I'm wondering if a key difference is your climate. I was able to breed difficult killies outdoors in tanks during our short summers. Are your tanks exposed to breezes year round?
It’s breezy some days. Usually, it’s either very hot and humid or raining heavily, with the occasional tropical storm. I keep fish indoors in aquariums, usually with no filter, only aeration, and sometimes none. I keep the lighting on for ~8–12 hours a day and do a water change every 2 weeks to a month.
For my outdoor pond buckets, I don't do water changes, but I top them off almost every day. There are countless native tree frog tadpoles in there, and these frogs lay eggs year-round. The substrate depends on the bucket: sometimes a mix of gravel, sand, garden soil, mud, and lava rocks, or just garden soil.
I don’t test the water, but I tend to plant very heavily from the start using random plants or floating Ceratopteris thalictroides, adding fish after 1–3 months. I use large emergent native sedges, Floscopa scandens, Lasia spinosa, Hanguana malayana, and Ceratopteris thalictroides for the outdoor buckets. Adding fertilizer is guesswork, or based on observing the growth rate/color of the emergent plants.
I’ve not always been successful however. I was about 15 years old when I joined this forum, and at that time, if you look at my post history, I tended to buy fish a lot. Into techs, filters, pumps and all that. I would go to the fish store and couldn’t walk out empty-handed, had to buy something. Then they would always catch diseases, even though I tested the water, did daily water changes, and added salt, medication, etc. Somehow I was still able to successfully breed cardinal tetras, though.
Nowadays, I think I’m much more chill. I keep monospecies tanks, and lately, only feral guppies that I caught from the canal. Completely free of disease.
I’m very picky about fish stores. This week I walked into four fish stores and I bought eight neon tetras from the last store, very clean, one of them got a lump on its mouth, and now I regret it.
I have had as many as 13 panted tanks at one time. I had a high tech pressurized CO2 tank for about 10 years as well. I had one firm rule I would never violate- no dirt is allowed to be under other substrate of the lone substrate. It makes a mess of everything, IMO. How can one vacuum a dirt substrate?
I have used sand. I have used small sized gravel and ever larger sized gravel in planted tanks. But never have I nor will I ever use dirt. Changing a plant makes a huge mess. Trying to catch a pleco or cory off the substrate will do this as well.
I know some folks like the idea of dirt in a tank and that is fine with me, It is your tank and you should do what you want. But, I want no dirt in my tanks. I see no reason for having it. I can grow anything I want in sand or gravel, or I could as long as my high tech tank was still in use. Now I am all low or medium light plants.
I simply like to copy what I’ve seen from wetland, swamps, canals etc.
/www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/lighting-for-emersed-echinodorus.68046/#post-674632
