Recent content by loachman

Ghost knife fish will eat anything they can get in their (deceptively) large mouths. Platies would fit nicely.

Not sure about assassin snails although I'd assume so. They will definitely eat ramshorn and pond snail. MTS they tend to not go crazy over. They'll eat them, but since the snails are hard to eat and spend time in the substrate, they're usually not totally eradicated. This is all generally...

You "can" keep them. They're marine and are generally hard to keep fed. IIRC, they're sand sifters and need a large sand bed. They also get quite large.

What type of algae do you want eaten? For filamentous algaes, mollies work well. SAE and American flag fish are also supposedly good. For film algaes, ottos, SAE, and most plecos work well. CAEs are okay when small, but aren't worth it IMO. They're not great algae eaters over their...

Get all males. Male Platies do not really fight with one another.

You can also skim the surface of the water when you siphon the tank for water changes (in the future). Additional surface agitation will quickly get rid of it IME.

Generally, it is not worth the money. What fish do you have?

Looks like a cyprinid or characin to me, although I don't know which one. Maybe chalceus macrolepidotus

Not typically needed. Only reason that I could think of would be if you have very acidic water and need to adjust the pH. This has some good info. There are tons of webpages that give instructions for hatching BBS. Just about any that deals with raising fry will have info on it.

Those fish should be fine in soft water. You can buffer it a little bit if you have issues with a widely swinging pH, otherwise it should be okay.

earthworms are fine. Just be sure that they're free of pesticides. You should cut them up to a bite sized pieces. For guppy fry, they'll eat any small food. Crushed up flake food is good and easy to get a hold of.

Many people keep groups of mixed sizes. Shouldn't be an issue.

Bettas aren't hard to keep and fine for a beginner. Many people start with them. Fairly tolerate of most beginner mistakes and do fine in small tanks. The primary issue with them is that they severely restrict your ability to stock other fish. In a 5 gal tank, it's not an issue but I...

It's pretty common behavior for some fish to be "trained" that an open top means food. You just want to be sure you're not feeding so much there is leftovers after a couple minutes (with the caveat that some bottom feeders feed more slowly) and that you're not feeding so little they're loosing...

From what I've heard, they have a fair bit of discretion in what they order. Try to make a "friend" of someone who works there and see.