Fry are maturing

So I bought my 29 gallon tank. The idea is to use this as the main storage for all my guppies. I bought a tank divider, so I essentially have two 15-gallon High tanks in one unit...one side for each sex. I filled it with water (including some water from the other tanks, to start the nitrate process) and a sponge filter and started it cycling. The fry are like miniature adults now, except for their color. They are active and habituated to my hand, so they dont run or hide when I feed them.

I got some black marine sand (very fine, but not as fine as silt) because I thought it would look cool. And it does. But I wasnt prepared for the problems it causes. It has pretty much ruined my power filter. If you ever put sand in a tank make sure you leave your filter off until the sand has settled...it gets into the moving parts of the filter and interferes with their movement, making the filter useless. It also has an annoying tendency to clot around air bubbles, giving it a messy appearance. After an hour or so of stirring it I got most of the bubbles out, and it looks like normal sand.

I rinsed it out and have got it working again, but I think it is permanently damaged. It was a Penguin bio-wheel filter, so it wasnt cheap. Live and learn I guess.

My snails are actually reproducing finally...I have about 5 or 6 apple snails, and I have been trying to breed them as well. I have a single giant Ramshorn snail in my goldfish tank...it's the only one I have found in any pet store so far and I'd love to breed it and get more. I have been told it is a species of Apple Snail, but I have not seen it attempt to mate with any of the other Apple Snails yet.

But all that is growing in the tank are the Pond snails (which arent very useful, and visually unappealing because they only grow to about a centimeter and are a dull brown color). Pond snails reproduce VERY fast, so they are infesting my tanks like little lice. I've begun picking them out by hand to thin their numebrs...I wish I had something that would eat them.

But anyway, in the process of doing this I came across two snails that didnt look like the others. They have vertical (flat) shell spirals of Apple Snails instead of the cone-shaped shells of the Ramshorn snails. So far I have only found two, but they are pretty cool colors too. One of them is already bigger than the adult Ranshorn snails in the tank.

I have been doing the same extermination process in my work tank. Where, unfortunately, the guppy holocaust continues. I lost another two females over the weekend, and am about to lose one of the yellow males. Keeping females alive is apparently really really hard.