I have little experience and i don’t wanna mess it up. Pls help!
Hello! So im really new to being a fish owner. To try and keep it short (professionally yapper here).
A few months ago i wanna say maybe like January/ February of this year my GF and I were given a beautiful blue and red male betta and we got everything and established his tank. Then we wanted to step things up and give him a bigger tank. We did, he liked it, we tried to give him tank mates and he was not happy. So we put him back in his original tank and seemed much happier and made that one an amazing tank for him that we still want to make bigger (3.5gal half moon tank is what he has, 5-10gal is the goal). Half moon tank is harder to clean. And he’s not alone he has a Zebra snail friend which has been the alone creature he hasn’t tried to eliminate.
This was going to be his tank, now we know he cant be with others we established this one as a new tank. We got the tank mates before the Female Betta and learned that the females can but not always be calmer. We have 1 Female Betta, 2 Mixed Dumbo guppies, 1 bristlenose pleco (juvenile), 1 black Guppy, 1 female platy, 1 big ass mystery snail, a few Ghost Shrimp, and smaller snails which their population is starting to explode, idk what kind of snails are the little ones but there is some many and i keep finding small clutches of eggs. We originally had some more ghost shrimp but some have died while molting or just randomly, 1 platy unfortunately passed from bacterial infection that was too far gone we assumed he was the female platys boo-thang (idk if she pregnant), another black guppy that started to pinecone and lost him too, and when we first got this tank we also had another mixed dumbo but he passed i believe that one was stress from moving bc it was the next day. All the fish that passed didn't all happen at the same time, all this has happened over the time we've started this tank. I did wait a week to let the tank run at the time i definitely didn't know you had to wait for the Nitrogen cycle to be complete or that there even was one. By now I'm sure it's now fully cycled, but now when getting a new tank i know not to immediately start adding things like an idiot.
I test the water regularly. Usually once a week or if i notice anything weird about the way the fish act or if the tank is looking weird. Today i did a test and the PH is about 6.6-7.0, Ammonia was at 0.25 ppm but i have to clean the gravel and dispose of uneaten food, Nitrite is at O ppm, and the Nitrates are around 20-30ppm. I don’t have the liquid test for GH and KH but with a test strip i believe the levels are okay. Again i would like to test with liquid instead of the strips. LFS didnt have the liquid ones at the time.
The main reason for posting is to see if theres anything i can do to make the tank more viable to all of them like having stimulation and places to hide. If a shrimp feeding bowl is necessary bc the pleco and snail like to eat their food too. The water sprite is slowly dying and i use it for surface level cover and so they can swim through it. Most of the plants are slowly dying and we plan on replacing the substrate to the fluval plant and shrimp substrate bc we'll be moving soon and itll be easy after taking the little critters out.
I really appreciate anyone who genuinely reads this and i apologize for it being so long. I like to make sure when i have something that i do it right and when the fish or shrimp die i start to panic and assume everything is wrong.