Originally Posted by
NyButterfly03
I need to know what kind of sponges u have covering ur intakes?? The black ones????
I do NOT like the one I have. I am afraid somone might get stuck but it hasnt happened, they just hitch to it but with new babies coming I dont want to risk it and want something smoother
I do use the black ones, I prefer the sponges that are actually foam, not the bristle type, these did claim several of my babies. The other thing you can use, in a pinch, until you find a foam sponge is a clean knee high nylon stocking. Just wrap the current sponge you have with the nylon. I would wrap the sponge starting by placing the entire sponge into the stocking, just as you would your foot. Then stuff the remaining part of the stocking down the intake hole and put the sponge back on your intake tube.
I used a stocking for the intake flow cover in my baby 1.5 gallon. Worked great.
Your babies will also be the first to look at if you think the flow is too high. Babies are extremely adventurous, as we both know
after watching my newborns, I realized that ponies(and horses) enjoy high flow~just not all over the tank. the little ones especially like to swim straight into the return flow and ride the tidal wave back. I wonder if they do this in the wild to practice and perfect their swimming techniques.
Looking at the pictures of your tank it looks like you have plenty of hitching posts, which i think is another key item in tanks. Horses in the wild live in shallow coastal waters the have constant changing currents. These shallow waters also house TONS of living hitching posts. Allowing ponies and horses to navigate from point to point with ease among waters that even avid swimmers could get into trouble.
When I have placed power filters in the pony tank at different angles, the ponies jump right out into main stream, what I found was, the ponies were navigating the currents. One female in particular went around the tank 4-5 times. She was practicing hitching to a specific macro branch. At first I thought she had just missed her mark, but after the third round, it became clear that she had a target branch in mind; she had passed up several branches that she could of easily hitched to. Once she had the currents mapped she hitched up on her target branch.
