Long time no see everyone.
I wanted to do an update as I will be moving the tanks in a day to my parent's house for the summer. Here's how the tanks look currently.
10G:
As usual, please excuse my iPhone pics.
I did a bit of rearranging and trimming a few weeks ago. I got rid of whatever those leafy plants were and planted them in the vase. I then separated and moved the giant hair grass to create more of a canopy look like in the 5g before I sold it. Everything is still growing in, so it still doesn't look as I planned, but it will soon enough.
4G vase:
Taken right after cleaning.
You may notice it's quite a bit different than before, well that's because I made a fatal beginners error and did it to almost all of my tanks. Basically I bought some liquid algae remover that I though was liquid CO2 like Excel sells. It made sense in my head, CO2 kills algae, so an algae killer is liquid CO2. Boy was I wrong. I first noticed it in my moms mother's day present. The small Cherry shrimp I had put in there died after about 3 days of refusing any kind of food or algae. At the time it didn't strike me as strange, I just figured he got stressed, etc from the move. Then I noticed the vase seemed funny. The color had a strange tint and the fish and shrimp stayed at the top of the water. There were empty snail shells lining the base of the vase. Further more, the plants I pulled out of the 10g were melting and the duck weed in all of the tanks was dyeing off, something that has happened before, it was always quite the opposite normally. Once again I just shrugged it off as "eh it will clear up on it's own." Well my eyes finally opened when I started loosing shrimp left and right in the 10g. They were the ones closest to the dosing I was doing as they were on and in the grass with the algae I was trying to clear up. So I did massive water changes in everything that had been dosed with this stuff tonight, vaccumed, and have my fingers crossed that everything turns out right. I lost all of the plants in the vase minus the bamboo and a total of 7 shrimp out of all of the tanks.
I would like to mention this is only the second time I have EVER vacuumed my tanks. I have found that with the amount of shrimp and snails? I have there never is any kind of waste just sitting around. I very rarely have dead plant matter either. However I did it tonight because of the massive die off of the vase. That water smelled of something foul in the bucket.
My mother's day present:
I need to take out some sand, there's a tad bit too much.