Bacteria/pH with vinegar solution & propagating vinegar eels

I've done my research & searched past FL threads till my brain is addled, but am not finding an answer clear to me.

Took a bit in my rural area but I found vinegar eels for the pea puffer that does not eat snails - only ghost shrimp & the eels.

The mature culture is in a water bottle & thus far I've simply dropped about half a mg of eels in vinegar into the 6g tank & the PP begins hunting. However, my research turned up that the vinegar is likely damaging nitrifying bacteria & could cause sudden pH drops - particularly in such low water volume. I haven't seen this yet, after a handful of vinegar eel additions, but I don't want to court disaster in this heavily planted, high pH, years aged tank with similarly difficult to aquire feeder shrimp.

The alternative is properly harvesting the eels from a narrow neck beer or wine bottle, filter floss stuffed neck w/declor water above that the eels swim up to within 24 hrs & are removed via pipette for feeding.

The problem is that I'm also told to maintain the eels in a wide mouth jar for gas exchange, rather than a beer bottle.

Should I keep the eels in a wide mouth jar, set up a new beer bottle w/vinegar, declor water & apples weekly, then pour it all back into the wide mouth jar & start the beer bottle again every week? For a few mg a week it kinda sounds like overkill. Can the eels instead live & propagate in the beer bottle indefinitely?

Alternatively, can I keep up with the .5 mg of vinegar & eels straight to the tank without endangering the bacteria or creating pH drops that may kill the shrimp b4 the PP gets to them?

Anyone here that can speak to the bacteria/pH issues and/or vinegar eel propagating issue? Thank you.

 

It's heavily planted, so pH swings a lot. It's heavily planted, so nitrifying bacteria play the 16th and 17th fiddle.

Anyways, I keep vinegar eels in two large bottle (risk management) and pour some of the vinegar water in a small bottle with a long, thin neck, stuff some floss in, gently add some water and harvest eels for a week or so. I find offering live foods to fish a rewarding task, not overkill.

I have no experience keeping vinegar eels for a prolonged time in a bottle with a thin neck.

 

It's heavily planted, so pH swings a lot. It's heavily planted, so nitrifying bacteria play the 16th and 17th fiddle.

Anyways, I keep vinegar eels in two large bottle (risk management) and pour some of the vinegar water in a small bottle with a long, thin neck, stuff some floss in, gently add some water and harvest eels for a week or so. I find offering live foods to fish a rewarding task, not overkill.

I have no experience keeping vinegar eels for a prolonged time in a bottle with a thin neck.

I don't get pH swings normally ... 8.2 bang on the regular & while I know the heavy planting helps I haven't had the confidence to go full Walstad yet, particularly with a puffer - whole new fish to me.

Thanks for the advice on the harvesting tho! Perhaps what I need to find is a smaller thin neck bottle. You said you keep yours in two bottles - is that wide mouth or narrow neck? It's not the live feeding I view as overkill - it's preparing the big bottle & only to use mgs. But it sounds like you're pouring directly from the mother culture, using for a week, then pouring the remainder back into the mother culture...Which if I weren't so addled lately I'd have figured out. Thanks for being my brains today.

 

If you have 8.2 water you need to mess up really bad to cause PH swings.

If you are curious I would fill a bucket of water up and let it sit overnight before you see how much pure vinegar you need to move the PH. I have a feeling it is way more than you are expecting.

 

If kH is high, swings are less of course. But if it's lower, and the pH is all over the place due to CO2 swings (plants), it still is totally fine. In my book, worrying about pH is overkill. Worry about live foods instead. Much more rewarding for your puffers.

You don't have to go full Walstad. Not even ms. Walstad does that .
Just add more plants - that's all.

For cultivating, I would say a wide mouth. A picture says more:




Normally, the 2 bottles are stored in a cool, dark spot. I made a hole in the bottle cap and put some floss between the bottle and cap.

Below is my fancy harvesting equipment. This bottle is a lot smaller than the one pictured above. You can see the eels swimming above the floss. I set this up probably once every two weeks.




And this is my super de luxe artemia machinery:



I prepare this twice a week. Vinegar eels and artemia nauplii is all the food I give my fish.

At the moment I run 10 tanks, with small fish and about 1 inch of fish per 10-15 gallon. The largest species I have are chocolate gourami's. So this places my modest equipment in some perspective.

Also, I'm a big fan of leaf litter and cultivating live foods inside tanks, partly due to the leaf litter.

 

If you have 8.2 water you need to mess up really bad to cause PH swings.

If you are curious I would fill a bucket of water up and let it sit overnight before you see how much pure vinegar you need to move the PH. I have a feeling it is way more than you are expecting.

Thank you. An excellent suggestion.

If kH is high, swings are less of course. But if it's lower, and the pH is all over the place due to CO2 swings (plants), it still is totally fine. In my book, worrying about pH is overkill. Worry about live foods instead. Much more rewarding for your puffers.

You don't have to go full Walstad. Not even ms. Walstad does that .
Just add more plants - that's all.

For cultivating, I would say a wide mouth. A picture says more:

View attachment 866447

Normally, the 2 bottles are stored in a cool, dark spot. I made a hole in the bottle cap and put some floss between the bottle and cap.

Below is my fancy harvesting equipment. This bottle is a lot smaller than the one pictured above. You can see the eels swimming above the floss. I set this up probably once every two weeks.

View attachment 866446

And this is my super de luxe artemia machinery:
View attachment 866445

I prepare this twice a week. Vinegar eels and artemia nauplii is all the food I give my fish.

At the moment I run 10 tanks, with small fish and about 1 inch of fish per 10-15 gallon. The largest species I have are chocolate gourami's. So this places my modest equipment in some perspective.

Also, I'm a big fan of leaf litter and cultivating live foods inside tanks, partly due to the leaf litter.

I'm amazed & gratfied by your willingness to help. I have 4 tanks with livestock currently running - usually run 8 or 9 but have re-homed all the blasted "fair fish" at this point. For my own pleasure I'm learning nano rasbora (merah) & slowly taking in MacZ's advice on pH. Laughed at the Walstad comment! You're right. She's lightened up a lot in her own practices over the years!

The Pea Puffer (one now & two more expected for quarantine) are attempts to do exactly what you describe - an ultimately self sustaining live food tank - but I'm hampered by difficulty getting live anything here in rural Canada. The eels are gold to me & are in addition to the mosquito larvae I cultivate in a vase. It's not a popular choice for the rest of my housemates, but most of my fish love them. Keep hoping ostracods will pop up somewhere.

'Modest set-up' my fanny. I have to look up the artemia as a sustainable food. And I thank you for the pics on top of the info. The visuals really help me put things together. I won't lose this culture & I'm grateful for the help in sustaining it.

Don't know if you're interested, but it seems we're on similar pages with leaf litter, plants & feeding. This is the current Pea Puffer tank after a 50% trim & clean up yesterday. I have a running chance of seeing the little guy more than once a day now. Believe it or not, there are 18 different types of plants growing in that tank. Went a little overboard when I started it. Today I'm setting up the 'plants only' tank.