting an infestation can be dangerous for your tank.

Fish Food

Another obvious one but this is more complicated than you think! There is a lot of cheap and poorly made fish food available on the market. I don’t suggest ever buying it from the grocery store unless its an emergency and you plan on replacing it with something better very very soon. Different fish have different requirements, some are strictly carnivores, others omnivores, some herbivores. Feeding them the wrong thing can lead to starvation, malnutrition, constipation and general failure to thrive.

Always read the ingredient list, some foods contain copper sulfate which is a very dangerous chemical to any invertebrates (snails/shrimp). I once lost a beloved rabbit snail because I failed to read the full ingredient list of the algae wafers I got for the tank. It can also be toxic to fish in high doses. I’d suggest just avoiding any foods that list copper sulfate at all to be on the safe side.

Hood/Lid

You can go without a hood or a lid... however, there are very good reasons to make sure you have a good tank cover. Water evaporates and you’ll have to add water between water changes, which is tedious and can mess with the parameters of your water. Higher on the list of importance is the fact that some fish are jumpers. They will leap right out of the water! Betta fish are well known for this, the Silver Arowana I mentioned above is so notorious for this that even very experienced keepers have lost full grown ones to a hard leap, even with a secured lid.

If you have pets (cats especially) you may end up finding them pawing at the water, falling in or just trying to catch the fish. I say: better safe than sorry!

If you’re willing to keep on top of the water levels, have no pets that can get into the tank, a rimless acrylic tank without a lid does look amazing.

Lights

This is another one that can be as complicated or easy as you want it to be. If you have a very well lit area for the tank you could potentially get away without a dedicated light. You could even just have a hanging pendant light that is bright enough to illuminate the tank and that’s fine!

It gets more complicated if you want to do a planted tank, as I said in decorations, live plants require extra work and this is one of those things that will add to their time and cost. Live plants require a specific spectrum to grow properly. Some can survive with basic lights but if you want to really get a planted tank going you need to get full spectrum lights and full spectrum LED lights can be very expensive (for my 20 gallons I was looking at 60+ dollars).

LED lights take less energy to run, which is great in the long run and they last a very long time. Fluorescent bulbs are cheaper and readily available (hardware stores may even have the size you need!) but will need to be changed more often and it’s vital that you don’t let any of the moisture hits them.

And that’s all the things you need to consider when buying an aquarium and setting it up! There are other things you’ll need but aren’t as vital as what’s listed above. A small tank you could just use a soft toothbrush to clean algae off and you could just siphon the water out with a cup for water changes. Bigger tanks though will require gravel vacs and dedicated algae scrubbers (you could use a soft sponge like the ones sold at the grocery store but don’t use the scrubbing side!).

Here is a link to a PDF you can print out to check off what you have and still need!

[eabunnymund]

so you're not a registered rescue yet you're asking people for donations? sounds like a scam. you also show poor knowledge of rabbit care and are neglecting your fish, and support letting cats free roam outside. maybe you should rethink this animal thing, you clearly know nothing about animal safety and care. yikes.

I've had anon turned back on for 3 hours people, but sure, lets do this again.Per the 501c3 requirements I cannot apply as a registered rescue because my rescue does not have any revenue or income, the only members of my rescue are my immediate family, and I can not afford the $400-900 application fee. Per the FAQ page 

“The IRS does not grant tax exemption to organizations that do not have their programs budgeted. They require detail regarding your proposed activities to ensure you qualify as a 501(c)(3) organization. 

Regarding Your Budget: Your Nonprofit budget needs to balance out each year on the document you submit to the IRS. Significant profits or losses will be a point of concern with the IRS. Significant profits will prompt the IRS to assume you may be operating as a for-profit corporation.

First, you must form a Nonprofit corporation in your home state. Second, your organization must adopt bylaws and obtain an employer identification number. Then, you must prepare and submit an application to the IRS that requests tax exempt status under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3). The application review process takes the IRS from 3-6 months. 

The IRS wants to ensure that the control of the Nonprofit is held by individuals focused on public benefit. According to the IRS, related directors, or those with common business interests (i.e., they own a business together), cannot make a disinterested vote.

Even if related directors are unpaid, the IRS may still ask the Nonprofit to revise the board to people who are unrelated.

Most people forming Nonprofit organizations prefer to set up a 501(c)(3) public charity because the opportunities for public donations are far greater. Private donors to a 501(c)(3) "public charity" may donate up to 50% of their adjusted gross income. Donors to a "private foundation" can only donate up to 30% of their adjusted gross income.

Ultimately, the IRS will look at an organization's primary source of financial support to determine if it qualifies as a public charity or a private foundation. In general, if an organization derives its support from a relatively few number of people, the IRS will classify the organization as a private foundation. If the organization's source of support is large and varied enough, the IRS will usually classify the foundation as a public charity.”

So, I am currently in the process of forming my Rescue, but have not deemed it an immediate concern yet because my goal is to first network with other rescues in the larger areas (I’m in a small farming town outside of Orlando), Form ties with the community to acquire board members and volunteers, and gain interested sponsors so as to complete the requirements for an official nonprofit status. 

In regards to my animal care, I do not let my cats roam freeoutside, there are several feral cats I care for, they lived on the old orangegrove my mother’s neighborhood was built on, I feed them, tend to any injuriesor illnesses they have, had them all spayed and neutered, and have set upshelter for them in the rain. Pretty Lady, who brought her kittens to us, isprimarily at Porch cat, but will not come inside, and when she does its usuallyto cut through the house from the front door to the back so she doesn’t have tohop the fence if its raining.

My cat’s are: Angel, who is blind, and Boxer, who belongs tomy niece, Milo who is in my icon is my brother James’ cat and lives primarily inhis room because he is a very shy kitty, unless he is slinking down to sneakinto the bunny room. These cats get supervised play outside with the bunnies,they do not live outside, but they enjoy the outdoors the same as anyone. Wehave outdoor enclosures, but that is because it rains a lot and there is therisks of birds hunting them, also it gives them a place to roll around in pilesof hay or dig deep ankle breaking tunnels they can’t do inside. Rabbits need toforage, they need to dig, it’s a requirement they have, if you do not provideyour rabbit with some kind of sandbox they will begin destructive habits. Somefamilies give them hay mats or ball pits instead of sand boxes for a more messfree stimulation.

My rabbit care is far from perfect, no animal caregiver isthe best, and if you go into rescue with the idea you will always have theperfect setup you will never succeed. Sometimes all you can do is have a communalplay area and a few small enclosures, which is why rescues end up having kennels.Rabbits also have very scary disagreements, the bonding process of rabbits canturn violent fast,but if you do not let your buns work things out they willonly get worse, its up to the parent to monitor when an argument between bunsbecomes dangerous and when its just a little flying fur, and to separate accordingly.

In regards to the fish, we’re going to go over this one lasttime. Mustachio has a 50 gallon former tank, this means it is a triangle with acurved front, it looks smaller than it is because it extends into the back.When he began to outgrow this tank I began the search for a better setup, as myvet recommended a pond I started that process, however I had no funds and a lotof bunnies with health issues, Mustacio was not in immediate danger but therabbits where, so he was put on the backburner. When I got my settlement checkfrom my car accident last spring immediately resumed my quest for a pond,however it would take months for the HOA process to approve an in ground pond,so I got a 100 gal patio pond to solve the more immediate crisis.

When the subject of the pleco and goldfish came up I taggedsomeone I knew and respected for advice, and followed their advice, I decidedthat since the pleco is still only around 3 inches he could continue living inthe 50 gal tank with the new guppies, who are in a 15gal holding tank for quarantineright now, and I would place Mustachio with a few little feeder fish from thebarn into the pond, as I had every intention of getting a bigger pond and theywould not grow fast enough to be in dire need before then.

At my mother’s barn there are 2 bait tanks, they look like bigfreezers, that hold goldfish kept to control mosquitoes in the water troughs. Theydon’t live long because of birds, racoons, frogs, cats, and the horsesthemselves eating them. The first tank is the gold fish that are ready to beput out in the horse troughs, many of these horses are around $10-20k horsesand they cannot risk exposure to unscreened fish in their tanks, so the secondtank is the newly bought goldfish that are kept for quarantine and observation.You can buy these fish for bait if you want to go fishing, I bought a few fromthe prescreened tank, knowing that mustachio would probably eat a few of them Ibought 5, big fish tend to each fry you see. My nieces’ balloon mollies arealways easing their own babies. True enough, he ate the 2 smallest, which iswhy Beebee is in their own little area, because I really liked the colors and Iwanted to protect her until she grew big.

However, because several people can’t accept that atemporary solution that is not immediately harmful (such as a kennel or asmaller tank) with the active steps underway to create ideal conditions(adoptions or a pond) is better than euthanasia I have had my askbox, my messaging,my replies, and my own mother’s facebook filled with rants, insults, andthreats because I dared to disagree that keeping a pleco and a goldfish togetherwould be immediately lethal to either of them, and that a 100gal pond was asuitable temporary fix to a housing issue.

Oh, also that I keep goldfish in horse water troughs, andfeed my fish bloodworms, because vegans.