u/Glad-Love-3057

The beni kabuto are officially cooking.
Set them up 3 hours ago and now I’m staring into the hatchery like a woman waiting for a pregnancy test to develop.

Meanwhile the australiensis tank with the black sand got zucchini today for both the aussies and the nerites.
The australiensis developed such a pretty green color lately. Tiny little swamp goblins thriving on vegetables and violence.

The 30l tank is fully back in its blackwater era now.
Dark. Moody. Tannin soup.
Basically me after fighting bladder snails for weeks.

My original strategy was “just stop feeding and the bladder snail population will go down naturally”.
Turns out those little freeloaders simply started eating the plants instead.
Nature is healing. My sanity is not.

So now I regularly remove baby snails from the cacao leaf like some exhausted medieval peasant harvesting curses from the fields.

Tomorrow I’ll do another water change so the beni kabuto can move into the 30l in about 14 days.

Also: still no dragonfly larvae.
Either I won the war or they are currently hiding somewhere plotting my downfall.

Today I removed dragonfly larva number TWENTY from my 30L tank.
The tank has been running since February, and the last new plants were added in March. So… how many of these little armored nightmare shrimps should I realistically still expect? Can they keep appearing for this long from plants, or am I unknowingly hosting a full dragonfly dynasty?
Current inhabitants:
3 nerite snails
approximately 400 million bladder snails
the apparently endless dragonfly legion
And while I have the aquarium hivemind here:
How do I get rid of the blackwater/tinted look without removing the wood?
The wood was boiled, soaked for several days, and I’ve already done four partial water changes. The tank runs with a sponge filter and an air stone/bubbler, but the water still looks like someone brewed weak tea directly inside the aquarium.
I like a natural look, but this has crossed the line into “Victorian swamp documentary.”
Any advice? Activated carbon, more water changes, just waiting it out… or sacrificing one of the 400 million bladder snails to the aquarium gods?