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Post by babygeige on Jan 19, 2013 13:28:26 GMT -5
After years of looking at the moss balls in the lfs tanks, I finally broke down and bought one. They had a bunch of them in a tank with fish, so I just have the moss ball in a bucket of water for now. I'm debating on whether to just leave it in the bucket by itself for a week or two to make sure it's not carrying anything that will harm my fish or shrimp, or just doing a bleach water bath so I can put it in my tank sooner.
I looked around online a little bit and some people said a bleach bath is fine and others said they killed their moss ball with one. It could be that those people just did it with too much bleach, but before doing anything I wanted to see anyone here has ever bleach bathed a moss ball?
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Post by Carl on Jan 19, 2013 17:34:49 GMT -5
What are you attempting to kill with the bleach? If you are going for parasites and many bacterium, the bleach may be for you. However I have not used it for any plants, only tank disinfection, so I cannot give you a ratio (I would guess at 1 to 20, bleach to water) If you are simply attempting to prevent introduction of some bacteria, fungii, algae; I would suggest Hydrogen Peroxide or Flourish Excel as a dip. See: Aquarium Plant CareCarl
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Post by babygeige on Jan 20, 2013 14:09:52 GMT -5
Yeah, just trying to kill any bacteria, etc that the moss ball could have carried from the lfs. Or... SNAILS!! I didn't see any in that tank, but you never know! I've done bleach dips for most new plants in the past - the one time I didn't... SNAILS!!! Just wasn't sure if it would be bad for the moss ball. I'll give it a shot and let you know how it goes, lol.
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Post by parker002 on Jan 21, 2013 17:22:59 GMT -5
I would be careful.
From my experience, "moss" balls are not actually moss. They are actually algae. A moderate-strength bleach bath will kill it.
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Post by babygeige on Jan 24, 2013 20:14:19 GMT -5
I did about 1 tsp or so to a half gallon of water for about 7 minutes. Then I rinsed it very well, and put it in some fresh water with a generous amount of water conditioner. This was back on Saturday. I left it in that water until this evening, rinsed it out and threw it in the tank. It seems to be ok so far since the bleach bath. It didn't take long for the shrimp to find it and check it out, lol.
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Post by billg71 on Jan 25, 2013 6:13:39 GMT -5
Great to heat the dip didn't hurt it, have to keep that in mind when I get some more plants. Didn't dip the last bunch and now I've got pond snails.....
My LFS has a nano set up on the counter with shrimp, really cool tank! They have a moss ball in theirs, the shrimp are always crawling over it.
Pics?
Best, Bill
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Post by parker002 on Jan 30, 2013 15:22:21 GMT -5
Bill,
All I can say is get a couple assassin snails.
My problem with the common snail are pretty well-documented here. We were trapping and removing 50-100 out of the 14G tank EVERY DAY.
We put in 4 assassin snails and in a month or so, all of the pond snails were gone.
EDIT: The assassin snails actually look cool too.
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Post by babygeige on Mar 6, 2013 18:38:04 GMT -5
Here's a picture of my moss ball. It's kind of an odd shape, with this funny little extra tuft sticking out of it. It reminds me of a tribble from the old Star Trek episode.
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Post by parker002 on Mar 8, 2013 15:25:01 GMT -5
Nice baby crypt there.
I've starting cultivating red crypts and intermixing them with the green. My 55G tank is now just crypts and Java ferns.
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Post by missdiane on Mar 8, 2013 18:27:31 GMT -5
I never dipped my moss ball - have had success dipping to kill BBA on plants with excel (5/1 water ration, 30 seconds). I will say though that when i dipped my anubias which is attached to driftwood covered with moss - the dip also killed the moss
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Post by babygeige on Mar 8, 2013 21:59:54 GMT -5
I started with one crypt lutea in the middle-back of the tank. There's 5 or 6 smaller ones spread through the tank now. I can't imagine with the roots look like under the gravel, lol.
I've got 2 crypt parva plants in there too. They're so small and funny looking. I'll post a pic of them sometime. I keep waiting for them to grow. I know parva is one of the smallest varieties, but geez!
I've read that excel is a great BBA killer. I've never tried it though. I'm just glad I didn't kill my little moss ball. I'm interested to see how big it will get!
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Post by parker002 on Mar 10, 2013 14:09:42 GMT -5
Flourish Excel absolutely will kill BBA but it's a somewhat expensive solution, in my experience. I just put up with the BBA.
How long have you had the lutea?
I gave away about 10 pounds of crypts (and even more Java moss and Ludwigia) recently, leaving myself with only 12 individual "crowns" with 3-4 leaves each.
They're adding a new leaf about once every 3 days and I have 6 new sprouts coming up. They're like weeds.
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Post by babygeige on Mar 16, 2013 13:47:57 GMT -5
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Post by parker002 on Mar 16, 2013 19:21:46 GMT -5
I bought one green crypt when I first started with my plants.
I took that one and broke it into individual crowns. From those first 12-13 plants I've got two full tanks and I've given away and sold 5G buckets full of them probably 6 or 7 times.
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Post by babygeige on Mar 21, 2013 18:07:49 GMT -5
Yeah, you really get your money's worth out of them! And java fern...and anubias...
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Post by parker002 on Mar 22, 2013 14:49:12 GMT -5
Should have seen the Ludwigia. I eventually just had to get rid of it. It was growing 6" a week.
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Post by angelminx on Oct 16, 2014 18:15:32 GMT -5
Hi, all! I can't remember if I mentioned getting a Moss Ball in some other thread or not, but I did get one back in August of this year I broke down and got it because the store had just received a shipment of larger-than-normal Moss Balls that they were selling at the regular price. I didn't think to measure it until now . I should have done so before I "dipped" it (and the other couple of plants that I got at the same time), and placed it in my 55G (8/19) . I measured it today, because it seamed a bit bigger to me, and it measured 3" in diameter. I'll have to keep an eye on it to see if it IS growing in size or not. Angelminx
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Post by devonjohnsgard on Oct 16, 2014 18:51:00 GMT -5
Hi, all! I can't remember if I mentioned getting a Moss Ball in some other thread or not, but I did get one back in August of this year I broke down and got it because the store had just received a shipment of larger-than-normal Moss Balls that they were selling at the regular price. I didn't think to measure it until now . I should have done so before I "dipped" it (and the other couple of plants that I got at the same time), and placed it in my 55G (8/19) . I measured it today, because it seamed a bit bigger to me, and it measured 3" in diameter. I'll have to keep an eye on it to see if it IS growing in size or not. Angelminx yes
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Post by sdboers on Oct 29, 2014 8:09:05 GMT -5
I tried a moss ball - really liked the look of it. It turned into a $8 cichlid salad. lol...
Sean.
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Post by angelminx on Nov 1, 2014 0:52:15 GMT -5
Here's a shot of my Moss Ball; I tried to get a zoomed in photo of this (for the 2 shrimp in the picture), but it was one of the ones I tried but that ended up a bit over 1MB: I'll have to measure it again at the end/beginning of the year to see if it's grown any more.
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