This is a continual journey, whether it be fresh, brackish, or salt, there will always be a glass box with fish in it.
What is upstairs?
I have a 75 gallon aquarium in my bedroom. It took a lot of convincing to let my parents agree to this. We aren’t too sure about the floor joists though, so I ended up partially filling the tank to about 55-60 gallons just in case. But I wholly doubt the floors will collapse… fingers crossed…
I have changed this aquarium multiple times, but here is one of my more proud projects. Starting chronologically we will eventually see what it looks like now!
Here are the bare bones, take a peek at the plastic containers. Not only do they help distribute the weight of the rocks, but they also save money by using up space that substrate would have taken! Note, the thing on the right is a co2 reactor.Here I sprinkled a base layer of Tropica “substrate”, it sits below the actual “aquasoil” but provides a great mineral foundation for plant growth. Supposedly it helps with nutrient retention but don’t quote me on that!Finally there is some “aquasoil” in the tank, sloping from front to back we can hopefully give the illusion of depth! Notice the container that the co2 reactor is sitting in. This is to allow for easy removal of the reactor without disrupting our substrate layer!The first layer of rocks and wood have been placed!, notes that larger rocks are positioned closer to the front. Once again we are trying to do some forced perspective.The rest of the rocks and wood was added and water was filled up to about 75%. Now we just let it marinate so that the wood fully soaks and that the murky water helps clear up a bit before we plant.The tanks is drained and I started planting. Moss on the wood and plants in the substrate, it is that simple!Here we are all filled and getting ready to grow. I love the dim look of a forest floor. Simultaneously spooky and inviting!The plants are really starting to fill in and take over, You can really start to tell how I wanted this to look.Here we are, look how fluffy and lush this looks! It looked fantastic. But stay tuned for the next image!NOW THIS. THIS IS OVERGROWN. It got way out of control, it was really hard to keep up with the explosive growth. For one, you can see that the plants are starting to peek out of the water surface. Having had my fun with this aquarium I decided it was time to mix things up!
Now you may be asking, why would I just decide to swap out this tank? Well, if you had to harvest about a pound of plants every week to just keep up with the growth, it might get stale pretty quick. I was also having a problem with rampant algae growth. So I decided that it was time to try something less “intensive”.
Does this wood look familiar? But doesn’t it look like one piece? Rather than a bunch of smaller ones? Hopefully thats what you are thinking. But in fact that is all the wood from the tank design you saw prior. Just some clever stacking to make it look singular!Since the wood had completely dried out I needed to re-soak them. But as I had already put them into the aquarium in the orientation I liked, I slowly filled the tank over the course of a month!Ahh yes. Here we are, it’s filled to the mark and the wood is staying submerged… Success! (Unlike my driver’s test ._. )The planting was a bit underwhelming compared to last time. Instead of using stem plants that need soil and co2, I used rhizome plants. These plants can stay on the wood directly and are less demanding!Here it is a little bit later, and it definitely is filling out nicely!Some of my inhabitants include these archer fish! Although commonly brackish, I believe these are Toxotes microlepsis and thus are freshwater!
What lurks in the basement?
The basement tanks are seriously a labour of love. They took so much time to design, plan, and set up. If you notice, its a triple tiered system with a sump/algae reactor. I designed it in a way that you can isolate the middle and top tanks if you wanted to. (Perhaps you wanted to quarantine a system?). So the water from both tanks independently reach the sump where they finally return to a manifold which redirects it to separate tanks!
Currently, I am trying to breed Pearly Jawfish and Banggai Cardinalfish. You can see that the middle tank is half filled with sand and rubble to let them burrow and create complex tunnel systems. In the top tank we have an urchin, which naturally is a host for the cardinalfish. How cool is that?
The technique used for the Jawfish was actually based off of written records of breeding on “marinebreeder.org”. To encourage breeding behaviour we feed as much fresh/live food as possible. In addition, the deep layer of substrate is interspersed with crushed coral, coral rubble, and sand. The variation in sizes gives the fish the ability to properly burrow and make complex tunnels! So often you might only see a little cheeky head peeking out once in a while.
Maintenance and Titrations
Although this isn’t a picture of me per-say, but it is the general gist of how accurate aquarium tests work. We use a predetermined amount of tank water (say 5 ml) and add one reagent to the main vial with the water. Then with a small syringe (think 1 ml) we go drop by drop with a different reagent until the colour changes! Then we calculate how much of that reagent we used to find out the water parameters! It’s “at-home” chemistry! (Check out Salifert test kits, they are awesome and super fun to use!)
