MichaelJ

I have an outside pond in which I keep a number of fish, including guppies. I bring the guppies inside for the winter. The pond is around 1500 gallons, and about one fourth of it is covered by water hyacinth. The guppies had fry that grew like crazy. I gave away over one hundred. I never fed them or did anything for them. They got all the infusoria they needed from the hyacinth. I'm setting up a 75 gal tank and I'm wondering if it's possible to duplicate those conditions in a tank. What I'm considering is covering about a third of the tank with Riccia floating plants. It should serve the same purpose as the hyacinth. Maybe I'll need to add some additional culture into the Riccia. In other words I'm trying to grow enough fry food in the tank to support at least a majority of the fry. Has anyone tried this approach? Good idea, or thumbs down? I'd appreciate reading experiences and opinions.
Thanks

pepetj

Hi MichaelJ. I keep water hyacynth in my 145gal tank. They need a ton of light and some time to adapt. I also keep water lettuce and duckweed in smaller tanks. However, my infusoria culture are outdoors. I haven't tried to keep infusoria indoors but some articles in the web show how to do that.

On the other hand, guppy fry will eat crushed flakes... I figure it's easier to get a high quality spirulina food can (e.g. Spirulina 20 by Aquatrol) than all the hassle of keeping surface floating plants indoors.

Pepetj
Santo Domingo

MichaelJ

I failed to say that I'm planning on having the Riccia for pearl gouramis anyway. I thinking about how I might be able to set up an on going system with the guppies, and having the gouramis being hatched right in the middle of an infusoria farm.

trinket

I hope you don't mind me asking here, but what does infusoria look like? I think I might have accidentally somehow cultured some in my aquarium. What I'm seeing is extremely small, smaller than a grain of sand, and light in color. They float in the water, move on the glass, rocks and my driftwood (where I first saw them). They can move pretty fast on surfaces, in the water they just float. From what I've searched on google, this seems to only answer that fits but it isn't a topic I'm familiar with at all.

Thanks!