# Episode 3: A new scape



## Karmicnull (7 Sep 2020)

A brief history to-date. 

Won a goldfish in a fair as a child.  Put it in one of those round goldfish bowls that every house had back in the eighties.  Got a second goldfish at another fair and my stepfather managed to source a sensible sized tank (about 90L).  We slapped it on top of the child-height wardobe in my room, and popped the goldfish in it.  All the aquarium books in the library said get an undergravel filter, so I got one.  In hindsight, not the best idea with goldfish.  By this time I was at 3 goldfish, a shubunkin and two green tench.  The tank cracked and leaked everywhere; we fixed it.  Astonishingly despite everything the fish survived, and when we moved to a new house with a pond, they all went in the pond.  About a year later all but the green tench ended up as food for a very happy heron.  We never saw the green tench.  Apart from very occasionally from a distance when you would see a ripple circling the edges of the pond, a bit like jaws.  When we emptied the pond out to clean and fix a leak a few years later, one was still there, skulking in the mud.  The old 90L tank sat in the loft gathering dust. 

When I grew up and had kids of my own the tank transferred into my own loft where it sat for the next 18 years until a combination of pestering from children and lockdown staycation galvanized me to action a couple of weeks back.  Key requirement was that it had to match the furniture in the living room, which meant a light oak or pine stand.  Turns out they are hard to come by.  I looked at bespoke options, but they were so expensive that it ended up being cheaper to buy a brand new aqua oak 130L tank.  So my old tank carries on gathering dust.  Go figure. 

Anyhow I did a bit of research and got all the paraphernalia that the interweb told me I needed to keep fish alive.  Then we went to the LFS to get substrate, a couple of plants, an ornament (I had my heart set on a crashed star destoyer, but the LFS only had shipwrecks and ruins) and advice.  I came back with some sand, a handful of plants  and a sneaking suspicion that the chap I'd talked to in the shop knew very little more then I did.  So we set up the tank and I decided to do a bit more research online. 

This is the tank on 31st August after we set it up:






At this point my biggest setback was the discovery that my external filter was too tall to fit in the fish stand's cupboard.  You can see the tubes off to the right.  That hasn't gone down particularly well.  Esp. since it's in an old plastic washbasin as I was paranoid about leaks (it hasn't).

Having done this there followed a frantic amount of research, through which I learned (amongst other things) that:

plants need to be fed.
most of what is out on the interweb is either incorrect or at best insufficiently precise.
my lighting was probably too bright.
my air bubbles should only be on at night
I don't have enough plants
the Anubais Nana that you can't see behind the purple rock probably won't ever grow big enough to make it into sight.
I've probably got too much sand on top of my aquabasis plus
Test kits are interesting but not the be-all and end-all.
What I appear to be aiming for is called a low-tech tank.

As a result...

I have made up my first EI mix yesterday and gave my first (50%) dose today.
there is now pond lettuce jetting round in the flow on the surface of the water
I have a couple more plants arriving this week.  Everyone on these forums seems to swear by Tropica, so I found a reseller, but they're a heck of a lot more expensive than Amazon.
I've downloaded  the water reading from Cambridge water (rock hard, slightly alkali and full of nitrates.  Even though my test kit is in denial about the last of these)
I know what a stem plant is and I reckon I need to get a few.
I have a spreadsheet of approximately 80 fish that the internet swears are hard for beginners to kill, of which 20 will actually be happy in high PH hard water and my size of tank.  Interestingly different sites sometimes give spectacularly different values for what hardness a fish can cope with.  e.g. Serpae tetra can cope with between 268ppm and 465 ppm depending on which site you believe, so I think the error bars on my spreadsheet are pretty wild.

Anyhow, here's the tank as it was earlier today.  Looking forward to seeing what the next week brings!


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## davidgorman74 (7 Sep 2020)

For fish advice I always use the Water Zoo in Peterborough, really good guys there they will be able to advise you, maybe better than the internet


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## Karmicnull (7 Sep 2020)

@davidgorman74 thanks for the tip - from the look of the site it's in a different league from the ones I've visited.  Swapped a couple of mails with them and I'll pop up this weekend.


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## davidgorman74 (7 Sep 2020)

no probs


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## Melll (8 Sep 2020)

Hi @Karmicnull,

The purple rock, what is that?


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## Karmicnull (10 Sep 2020)

Hi @Melll  I bought it at the LFS - the chap there said it was one that people usually used in marine aquariums, but wasn't more specific than that.  Having a look round online, I reckon it's a live rock.  Probably a bit overpriced for a freshwater aquarium, but I liked it, and given I'm going to spend the next few years looking at it, thought it was worth the investment!


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## Melll (10 Sep 2020)

@Karmicnull ,

It looks like a man made reef called Real Reef, it will harden your water and if it was seasoned in the sea, may well be full of mini sea creatures.  
Was it wet or dry when you got it and is your water naturally soft? 

But if you like it, I`ve got several kilo for sale 👍


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## Karmicnull (11 Sep 2020)

@Melll it was bone dry - in with a box full of similar rocks.  My water is hard as nails already.  It measured 286 GH a week or so back.  I'll take a read this weekend and see if it has changed materially.  I'm not particularly keen on it getting even harder!


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## not called Bob (11 Sep 2020)

it looks like ceramic rock, made to look like reef bones and covered in Coraline algae,  I used a different brand in mine, a baked pirated ceramic, that soon seeded and hosted all sorts of life, but is inert


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## Karmicnull (11 Sep 2020)

Many of the leaves of the plants I planted have died off and I've been pruning away - but there is now a tiny amount of new growth in the Alternanthera and the Helanthium!  I'm inferring from this that I've not (yet) killed my plants.  This means that - from a plant perspective at least - this tank is already a runaway success in comparison to my childhood one, where the plant MTBF was under a week.  Whatever else happens, I'm gonna take that.







I've also found the specs for my light (Nicrew Classic LED plus).  And learned all about PAR, which some chap on a website has very kindly measured for a range of aquarium lights.  



 



I'm running the lights at 60%, and doing two lighting periods a day so I get to see the tank in the evening.  The received wisdom on this site appears to be that there's no evidence that having a midday lighting siesta makes a difference one way or the other for a low tech tank.  Which means I should be fine doing it.

Running at 60% gives me the below, which looks about right for my tank (40cm from substrate to surface, lights about 5cm above surface).




All good so far apart from the daft-as-a-brush Real Reef purchase  potentially doing the impossible and making my water even harder.  It is a really pretty rock though...


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## Karmicnull (11 Sep 2020)

not called Bob said:


> it looks like ceramic rock, made to look like reef bones and covered in Coraline algae,  I used a different brand in mine, a baked pirated ceramic, that soon seeded and hosted all sorts of life, but is inert


Fingers crossed you're right!  I guess I'll get some insight on impact when I check hardness.


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## not called Bob (11 Sep 2020)

Karmicnull said:


> Fingers crossed you're right!  I guess I'll get some insight on impact when I check hardness.


if it is the real reef brand, then its been in a glasshouse submerged growing marine algae and as its some what cheaper than korallenwelt or aquaroche, it might well be made from a cement shell blend.


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## dw1305 (11 Sep 2020)

Hi all, 





Karmicnull said:


> I'm not particularly keen on it getting even harder!


You are fine, the water won't <"get any harder"> from adding more calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Because your water is from a chalk aquifer it is already fully saturated with Ca++ and HCO3- ions. A limestone, or concrete, rock will add potential carbonate buffering, but that would only go into solution if you added a lot of acid.

Have a look at <"Nerite snails....">.

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (12 Sep 2020)

dw1305 said:


> Hi all, You are fine, the water won't <"get any harder"> from adding more calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Because your water is from a chalk aquifer it is already fully saturated with Ca++ and HCO3- ions.


Thanks Darrel - I had suspected from what I've read that the Cambridgeshire water might already be fully saturated.  I'll still test out of curiosity, but in a much more relaxed frame of mind  

  Simon


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## Karmicnull (12 Sep 2020)

*A Planting update!*

When I went to the LFS to get substrate and rocks I bought an arbitrary selection of plants too.  They were:

Alternanthera Rosaefolia ("Magenta Water Hedge")
Anubias Barteri var. Nana
Eleocharis Acicularis ("Dwarf Hair Grass")
Helanthium Bolivianum ("Chain Sword")
Taxiphyllum Sp.("'Spiky Moss")
Vallisneria Americana/Gigantea

There's a photo of the tank with this lot in earlier in the thread.

Then I read about the <Duckweed Index> and got some Pistia stratiotes ("Dwarf Water Lettuce") off Amazon.  My water lettuce was very happy and started growing roots.  More research lead me to find out about <Surface Agitation in a low tech tank>.  So I adjusted my spray bar up a bit, which gave plenty of agitation.  That's when I learned that Water Lettuce and Surface agitation is a bit like Moths and Flames.  Or Pier jumping.  Pick your simile.  I'm fairly convinced that taking regular dives to the bottom of the tank and resurfacing upside down, whilst potentially giddy fun for my lettuce, is not actually good for them.  Other people have had the same problem, so I pinched a solution some people used and have penned the lettuce in with some airline.  The time-honoured sacrifice of personal freedom for safety.  




It's not as aesthetically pleasing as I would like, but it will suffice until I come up with something better.

Meanwhile I bought a few more plants, mostly from aquarium gardens:
Cryptocoryne crispatula
Cryptocoryne Wendtii Brown
Cryptocoryne Wendtii Tropica
Hottonia Palustris (water violet)
Hygrophila Costata
Hygrophila Siamensis 53B
Microsorium Pteropus Mini (Petit Java Fern) - and some  Seachem Flourish Glue 

Then had a lot of fun adding them in, during which time I learned that:
 - You think you're buying one plant but in practice you could find there are anything between one and thirty
 - Seachem Flourish glue does indeed work underwater.  And if the bit of Java Fern you're trying to glue is sufficiently small you end up with your fingers firmly attached to the rock whilst the fern floats away.  Still it all worked out eventually.







*

*


So that was last night.  This evening, I discovered 4 illegal immigrants had snuck in with the plants.  Presumably arrived as eggs; currently little transparent snails slightly larger than a pin's head.  There are presumably more I haven't spotted.  My next task is to identify the species and decide whether to grant them citizenship or deport them.


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## Karmicnull (16 Sep 2020)

KPI update.  Looks like the ceramic reef rock (as Darrel predicted) isn't affecting water hardness





I'm assuming the high nitrates is because I'm dosing ferts.  Mind you it could be down to fundamental indecisiveness on which specific shade of pink a solution is after 10 mins.  I can see why everyone flags these tests for being imprecise.   TDH is great as it's (1) instant and (2) not subject to my flawed interpretation.


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## Karmicnull (16 Sep 2020)

Snail update.  I have decided to grant the snails citizenship.  They were born in the tank, and I think that qualifies them.  Also I feel mildly sorry for them.  The shell to snail ratio is quite high, and the shells keep getting pushed over in the current.  The poor things are struggling a bit, but they soldier on snailfully.  To date we've counted 6.  They clung together in one small patch of the tank for the first day or so, but are now venturing further afield.  My best guess is that they are Ramshorns.






I also have at least one other unexpected resident.  It was a small white triangular blob with bulges at each point of the triangle.  I found it crawling enthusiastically across the glass.  I may however have accidentally hoovered it up as I haven't seen it since the last water change.  My working theory (based on yet another google picture search) is that it's a copepod.  I shall keep an eye out for its return.


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## Karmicnull (16 Sep 2020)

Plant update.  The bottom leaves of the crypts are melting, and all the original growth from the one lonely Helanthium has almost completely melted away, but there is new growth, so I'm still feeling optimistic.  The Hottonia on the other hand looks amazing.  This is currently my favourite plant -  I love the colour and the leaves.  Notwithstanding all that, the big success story is the water lettuce.  Now It's safely corralled away from the spray pipe, it's much happier and its roots have bushed out. Simultaneously the Vallisneria Americana has quietly grown, and one tip is now touching the lettuce root.  This means I have leaves at every depth.  I reckon that must unlock an achievement.  Also one rebellious lettuce has left all the others, snuck other to the other side of its pen, and somehow managed to help its child escape.  I can only approve.


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## Karmicnull (17 Sep 2020)

Karmicnull said:


> I'm assuming the high nitrates is because I'm dosing ferts.



You can make the worlds prettiest spreadsheet but you still have to type the numbers into it correctly.  Nitrates should read 40 rather than 4.


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## dw1305 (17 Sep 2020)

Hi all,




Karmicnull said:


> Nitrates should read 40 rather than 4.





Karmicnull said:


> I'm assuming the high nitrates is because I'm dosing ferts.





Karmicnull said:


> Mind you it could be down to fundamental indecisiveness on which specific shade of pink a solution is after 10 mins.


Yes, there is definitely something a bit strange there. I don't know why the tap water reads 0 ppm when the given value (from Cambridge Water) is ~38 ppm. @alto might have some ideas?

There is a slight possibility that your tap water has been through a nitrate stripper. Have a look at the water report in <"possible BBA">

I wouldn't worry too much about the nitrate value (whatever it might be), your plants should help suck it up and reduce it. Assuming your _Pistia_ does OK, and you can use <"the "Duckweed Index">, you may find you can reduce your EI dosing without compromising plant growth.  

cheers Darrel


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## LondonDragon (17 Sep 2020)

dw1305 said:


> I don't know why the tap water reads 0 ppm when the given value (from Cambridge Water) is ~38 ppm. @alto might have some ideas?


Could it be the testing method or what is being used to test is not up to scratch?


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## Karmicnull (17 Sep 2020)

LondonDragon said:


> Could it be the testing method or what is being used to test is not up to scratch?


 
I'm suspicious that there might be driver error involved.  I'll retest again tonight.


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## Karmicnull (19 Sep 2020)

Karmicnull said:


> I'm suspicious that there might be driver error involved.  I'll retest again tonight.



I retested, and again got a very low reading - perhaps 2-3.  So something's happening between the water as reported by Cambridge Water, and the water as it comes out of my tap!  Hey ho.


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## Karmicnull (20 Sep 2020)

Algae Update. 
Yes.  The algae have arrived.  Primarily brown diatoms and filamentous diatoms.  Extensive perusal of the ukaps archives and the internet beyond has revealed slightly conflicting advice:
Reduce ferts! Don't Reduce ferts! Less light! More light! Take all your plants and rocks out and clean them! Introduce a clean up crew! Don't introduce fauna - it handcuffs you!  Use this fantastic algae killer chemical! Don't bother with chemical treatment; it attacks the symptom not the cause!  etc.

I concluded that this is a new tank and the algae I'm seeing are to be expected.  It's also a low tech tank so I'm going for a low tech solution.  I've bought a toothbrush. 

In fairness I did also drop my sunset/sunrise from 30 mins to 15 mins.  I'm also slightly concerned that because of the spray bar position (which I have little choice about) half the tank is in a raging torrent, and the other half is a quiet backwater.  Curiously the filter intake which I thought would generate some of the biggest current seems relatively quiet.  The brown diatoms are only growing where the flow is gentle, so I'm experimenting with positioning of an airstone to change the hydrodynamics and get more of a flow at the quiet end.  And I found a fabulous quote on a "what eats algae" web page at practicalfishkeeping.co.uk:  "Though some fish (like Otocinclus) will eat it, the paradox is that brown algae will almost always indicate a tank too immature to keep them. Clean and wait, and eventually the algae will go."

In the marginally  longer term I'm considering the first invited occupants (to join the uninvited  Ramshorn snails, Planaria and Cyclops Copepods).  I'm thinking shrimp.  Cherry or Amano. 

Amano:  Pros - resilient.  Cons. I would be carrying out mass child genocide through inaction were they to spawn,
Cherry:  Pros - beautiful; will multiply to match available food.  Cons.  Not so resilient, small and therefore compatible with fewer fish. 

I think on balance next weekend might be Amano weekend.


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## Karmicnull (20 Sep 2020)

Plant update.
The Vals, the Hygrophila Siamanesis on the right next to the heater and the Spiky Moss are definitely growing.  The Java fern is starting to look indefinably happier, albeit not growing.  But the star of the show is the water lettuce.


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## castle (21 Sep 2020)

If you'd like some Limnobium laevigatum @Karmicnull - I have a pot (tropica) unopenned, and needing a home. I'm in central Cambridge, if you're not too far away I can deliver to your doorstep. 

As for Cambridge water; it's hard. The only (2) aquarists I've met have reported having problems with algae, and now using 50% RO.


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## Karmicnull (22 Sep 2020)

castle said:


> If you'd like some Limnobium laevigatum @Karmicnull - I have a pot (tropica) unopenned, and needing a home. I'm in central Cambridge, if you're not too far away I can deliver to your doorstep.
> 
> As for Cambridge water; it's hard. The only (2) aquarists I've met have reported having problems with algae, and now using 50% RO.



Offer gladly accepted!  I'll DM you with details.


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## Karmicnull (26 Sep 2020)

Tank update.
I've been surfing the journals and looking at all the amazing tanks people have created.  I have been in equal parts filled with envy and inspired.  It's worth observing that I haven't got an artistic bone in my body.  When I was a kid I drew a picture of a house and my art teacher thought it was a portrait of my mum.  So I am never going to be a proto-Amano.  But I did conclude that my tank was lacking in height.  I had this leftover piece of driftwood that didn't fit because I'd been thinking in terms of length not height.  I tried it for size; it was great but a bit unstable.  Needed a few rocks to shore it up.  Also in my battle against algae I have decided to supplement the toothbrush with more plants to help outcompete the filamentous diatoms.

  So I popped over to Aquarium Gardens - whom I'd discovered were just round the corner, relatively speaking  - where I peppered the extremely patient staff with noob questions, bought a plant or two and a couple of rocks to stabilize my piece of wood.  And was further inspired by the spectacular set of tanks they run.

Back home I added the rocks and wood, shuffled a couple of things around and added the new plants.  All the new plants were chosen to grow on wood or stone (is there a technical name for this?)  

Picture of the updated tank below.  As always I'm doing things back to front.  It was only after I'd glued down all the Hygrophyla Pinnatifida that I read Tony Swinney's observation that it really doesn't like being glued.  So I may have a lot of melting Pinnatifida in the next couple of weeks.  I tried to attach the ones with stronger light requirement higher up the tree; we'll see how that works.  And I had a go at that thing I've seen where moss lies along branches.  Although that didn't work so well.  I've ended up with large blobs of white superglue attached to the branch with the odd strand of moss hanging off them.  Aesthetically not quite what I was aiming for.  

Do other people struggle with superglue?  By the time I'd finished I had superglue all over my hands, the tweezers, the tank glass, and  even on my elbow.  

Also when I kicked this off towards the end of August, I dutifully bought a ton of stuff that was recommended in many places.  Most of which I've used, but I have a bottle of 'Fluval Biological Aquarium cleaner' that is still untouched.  Largely because I have no idea what it does and the internet seems unable to tell me.  There are lots of sites that wave around platitudes but no that have any real detail.

Anyhow, here it is.  





Tomorrow is cherry shrimp day.  I moved away from Amano based purely on their awesomeness when I saw them in proper tanks yesterday.


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## Karmicnull (30 Sep 2020)

Shrimp update.
The tank has it's first invited denizens (to add to the uninvited ones)!  A baker's dozen of cherry shrimp courtesy of aquarium gardens.  I used the drip method to acclimatise them and then in they went.  I assumed they'd all vanish for the first few hours to recover from the trauma, but they were out, about and exploring within minutes.  The guy at aquarium gardens suggest I don't feed them for a couple of weeks, and let them get on with tidying up the tank.  So that's what they've been doing for the last few days.  Between them and the latest round of planting they seem to have stopped, or at least massively slowed down, the encroachment of diatoms.

To date I've done everything backwards.  Taken some action and then read up on what I _should_ have done afterwards.  This is no exception.  Having got the cherrys, I started looking at what will go with them and discovered that, aside from corys and otos, the answer is nothing really.  However this plenty of anecdotal evidence of cherrys surviving and even thriving in heavily planted tanks with lots of nooks and crannies, if they are allowed to establish their colony before potential predators are introduced.  So I'm going to leave them to do just that, whilst the plants (hopefully) grow to the point where the tank is reasonably heavily planted.


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## hypnogogia (30 Sep 2020)

Karmicnull said:


> and discovered that, aside from corys and otos, the answer is nothing really.


There’s a useful compatibility chart here:
http://www.tropco.co.uk/red-cherry-shrimp-1cm-p-2333.html


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## dw1305 (30 Sep 2020)

Hi all, 





Karmicnull said:


> All the new plants were chosen to grow on wood or stone (is there a technical name for this?)


<"Epiphytic">, technically if they grow on rock they are "Epilithic", but they are usually all referred to as "Epiphytes".





Karmicnull said:


> Do other people struggle with superglue? By the time I'd finished I had superglue all over my hands, the tweezers, the tank glass, and even on my elbow.


Sounds familiar, it always happens to me. When everything is damp it just cures instantly. It is easier with the gel formulations.





Karmicnull said:


> Picture of the updated tank below.


Plant growth looks pretty good. 





Karmicnull said:


> but I have a bottle of 'Fluval Biological Aquarium cleaner' that is still untouched. Largely because I have no idea what it does


I suspect that Fluval don't know either, but I'm willing to bet it is a cheap product that <"magically increases in price"> when you bottle it. 

<"This"> says a_ "Proprietary Blends of beneficial bacteria _", so it is probably a <"sludge buster type product">, and it might provide a sticking plaster for people who keep their fish in very unsanitary conditions.

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (4 Oct 2020)

General update:

This tank has already evolved beyond anything I'd imagined.  And it hasn't event got any fish in it yet.    In a fit of noob-enthusiasm I am now the proud possessor of what is possibly a lifetime supply of EDDHA chelated iron (that's the one that copes with hard water, if you're trying to remember which set of initials is which).  Various wiser heads have intimated that it's highly likely to be unnecessary given my low-tech approach, but I haven't done any chemistry since I left school and I couldn't resist.

The snails have had babies, and my population has doubled overnight to around 12, which is, I think, a good thing.  Shrimp are settling in nicely.  I never see more than 6 at a time, but there are in particular these three females who have favourite resting places - one sits on an Anubias leaf, one on a Hygrophila, and one on the flat stone in the middle.  They spend a lot of time sitting around laughing at the frantic antics of the males.  I cubed, blanched and froze a courgette large courgette marrow from the garden, which gives me a year's supply of rather bland shrimp food.  I tried one cube dangled on a thread for a few hours, and it got a few nibbles, but I wouldn't call it a ringing endorsement.  I think I'll go and wrestle with the nettle patch at the end of the garden.

I'm also thinking of turning my flow down a bit.  Whilst it's great to know that I'm getting nutrients to all corners of the tank, the addition of the mountain range on the right has created a mill race that reminds me a bit of those underwater videos of the corryvreckan whirlpool.  Every now and then a hapless shrimp ventures too close to the spray bar and gets tossed helplessly over the mountrain range, down the front of the tank, and wooshed along to the left, before regaining control and pretending, catlike, that the move had been intended all along.

Courtesy of @castle the pond lettuce has been joined by Amazon frogbit, which is looking very happy.

With regard to  Fluval Biological Aquarium cleaner' 





dw1305 said:


> I suspect that Fluval don't know either, but I'm willing to bet it is a cheap product that <"magically increases in price"> when you bottle it.


That made me laugh!  I'll put it at the back of the cupboard, and then bring it out occasionally and marvel at the power of marketing.

With regard to fish choice, 





hypnogogia said:


> There’s a useful compatibility chart here:
> http://www.tropco.co.uk/red-cherry-shrimp-1cm-p-2333.html


Thank you!  I have bookmarked that along with a couple of other intersecting charts.  I'm compiling an unnecessarily large spreadsheet of fish, and Cherry-friendly is now a column in that spreadsheet.  Other columns include temperature, minimum number and water hardness.  There's a lot of interesting debate about keeping soft water fish in hard water, and there are good arguments for why you don't need to worry too much about hardness, but in the end I've decided to only look at fish who are happy with >=268ppm, which is a little lower than my water (~290ppm) but not by too much.  That rules out a ton of fish I really fancied (Harlequin Rasbora, Otos, German Blue Rams, etc) but I stil have a shortlist of 44 who can cope with harder water, will be reasonably low risk with neocaridina, not nip fins, and generally rub along well together.  I shall continue to research...


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## Big G (5 Oct 2020)

Good journal !
Unless your completely wedded to the idea I would give the neos a few weeks to figure out the flow and adjust if they're your concern. Can only speak from my own early experiences but you would be amazed at how well they soon plot their way around and across strong flow points to get around to parts of the tank they want to. Of course if they're getting pinned to a tank wall then of course but you know, they seem very robust imho.


Hard not to anthropomorphise them isn't it? Charismatic little critters. Remind me of The Tweedlebugs from Sesame Street or perhaps The Doozers from Fraggle Rock (yes, I'm quite old) I even started naming some of my first, distinctive original intake and can still just about pick a few of those out but once the females start getting saddled and berried it seems to be the beginning of an impossible task. For me they're the stars of the whole show to the point where I'm struggling to imagine actually keeping any fish whatsoever. Sooner or later hopefully you'll get to witness a molt which I found knocked sci fi CGI into a cocked hat.

Good luck

Bg


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## Emma.Wakefield (11 Oct 2020)

I am thoroughly enjoying this journal; and what an amazing journey! Your tank looks so different from the beginning to where you are now. Looking forward to seeing more!

Emma


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## Karmicnull (12 Oct 2020)

Shrimp update. 
I have six more shrimp.  And a Zebra Nerite snail.  I decided I needed genetic diversity if this colony is to be successful, so the initial Aquarium Gardens colonists were joined by 6 from Maidenhead Aquatics in Coton.  At some future point  they will be joined by 6 more from Maidenhead Aquatics in Huntingdon. 

Various sites say occasionally feed shrimp protein if you want them to breed.  I thought I would try bloodworms.  I wasn't  entirely sure how a stash of bloodworms suddenly appearing in the freezer between the pizzas and the oven chips  would go down, so I decided to avoid finding out and went freeze-dried.  When the bloodworms arrived, I took a tiny pinch and carefully soaked them as recommended to ensure they sink ok.  After about ten minutes, I dropped them into the tank, where they were sucked into the spray-bar maelstrom and tossed around for several minutes above the mountain range before being spat out. At which point they all floated gently up to the surface and became entangled in the roots of the pond lettuce.  They were still there the next day.  I hope the pond lettuce likes protein.

For my next attempt at feeding the shrimp, I was planning to gather some nettles from the end of the garden, but it got a bit rainy and the end of the garden suddenly seemed a long way away.  In a moment of inspiration, I foraged in the freezer, and found some frozen broccoli, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable substitute for nettles. So I defrosted a thumb-size floret, blanched it and dangled that in the tank on the end of a thread for a couple of hours.  Then I completely forgot about it.  The following morning I forgot about it again.  When I finally did remember, and tried to reel it in, it disintegrated.  The two biggest lumps wedged themselves at the base of the the mountain range. Aesthetically this didn't work for me, so I decided to use my fishnet to retrieve them.  It became rapidly obvious that the mountain range itself was at far more risk than the broccoli.  Accepting that I was going to get wet, I got the pincettes out and flailed around trying to grab broccoli lumps.  The problem was even when I successfully got hold of one, about half way back up to the surface it would disintegrate further as it was wrenched out of my tweezery grasp by the fickle mountaintop currents.  Eventually, with the help of copious swearing, I managed to retrieve about a quarter of the floret.  The shrimp all sat on their various leaves and watched the whole episode in complete bemusement.  One even swam up and gave my pincettes a prod, just to demonstrate who had mastery of the whole underwater environment, and who clearly didn't.


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## Karmicnull (12 Oct 2020)

On the whole current thing:


Big G said:


> Unless your completely wedded to the idea I would give the neos a few weeks to figure out the flow and adjust if they're your concern.



I have to confess a big part of my motivation is that my current external filter (A Tetratec EX1200) is sitting in a washbowl beside the aquarium stand.  One important thing I've learned about my new hobby is that you need to measure the space in your stand before you buy the stuff to go in it.  I spent some time trying to recover the situation by trawling ebay for a cheap oak or oak-effect cabinet slightly larger than an EX1200, before realising that I was about to spend more money on a box to put around my existing oversized filter than I would if I was to purchase a new filter that actually fit my aquarium stand.  So I'm now targeting the Aquael Ultramax 1000, which is (a) cheaper than an oak cabinet, (b) less than 42cm high and (c) not entirely slated in other threads on this forum.  I'm planning to make this swap before I get any fish, which may well delay the fish purchase, as I will have spent my fish money solving the "filter in a washbowl not really working with the living room decor" problem.

Also


Emma.Wakefield said:


> I am thoroughly enjoying this journal



Thank you!  I spend much of my day job writing dry, painstakingly accurate documents.  I'm thoroughly enjoying being able to deploy adjectives (or weasel words, as they are referred to at work) with guiltless abandon.  

- Simon


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## Raekz (12 Oct 2020)

So far, the tank is looking really good, well done! I read your remark about the spraybar;_ ' I'm also slightly concerned that because of the spray bar position (which I have little choice about) half the tank is in a raging torrent, and the other half is a quiet backwater. ',_  did you consider slapping the spraybar to the right (short side of the tank)? I've had a low-tech (journal) too, had the same issue with a bad flow which caused dead spots. After moving the spraybar, things changed for the better. If that isn't a option, maybe you can extend the length of the spraybar, so you'll get some motion throughout the tank?


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## Karmicnull (14 Oct 2020)

Raekz said:


> did you consider slapping the spraybar to the right (short side of the tank)?


I'm definitely holding that in my back pocket as an option (don't know what it will do to my water lettuce and frogbit to be bombarded)!  I've seen that most tanks where the spraybar is 'end-on' have the intake under it, so the water flows along the top, down the opposite side and then back at ground level.  I think I'd try the same if I were to do that.  I have no concrete evidence in the tank that I'm worrying with any justification, so I'll leave it for now.  I'm operating from a position of almost total ignorance so I've been trawling youtube to see what other people's flow is like, and visually my tank appears to be within the 95%.


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## ChrisD80 (15 Oct 2020)

Really enjoy reading your descriptive and entertaining posts, this journal is a pleasure to read. Good luck with the scape!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Karmicnull (15 Oct 2020)

Yak shaving.  I was introduced to it by MIT media lab PhD students.  The idea is that as you go about your PhD you have some requirement that has a dependency on getting something else done.  And that something else has its own dependency, and so on and so on shaggy dog style.  The result of which in order to get your PhD done you are sitting there shaving a Yak.  And as I sat there last weekend reading a paper on the use of peppers in Salmon diet as a supplement to enhance their red colour, I realised that I had met my first aquarium Yak.  It's not as bizarre as it sounds - it's all because my partner grows chillis and I turn them into chilli sauces.  Those of you familiar with the art (science?) of chilli sauce making will know that you need to make sure that they are below pH 4.6 to suppress the growth of C. botulinum.  This will otherwise have a far more severe effect on your chilli sauce consumer's health than even the hottest of Carolina Reapers*. I'm paranoid so I like mine to be be below pH 2. I have a pH meter that I use to test my sauces which is way more accurate than my API test strips or my ICA NT lab test kit.  So having trawled the scientific literature I ended up with this paper on the effect of chilli peppers on salmon colouration.  Happily it concluded that whilst other stuff in the peppers is beneficial for colouring, the capsaicin (the 'hot' bit in chillis) has no effect on Salmon.  I've extrapolated from Salmon to all fish, which means that I'm good to go for testing my tank with a decent PH tester without having to worry about getting a supply of yoghurt in for the residents to cool off their gills if there is cross-contamination.  I can check my PH freed from the concerns of exactly how fast I'm using up expensive test kits.  Reading other UKAPS threads I've realised I need to test consistently at two points in the day - once before lights off and once before lights on, which will get me the tank's operating range and let me track like-for-like deltas week over week.  



ChrisD80 said:


> Good luck with the scape!


Thank you!  I will gratefully accept all the luck going - I'm going to need it at some point.  


*And believe me these are not fun to eat unprocessed.  As I discovered when my children chopped one up onto my pizza one evening.  How they chortled as I was doubled over in agony by the sink running my tongue under the cold water tap.  Kids, eh?


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## dw1305 (16 Oct 2020)

Hi all, 





Karmicnull said:


> And as I sat there last weekend reading a paper on the use of peppers in Salmon diet as a supplement to enhance their red colour, I realised that I had met my first aquarium Yak.


Because this forum is the _gift that keeps on giving_ we actually have some carotenoid posts that <"mention Salmon"> and (Flamingos). 

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (20 Oct 2020)

Plant update.

The Bolivian Chain Sword needs to make its mind up. First it melted 90% of its foliage, then it grew one new leaf, then it stopped.  Since then it has resolutely done absolutely nothing.  According to the notes I culled from AquaticPlantCentral.com it is highly invasive and "Plants up to eight inches tall can literally appear overnight."  I have shared these notes with my clearly dispirited example in an attempt to encourage it. 





My Anubias Nana, on the other hand, is exhibiting passive resistance, with some justification.  Initially I planted it in the gravel (rhizome on the surface) very carefully behind the big pink reef rock exactly where I couldn't see it. When I did my first big replant, it was tied on to the reef rock with cotton.  Or more accurately, anchored about six inches away from the reef rock.  Tying things to rocks with cotton is a lot easier on Youtube than in real life.    When I did my next big replant, I had superglue. I superglued the Anubias to the rock. That held for about a week. The Anubias freed itself and drifted back its mid-tank anchor point.  Last week, after swearing a bit, I superglued it back down again.  It retaliated by deliberately melting the one new leaf it had grown. I'm fully expecting it to wrestle free again over the coming weeks, at which point I will accept that it clearly prefers floating in the middle of the tank at the end of its cotton anchor rope, and hope that the cotton is made of stern stuff and won't rot in the forseeable future.

The Hygrophila Pinnatifida and the Hottonia Palustris are both looking slightly the worse for wear but may have some new growth at the top.  Fingers crossed.  It's weird how photos flatten everything and make stuff look better than it really is. 



 



I bought three plants that were 'medium' rather than easy.  The Hygrophila Costata is inching upwards, the dwarf hair grass is bunching out slowly but steadily and - once I'd replanted it somewhere that actually got some light - The Alternanthera Roseafolia is one of the few plants that is visibly growing.  It's a little on the leggy side but I view that as an advantage.  My partner is a gardener and it gives me the opportunity to look her in the eye and say 'underplanting' with a straight face.  Finally, a level playing field.



 



The water lettuce continues to thrive (and the shrimp love it).  I'm having to remove a handful every week when I change the water. I can only imagine that if I were running a high tech tank, all my plants would be growing at that rate.  I have been instructed by my partner under no circumstances to waste dirty tank water down the drain, and have won brownie points for working out its ferts ratio(apparently good for leaf growth).  I have however more than lost those brownie points due to the presence of splinter colonies of Pistia in pretty much every water containing vessel in the house.  The Pogostomon Helferi is also very happy, but I'm not convinced it wants to be an epiphyte (thanks Darrel). It seems to be making no attempt to bond with the rocks it's attached to, whereas I can see some of the mosses definitely starting to cling on.






Sadly the Crypt Crispatula is no more, the last leaf having finally melted away a few days ago.  On the one hand I'm gutted as it was very beautiful.  On the other hand I've read a ton of melting crypt blogs, and my wendtii is all pretty happy.  I think I'll look on the bright side.  So that leads to the mini-dilemma:  Do I try again with the crispatula?  (a) Yes - it's still an awesome plant.  (b) no - don't throw good money after bad.  (c) You've got plenty of stuff in the tank already - you don't actually need any more.  (d) why not seize the opportunity to try something else?


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## Wolf6 (20 Oct 2020)

If a plant refuses to grow, I'd say B and C or D


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## dw1305 (20 Oct 2020)

Hi all, 
Plant health looks really good, so I would expect all the, more tardy, plants to perk up and grow.


Karmicnull said:


> I have shared these notes with my clearly dispirited example in an attempt to encourage it.


It is not only me who does that then?


Karmicnull said:


> It retaliated by deliberately melting the one new leaf it had grown. I'm fully expecting it to wrestle free again over the coming weeks, at which point I will accept that it clearly prefers floating in the middle of the tank at the end of its cotton anchor rope, and hope that the cotton is made of stern stuff and won't rot in the forseeable future.


I wouldn't worry about the plant, none of my epiphytes have been connected to anything for a long time, and they still grow OK


Karmicnull said:


> Do I try again with the crispatula? (a) Yes - it's still an awesome plant.


Probably that one. It likes hard water so is ideal in many ways. 

Try the forum? It is a strong grower, so I'm sure that some-one will have, already submersed, plants you can have. 

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (31 Oct 2020)

I was going to do a different update all about plants and lighting and filters and what have you, but following Boris' announcement, that can wait. 
I still have no fish.  I was planning to get the first fish in a couple of weeks time, to give plenty of time to make sure my CRS are happy (the most tenured of them have now been with me for five weeks, the newest just two), but with the new lockdown imminent that plan must move forward or I will be without fish until December.  So on Wednesday I am going to head out fishwards.

I have been looking for fish that would be reasonably unlikely to eat shrimp, compatible with one another and like hard water.  And that are pretty good at being alive.

I've gradually narrowed it down to a few top contenders that from what I've read should get on ok together.  All mainstream and, I hope, robust.
- For the bottom: some form of Cory (Panda?), I'd also love a small plec (poss Bulldog or Bristlenose) although I think my tank doesn't have enough flow for the bulldog, and there seem to be intermittent anecdotes on the web about Bristlenoses disrupting plants.
- For the middle:  Cherry Barbs. 
- For the top: Gourami.  Pearl or Blue Dwarf maybe. Or even Banded.

So the burning question is:  Which to get first?

Also: 


dw1305 said:


> none of my epiphytes have been connected to anything for a long time, and they still grow OK


Thank you for the reassurance!

One of the shrimp contemplating a life in which they are not sole inhabitants of the tank.


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## Karmicnull (1 Nov 2020)

Blimey this is an emotional rollercoaster.  I woke up this morning and decided that this is the day - I have too much work on in the week, so today is Fish Day. And it's going to be Cherry Barbs. Then I brewed myself a morning cuppa and sat down to watch shrimp whilst I drank it. And saw my first berried shrimp! OMG. Maybe now is not the time to introduce a pile of fish.





The egg to shrimp ratio seemed huge, and she was clearly struggling.  Whilst I watched, she got the eggs stuck on moss, couldn't get them unstuck, and abandoned them.  That's not supposed to happen!  I took a really bad video of it.  The dangling yellow eggs are a wavy blurry spot roughly in the middle of the screen.  The mum went and hid under some Hottonia Palustris, so you can only see her tail.  I can't blame her.



I started frantically googling to find out what was going on.  Sue peered over my shoulder and I showed her the video.  "Typical first time mum," she said.  "She'll be fine next time."  Heartless, I call it.  Anyhow it turns out the internet agreed with her (it usually does).  So I think I'm going ahead with my plan, albeit feeling somewhat emotionally battered.  Off to the not quite as local as the various garden-centre corner ones, but most excellent FS in Peterborough.


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## Hufsa (1 Nov 2020)

If you have an egg tumbler or an airstone and a bit of ingenuity it is possible to save the eggs even though the mother is absent. There should be some tutorials on it online, I think its most common to do when the mother dies or molts prematurely with the eggs still attached


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## Karmicnull (9 Nov 2020)

Lots to write about.  I may break it into a couple of posts.

I have fish!  But in cheesy box-set episode style I'm going to keep you hanging for detail.  Before we get on to them a few other things.  First off, I have remedied my filter-in-a-washbowl decor disaster.  Here's the original Tetratec EX1200.  And the washbowl.



It has now been replaced by an Aquael Ultramax 1000.  In the cabinet, where it's supposed to be.  I moved all the internal filter media over, and filled the ultramax with the pretty vile brown sedimentary water from the Teratrec.  Inevitably I found a lone shrimp at the bottom of the Tetratec.  I have given him marks for persistence, as he managed to get past a sponge pre-filter and a densely woven initial filter pad.



Despite all the reviews, I've not found it to be as quiet as the Teratec, but then I wasn't buying it for its lack of decibels, so that doesn't bother me in the slightest.  I have now had to commandeer a couple of drawers in a chest for all my aquatic kit that was previously in the cabinet.  No one told me Aquaria needed quite as much kit as this.

I was looking at the tank and realised that everything on the right hand side was doing really well (including the algae on the glass), and everything on the left hand side (under the water lettuce) was a bit woeful.  The difference in light is really quite obvious.



You can see very happy Pogostomon throwing roots everywhere





Whereas the Hygrophila Costata is very leggy.





So in my weekly water change I took out about twice as much water lettuce as usual. That seems to have made a difference.  The Water lettuce is still pretty much 100% covering the LHS of the tank, but it's a lot less thick, and the Hygrophila Costata and Hottonia have both perked up slightly.




I mentioned before that the water lettuce is colonising the rest of the house.  A couple of weeks ago Sue brought in the Strelizia (Bird of Paradise) and Canna to overwinter in the Orangery.  Clearly perfect locations for Pistia Stratiotes!











I also picked up a second snail - a Lava snail.  Otherwise known slightly alarmingly as a Black Devil snail.  The internet says ""Lava snails are omnivores and skilled scavengers. They will feed on any algae in the substrate and on decorations, but they are too heavy to climb on the aquarium glass."  No one has told mine that.  




Also I have reasonable evidence that Lava Snails are not gifted with penetrating intellect.  I was wondering why I kept seeing small bits of water lettuce tangled up with my Wendtii Crypts at the bottom of the tank.  The answer came as I watched the Lava snail patiently ascend up the glass to the waterline, and then transfer its grip to the nearest water lettuce.  Physics reared its ugly head and the Lava snail plummeted to the bottom of the pool, clinging onto the water lettuce for dear life, hoping - I assume - that it would act at least slightly like a parachute (it didn't).  The snail thumped loudly into the Crypts, reluctantly let go of the water lettuce, and slunk off.  Leaving the water lettuce tangled in the Crypts.  Mystery solved.


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## Karmicnull (9 Nov 2020)

Oh yes.  The fish.  8 Cherry Barbs arrived on November 1st. Three males and five females. After a few days of nervous skulking next to the filter intake pipe, they've gradually made the tank their own.




They are amazing!!!  Who needs action movies when you have Cherry Barbs?  I was sat on my fish-watching stool having my morning cup of tea, and I tell you, the Mad Max movies are going into the loft.  As I watched, one of the girls erupted out of the Christmas Moss like an X-Wing bursting through the fireball left from the TIE fighter it had just destroyed.  Close behind her and totally unphased was a keen boy. She swerved over the reef rock, banked up the side of the glimmer Rock and then with a flick of her tail vanished between the Pogostomons with the boy in hot pursuit. 



 Her turning circle is better than my lawnmower's!  And it's not only action movies.  If I'd subscribed to the Winter Sports channel, I'd be cancelling that subscription now.  Who needs high velocity contact sports when you have competing testosterone-fuelled adolescents? (Or whatever the barb equivalent of testosterone is).  Two of the boys got into what was clearly a 'my gills are redder than yours' argument of some sort which ended up with a high octane chase around the tank that fused together the best elements of skiing, parkour and ice hockey.  
I was starting to think that I might prune those leggy Hygrophila, but I clearly can't, as the boys need the leafless stems for their slaloms.  And that moment when the lead barb sprinted towards the side of the tank, and at the last minute twisted, hit the glass with a side-on body slam and vanished under the intake pre-filter.  Whoa.  I'm convinced the whole tank shook with the impact.


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## Karmicnull (10 Nov 2020)

I was lamenting the loss of my Cryptocoryne Crispatula and Darrel said:


dw1305 said:


> Try the forum? It is a strong grower, so I'm sure that some-one will have, already submersed, plants you can have.


This seemed like an excellent idea and I picked up one from @akwarybka last Wednesday (my final pre-lockdown action!). It's in the holding tank, going in later this week.  Somehow I seem to have picked up her bristlenose at the same time.  He is stunning.  Having looked at a picture of the tank Akwarybka said he would make the driftwood his home, and she was right.




 Shortly after that picture was taken he found a cave that I didn't know existed between the wood and the rocks, and took up residence.  In fact, very much in the spirit of the lockdown, he never actually leaves it.  Or at least not when I'm there.  Someone is eating the algae wafers, though so I think he's sneaking out for socially distanced rambles when no one is around.  Either that or I'm going to have some very fat shrimp.

This is him in his cave.




Ok that might not have been super clear.  Here's a close-up.




Still not sure? hopefully this one will help...



Not the most compelling Ancistrus snap you may have seen I grant you, but I have to take what I can get.

In the interests of fish welfare I've been checking Ammonia and Nitrite every other day. Satisfyingly they have both remained a resounding zero despite the increased bioload.  Go plants!

Also Hufsa said 


Hufsa said:


> it is possible to save the eggs even though the mother is absent. There should be some tutorials on it online


Thanks!  I have looked the tutorials up, bought the requisite kit and will be ready should this ever happen again.

To close out out, a couple of full tank shots.  Lots of other journals have these great panoramic shots of amazing aquascapes in the context of the rooms they are in.  I've attempted the same.  Mine features my Aquarium-watching stool.  And the lens cap, which I left on it.








Cheers,

  Simon


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## Karmicnull (15 Nov 2020)

Plant Update.  The final leaf on my Anubias Nana had an argument with the bristlenose and lost, leaving a lonely Rhizome.  I fished it out and took a look at it.  About half of it was rotten, so I cut it back to the healthy tissue, and  have put it into my holding tank to see what happens.  In case you were wondering, the family gave me a Marina 360 about half a dozen christmases ago. It was a spirited attempt to jump-start my once and future aquarium which I'd been annoying them by talking about for the last decade.  It's 10L, so too small for fish (despite the promise of the pictures on the packaging), so I put it in a pile and wondered what to do with it.  Then Prime day came around and I picked up a small internal filter for a fiver, bought a couple of plants from AG and a light on Ebay for another fiver and created a "holding tank" to store all the cuttings etc. that I don't know what to do with.  At least that's what I told myself.  Given it's already pretty full, this plan isn't really looking that compelling as a long term solution for where to put plant stuff.  Anyhow, here it is with the Anubias Rhizome in the foreground.


 




Meanwhile back at the real tank,  having read a ton on UKAPS about emersed plants having to adapt to totally submersed living, and the different strategies that different plants adopt, I realised that this was super-visible in my Hygrophyla Costata.  You can see on the picture below the remaining leaves from when I bought it, all big and broad, and then the new growth higher up, where the leaves are long and thin.  The difference is so marked it's almost like a completely different plant.  There's an interloping leaf from the Crypt Crispatula, which has been slotted in where the Anubias was.  That's the wrinkly crennelated one.




One of the old (pre submersion) leaves has now got a rather attractive case of Green Spot Algae.  I spent a pleasant afternoon yesterday watching the rugby and spending the time when they faff around sorting out scrums surfing and trying to work out what I should do about it.  The prevalent UKAPS theory appears to be that it is caused by too much rotting organic matter in the tank, which makes sense as in my case it has been triggered by the addition of fish, and therefore of course excess food.  And as the last time I fed a fish was over 30 years ago,  I'm still trying to work out the right amount to feed them.  Especially the Bristlenose.  He's relaxed a bit and does occasionally move out of his cave to hug his tree.  You can feed him with a pleco wafer held in some tweezers, and he'll grab it and then skulk back off into his cave to eat it.  But for some incomprehensible reason he doesn't appear to have evolved to snatch food out of tweezers, so half the time it drops on to the aquarium floor and it is then ignored.  I think he's some sort of pleco aristocrat who will accept nothing less than food hand-delivered by tweezer.  I've even (accidentally, admittedly) dropped a wafer on his head, and he just stared at me balefully and gnawed at his tree.  It's definitely his tree, incidentally.  He's got rid of most of the epiphytes stuck to it and I've had to rehome them.  Nothing is allowed to come between him and the tree!
Anyhow, here's the green spot.  If you could design plants with these markings people would pay through the nose for them.  My current plan for dealing with it is to nurture some more matching leaves and call it a feature.




Cheers,

  Simon


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## Hufsa (16 Nov 2020)

I thought I had already written this, but apparently not. I just have to say that this is by far the best to read journal on Ukaps (in my opinion) and it always makes my day when I see there is a new update 😁 Basically, love the style, and the posts, please keep it up!


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## dw1305 (16 Nov 2020)

Hi all, 


Karmicnull said:


> The final leaf on my Anubias Nana had an argument with the bristlenose and lost.................Especially the Bristlenose. He's relaxed a bit and does occasionally move out of his cave to hug his tree. You can feed him with a pleco wafer held in some tweezers, and he'll grab it and then skulk back off into his cave to eat it.


Put some <"vegetables in for him">. Cucumber, Courgette, Pepper, Green Bean, Sweet Potato, Carrot etc. There is a list on <"PlanetCatfish">.

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (17 Nov 2020)

dw1305 said:


> Put some <"vegetables in for him">. Cucumber, Courgette, Pepper, Green Bean, Sweet Potato, Carrot etc. There is a list on <"PlanetCatfish">.



Thanks for the link - duly bookmarked.  In particular I like the idea of clipping the food to the side of the tank, given his regal disregard for the bottom.  I do tend to have a vegetable on-the-go most days.  I mentioned marrow and broccoli a few posts back.  I've also tried cucumber and a bean, all strategically dropped outside his cave, but no luck to-date.  A couple of weekends ago I was wandering around the garden and saw these:



My attitude has clearly shifted as I didn't yell 'Aaargh - weeds' but instead went "oooh: food!", got my gloves out and harvested the tips.  These were blanched and then frozen.





My son came in whilst I was blanching them.  "What are you cooking," he said. "Is it lasagne?"  Then he peered over my shoulder.  "Oh.  Weird nettle soup.  Will it have chicken in it?"  He pondered a little more before the penny dropped.  "That's not my tea; that's for the fish.  It's going to be baked bean wraps again tonight, isn't it. "
Sorry son.  Priorities.
Anyhow I bundled some up and wedged them under a rock near the Bristlenose's cave.  He was unimpressed.  The shrimp were unimpressed.  The snails feasted.
Undaunted, I shall soldier on.  Tonight I put out some more marrow for him to ignore.  I'm working on a twofold premise.  Firstly, the cherry barbs pointedly turned their backs on the tubifex I tried as their dinner a couple of weeks back, but went completely bananas over them earlier this evening, so there's still hope the Bristlenose will change his mind.  Secondly I have about a year's supply of frozen nettles and marrows so he is just going to have to suck it up.


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## Karmicnull (17 Nov 2020)

Hufsa said:


> love the style, and the posts, please keep it up!


Much obliged!  This forum has been invaluable in my brief journey to-date.  Feels only reasonable to share my own experience as a slightly weird way of saying thank you.


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## Hufsa (17 Nov 2020)

The unbeaten champion of the vegetables here is sweet potato. Nothing can compare to it according to my gang otocinclus. It has beaten cucumber, broccoli, aubergine/eggplant, green squash and even a very expensive and delicious looking butternut squash, by a landslide. Definitely recommend. It might take his royal highness a little time to discover it though, especially if his highness needs to descend all the way down to the slum to find it 
I boil slices a little less than a cm thick for about 20 minutes, but it probably depends on your stove. This makes them the right consistency for eating right away. Otherwise it may take a few days to soften enough, and that might affect water quality

[Super late edit] Frozen slices into cold water. Otherwise 20 minutes may net you some porridge. My bad


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## akwarybka (17 Nov 2020)

Hahaha, love this journal! I've been looking forward to new posts everyday as a post work treat, it never dissapoints!

@Karmicnull you asked what the pleco's name was. It looks like "His Royal Highness" is the perfect fit. I'm glad he's doing well and he hasn't changed his habits! Good luck with getting him to eat veggies, I've tried in the past, but same as for you he was super unimpressed with my offers of courgette... Maybe he will yet like something else than tablets!

How is that Crypt balansae doing for you, any melting?


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## Karmicnull (18 Nov 2020)

Akwarybka said:


akwarybka said:


> Good luck with getting him to eat veggies,


and Hufsa said:


Hufsa said:


> The unbeaten champion of the vegetables here is sweet potato.



So I now have sweet potato added to tomorrow's grocery delivery.  I also thought some competition might motivate, so I have explained to him that there's no guarantee he will actually get it as Sue is a sweet potato fiend, and if she unpacks before I get there he won't get a look in.  Actually, when I think about it, if he does have to go without for a couple of weeks it might make him value that sweet potato more if/when it does actually arrive.  A bit like toilet roll and flour back in March; maybe I can get him to panic-eat.

Akwarybka also said:


akwarybka said:


> How is that Crypt balansae doing for you, any melting?


I'll try and get a couple of photos at the weekend.  Some of the leaves are looking a bit pale, but others look very happy.  I've been stalking all mentions of Crypt balanasae online and several people report it melting back whilst it sorted out its roots, and then growing prolifically, so I'm cautiously optimistic.  That said I've come to the conclusion that for all I've read through and understood the theory of the ammonia cycle, emersed growth, CO2 and O2 absorbtion and everything that goes with it all, when it comes to practice, this issue of XKCD is dead on:



And that nicely sums up my lived experience with my tank.  When I started doing 50% EI dosing, my Nitrates were at 40.  I shoved a few more plants in, added some shrimp and fish, and now my nitrates are consistently at 10.  The fish all poop loads (especially his majesty), and yet my tank is never full of poop.  And when I've had to open the filter, just like Hufsa says about their tank here:


Hufsa said:


> I checked the filter today and it smells nice again!
> Ive always loved the smell of the filter but I have never been as happy to smell that earthy smell as I am today
> I stood for a while, just sniffing sponges in the kitchen, and im sure I looked quite insane.
> But yeah, very very happy.


Now I've occasionally had to unblock drains in the house and as you well know, they do *not* smell of earth and pond!  And the filter is effectively a drain that empties back into the tank again!!  I'm sorry, but notwithstanding all the amazing science, this is clearly magic.

Cheers,

  Simon


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## MossMan (22 Nov 2020)

Thanks for this Journal, i have enjoyed reading it from start to date! Amazing looking tank btw! Nice one!


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## Karmicnull (27 Nov 2020)

You're going to have to bear with me and run with this one.
So.  Imagine you're an eight year old schoolkid playing football in the yard.  Your arms are strapped to your sides.  Oh - and the ball is invisible.  And as a reminder for those of you who are a long way from eight - at that age football involves a lot of running around chasing the ball, rather than anything more nuanced like, for example, strategy.  Ok so far? So here's the twist.  You're a hugger.  You like hugging your mates.  So all the time you're running around chasing that invisible ball, you are also constantly trying to hug everyone.  Except you have that problem with the lack of conveniently available arms.  Got that picture in your head nice and clear?  If you have then it will be no surprise to you that I am deeply disappointed with UKAPS.
Why in all the many thousands of posts that cover in great detail the science and art of aquaria, covering everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, is there nothing warning me that Panda Corys are COMPLETELY BONKERS???
I arrived back home with six of them them last weekend, and they huddled in a corner of the bag as i acclimated them, with the Cherry Barbs nosing around curiously.  I'd read in several places that when you introduce new fish you should feed the existing ones to distract them, so after an hour or so of acclimatising I fed the Barbs and let the Pandas out.  The Barbs completely ignored their food.  I'm not sure they were even aware it was there.  The Pandas scuttled out of the bag to the nearest plant leaf, where they froze, presumably attempting to blend in with the leaf.  I wasn't fooled.  It seemed to work for the Barbs, though, who were all thoroughly baffled as to where the Pandas had gone.  After a while they cruised off, shaking their heads in bemusement, and the Pandas took the opportunity to dart to the bottom of the tank, where they made themselves at home. 
There was a point when it simultaneously occurred to both Barbs and Corys that there was a significant size disparity.  The Barbs are the Ferraris of my small underwater world, with style, speed agility and elegance.  The Corys on the other hand charge around the tank with graceless enthusiasm and endless energy. Thay are, well, more like RVs. And if there's a collision between a Ferrari and an RV, you know which is going to have the bigger repair bill.  The Barbs decided to leave well alone.
The Pandas meanwhile discovered all the food that the Barbs hadn't eaten earlier, gobbled it up, and started on their game of invisible football.  Which, with occasional gaps for a rest or a bite to eat, they have been playing ever since.  They've decided to make their base the back of the tank.  My visibility of the back of the tank is pretty limited, so I'll fix my gaze on the one gap between the rocks, and wait.  Eventually the football will get thumped from one end of the tank to the other, and all the Pandas will charge after it, in a giant mobile multi-finned hug, and I get to see them as they cross my sight line.  For some reason I will happily spend ages waiting for those brief glimpses.  I tell you my life is supercharged with excitement.
Anyhow, at one point the football game made it to the front of the tank, and I took a couple of shots.  Here they are.



 





 



I'm wondering if I should revisit my stocking plans.  I had planned to get a final set of occupants, 3 pearl Gouramis (2 female, 1 male).  Whilst that works according to bioload as far as I can see, I'm thinking my tank may already be full when it comes to personality. Hmm.


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## Karmicnull (28 Nov 2020)

Now that I've got the - admittedly fabulous- surprise of the Panda Corys off my chest, some other updates.  
I read with envy many of the other tank journals where people do awesome stuff.  Perhaps the perfect example of this is @Dogtemple's blog - he's two pages in and has drilled a ton of stuff - including a plastic Ikea chopping board - and lots of people are giving advice on how to drill stuff better and commenting on acutators and pipework.  I have no idea what he's making but I'm guessing its something to do with an Aquarium, and I remain riveted in my ignorance.  
I come from the opposite end of the capability spectrum.  The last time I attempted to do some DIY (lifting a carpet in anticipation of the new one arriving), I flooded the house and ended up in hospital having minor surgery on my foot.  Quite why the family encouraged me to get an Aquarium, where the opportunities to flood the house are maybe one hundred-fold those offered by a carpet, is beyond me.  Nevertheless, I have made my own contribution to the DIY content of this site, and 'modded' my lighting.  After seeing all the appealing lights suspended from the ceiling well above tanks, it occurred to me that if I could raise my lighting, I would get better coverage for the plants at the sides of the tank.  I measured stuff and there was room within the tank hood to raise the light.  So I got out my PAR ratings for the light, upped it from 60% to 70%, and raised it by 5cm with the able assistance of a set of wooden drinks coasters we bought at the primary school fete about 5 years ago.  I am now basking in a glow of DIY competence!



 




I said I would take a snap of the Cryptocoryne Balansae.  It's not at the aesthetically appealing end of the tank.  My plan is that it grows out to hide the water intake tube.  This may take several years.  Since taking this photo the two yellow leaves have both melted off completely, so it's currently going backwards in terms of leaf density.




Also a couple of snaps of the Bristlenose and his tree.  And all the patches of superglue left over from the insolent plants he has evicted.  I had to reach round and take the first one 'blind' as I can't fit myself and my camera  round that corner of the tank together, so it's a bit wonky.








MossMan said:


MossMan said:


> Thanks for this Journal, i have enjoyed reading it from start to date! Amazing looking tank btw! Nice one!


Thank you - appreciated.  I am constantly amazed by how good it looks considering I haven't a clue what I'm doing. I'll have no excuses on the next one, mind you.  And on that note the latest FTS:





Cheers,

  Simon


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## Dogtemple (29 Nov 2020)

Hey thanks for the shout out. I’m glad to have been one of the ones to ‘inspire’ you to give it a go.  Aside from flooding your house and killing a load of innocent little fish, I guess there’s not much that can go wrong in having a play about. 

Makes sense to raise your lights though, if you remove the top, buy 100 or so more coasters, you could nail them together and stick it to the ceiling and have a hanging light.


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## Karmicnull (29 Nov 2020)

Dogtemple said:


> if you remove the top, buy 100 or so more coasters, you could nail them together and stick it to the ceiling and have a hanging light.



Superb idea.  I'm on it.


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## dcurzon (29 Nov 2020)

I think you missed a trick there.  If you put the coasters on edge you'd gain more height.


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## akwarybka (29 Nov 2020)

Crypt balansae doesn't look bad at all! I can see new leaf grew nicely, so no concerns. Mine would also lose a leaf or two every once in a while, despite being well established. But I think you might need a few more if you want to cover the filter piping  

Pleco! <3 Sorry he evicted the plants, he was behaving himself around a Bolbitis heudelotii, maybe one to try in the future? It seems to root up much quicker than Anubias from what I noticed.

I really like the group of smaller crypts in front of the purple rock on the left, they look so lush! I think doing something similar in the right would look really good, just a suggestion


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## Karmicnull (3 Dec 2020)

akwarybka said:


> Pleco! <3 Sorry he evicted the plants, he was behaving himself around a Bolbitis heudelotii, maybe one to try in the future? It seems to root up much quicker than Anubias from what I noticed.


Actually I'm not worried about that - The whole family is enjoying his personality.  We caught him on the floor of the tank scarfing up algae pellets the other night after lights out when he thought no one was looking.  He looked really put out 😂.  



akwarybka said:


> I really like the group of smaller crypts in front of the purple rock on the left, they look so lush! I think doing something similar in the right would look really good


Yeah they've worked well and have been quietly getting on with growing.  I'm going to stick with the dwarf hairgrass on the right for now - as much as anything because I'm curious to see if it will actually spread.  I probably need to give it a bit of a trim really.


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## Karmicnull (3 Dec 2020)

Slightly off topic - but in the spirit of encouraging vicarious learning, here's one for you all:  Don't take enthusiastic photos of your tank after midnight having spent the evening in a beer-tasting event. However much of a good idea it may seem at the time.





View attachment 50419588862_0ebad70e35_6k.jpg

Cheers,

  Simon


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## Karmicnull (31 Dec 2020)

Shrimp update
Another long gap between updates due to work and Christmas priorities.  And once again quite a lot to cover off, so I'll break into a few posts.  First off I saw two more berried shrimp.  One of them seemed to have frondy stuff attached to her eggs.  I went off and did some surreptitious surfing during the family film night, and started worrying that this was Green fungus (Ellobiopsidae).  The internet is full of horror stories of breeders having 2000 shrimp die as this ripped through their tanks.  By that time, the berried shrimp had completely vanished, so I slept on it and let my subconscious work out what to do.  The next morning I leaped into action, went to Tesco and bought myself a bottle of coke and a large sandwich box.  Or, as I thought of them, a shrimp trap and a quarantine tank. I drank the coke, cleaned and prepped the bottle and popped it into the tank baited with a tempting algae wafer and a few granules of TA aquaculture #2 blend, which everyone in the tank seems to like.  Next morning I had caught six shrimp, including a berried female, but not the one who might have Ellobiopsidae.  



 



The six shrimp then colonised my 12L Marina plant tank as an insurance policy.  Meanwhile I was questioning myself - was this just a blend of inexperience and paranoia?  Especially since I couldn't see a frondy-berried shrimp, and I spotted at least one further normally berried shrimp in the main tank.  Maybe I was just imagining things.




 

Meanwhile the six colonists made themselves at home in the Marina. I'm trying to run that very low maintenance, with just a 50% WC every 2 weeks.  It had a ton of brown algae, and a bit of green thread.  Within 48 hours of the cherries moving in, all the brown algae was gone. but the green thread remained untouched.  My main tank is also nurturing some green thread algae, closer to the surface where the light is brighter.  Clearly I have nothing that eats it - an oversight on my part.
A couple of days later, looking at the Marina, to my horror I realised that it had suddenly developed a huge population of Hydras (Hydrae? Hydri?).  What had I done? In an attempt to make her safe, I'd introduced the poor berried female into a new and suddenly hostile world which would be a death-trap for her babies.  Also, where had the Hydras come from?  I have none in my main tank - and have had no hydras in this tank until it was settled by the six shrimp. 




 I channelled Arthur Conan Doyle.  "“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”  It is clearly the work of aliens.  
Or, on further reflection maybe I do have Hydras in my main tank, but something has been eating them as fast as they grow.
I frantically combed the net for info on how to eradicate hydras without offing shrimp, and ended up paying expedited delivery for some Genchem 'No Planaria', which contains extract of Betel nut.  Even expedited, with the Christmas rush, it took days to arrive.  Meanwhile the eggs hatched, and the Marina suddenly had a small collection of astonishingly cute little shrimp who were substantially smaller than the by now fairly sizeable hydra.  I spent several unhappy hours watching helplessly and desperately willing the shrimplets to navigate routes that dodged the many hydra on plants, the aquarium floor, water lettuce roots, etc.  Eventually the No Planaria arrived, and the tank was dosed.  To my slight surprise, it worked, and the hydra are now all dead. I have since seen a couple of baby shrimp, and the Marina now has another berried female, so life there is looking up.
Back, however, to the main tank. 
A few days later I spotted the frondy shrimp again.  It was definitely not berried.  Completely forgetting that the last time I'd tried to catch something (broccoli) I'd ended up almost demolishing my hardscape, I grabbed my net and flailed it around the tank.  The Frondy shrimp slunk off into the undergrowth and vanished out of sight.
My daughter, Léonie, had been watching. "Can I have a go," she said.
"Sure, but the shrimp has gone back into hiding.  You won't be able to see it, let alone catch it."
Léonie took the net and peered round the side of the tank, through dense bushes of Pogostomon Helferi. "Oh there it is."  She gently lowered the net into the heavily planted area at the back which is completely impenetrable and stared intently. "There you are - got it!".  
I felt both inadequate and pleased simultaneously.  Léonie does that to me a lot.
The shrimp has now gone into the shrimpy quarantine tank, been diagnosed with Cladogonium Ogishimae and is undergoing treatment.  You can read more here.
Whilst all this drama was unfolding, the other berried shrimp quietly got on with life and hatched her eggs.  The day before yesterday, half a dozen reasonably large offspring suddenly materialised and now spend their days hanging out in the Pogostomon.  
Also, in the middle of all this, the Pearl Gouramis arrived.  More about them later.

Cheers,

  Simon


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## Karmicnull (8 Jan 2021)

Plant update
============
I'll start with the Amazon Frogbit.  Several months ago mid lockdown, when I was just a few weeks into my scaping journey, @castle was kind enough to trek over to my house and leave a gift of some Limnobium Laevigatum on my doorstep.  I added it to my tank and it motored off and started generating the long drifting roots that characterise it.  I didn't pay too much attention to it after that for a while - it coexisted with my Pistea Stratiotes and collectively they were my duckweed index.  Then one day I focused in on the floating community and discovered that the water lettuce had radically outcompeted the frogbit. There is only one frogbit left. I view this as viable seed stock for a sustainable frogbit community, so I have transferred it to my 12L Marina shrimp tank, given it pride of place under the light, and am keeping the bullying Pistea well away from it.  So far this strategy has worked and it is growing.  



On this note @Hufsa if you want to succeed in growing a floater go for water lettuce.  I'm removing about a 10cm x 10cm patch from my tank every week.  I would offer to mail you some but  - notwithstanding the free algae, snails, hydra and possibly shrimp that would come with it - right now it would probably sit in a lorry in Kent for a month.

I've also pruned my first few stems and replanted them.  Another activity that is far easier to read about than do. The first one was one of the H. siamensis 53b.  The pruning side went ok, the replanting less so.  I am building a long list of hints and tips for future novices, and top of that list will be 'how to replant a stem (which is effectively a long slippery floating pole with some leaves at the top) in an area owned by a Bristlenose.  The first time it lasted less than 3 hours.  The second time it managed right through 'til lights out and then was evicted overnight.  The third time was about 5 hours even though it was right next to the heater in a really boring part of the tank that - surely? - no fish would ever want to visit.  In a fit of pique I shoved it back in to the middle of the main throughfare that the Corys use to charge around the back of the tank.  Where it has happily taken root and started growing. The Bristlenose wins again.
Most of the cut stems are out of sight behind the mountain range, but excitingly the base of H. Costata that I can see is now just starting to grow two new leaves. Give it a month or two and they'll be done.  There's no hurrying a low tech tank.

I have also flexed my Algae muscles and various forms are thriving.  I have thread algea everywhere, but especially in my moss.  I have BBA and stagshorn in my Pogostomon in the highest flow part of the tank.  I have Pogostomon in my Moss.  I have moss in pretty much everything.  







The green spot algae is looking very beautiful on a variety of different leaves.  For some reason the Alternanthera Rosaefolia now looks as if it recently guested as an extra in a James Bond fight scene.  Oh, and some water lettuce have escaped under the airline pontoon, got in front of the spray bar, surfed the current down to the bottom of the tank, and are now also stuck in the moss and pogostomon in a sort of drawn out multi-day suicide.  My pogostomon is also full of baby shrimp.  




I had a bit of a think about why I'd suddenly got all this algae and concluded that it was because I was overfeeding the Pearl Gourami (did I mention I now have Pearl Gourami?) since it is so much fun watching them eat. I've forked out for some measuring spoons that go down from 1/2 a teaspoon to 1/64 of a teaspoon, and I'm now adding to my obssessive log* how much I feed everything.  I've also taken Darrel's advice that sunset/sunrise periods are times when Algae benefit from light but plants can't, and knocked them down to 5 minutes each.  And I've gone for biological control of the thread algea by adding 4 Amano shrimp to the mix.

Still, the Bolivian Chain Sword seems to have risen above everything, and remains stoically identical to the way it was 5 months ago when I planted it.




Cheers,

  Simon

_*I'm way better at logging that I forgot to dose ferts than I am at actually dosing ferts._


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## GHNelson (9 Jan 2021)

Hi
I'm sorry to say that the H Pinnatifida and some other plants are destined for the big compost heap in the sky.....some plants really do need Co2 or they are destined to fail and cause a organic mess and that affects water quality!
Using some species of substrate plants as epiphytes is doable but once again they do need Co2 in the water column!
hoggie


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## Karmicnull (9 Jan 2021)

hogan53 said:


> H Pinnatifida and some other plants are destined for the big compost heap in the sky



Yeah, you may be right.  I'm finding it's far from black and white, though.  Statistically I've had a higher success rate with 'easy' plants, and a lower one with 'medium' plants, but there's definitely a distribution.  I have killed off my Hottonia Palustris and Ludwigia Palustris. Both nominally 'easy', plants. I've also killed off a Crypt Crispatula, which should have been perfect for low-tech, low-light hard water, but my second attempt is doing ok.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, one of my most successful plants is Alternanthera Reineckii (rated 'medium'), despite PH, Hardness, Lighting and CO2 all being nominally wrong.  So the fact that my Pinnatifida has lasted for four months and actually grown some new leaves is, on balance, a success, and I am rooting for it.

[The boring stats bit:  I have 19 'easy' plant varieties of which 73% (14) are doing well, 5% (1) are hanging in there and 21% (4) are dead or on their way out.  This compares with 6 'medium' varieties of which 50% (3) are doing well, 33% (2) are hanging in there and 17% (1 - the Pinnatifida) is probably on its way out.]

Cheers,
  Simon


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## GreenNeedle (10 Jan 2021)

This journal has been (to date) a thoroughly entertaining read and a joy to see the enthusiasm of someone not trying to go all guns blazing from the get go.  Which can be quite uninteresting both when it fails spectacularly or it succeeds immediately and a new "star" is born.

Love the evolution of your tank, your knowledge and the expansion of your knowledge through the journal and more importantly that you are enjoying the journey, moving along at a pace that lets you enjoy what you have rather than what you could have and not focusing on a showpiece.

In terms of the scape I like the look of the scape from the start to finish anyway and it is nice to see a non CO2 setup, complete with problems and problem solving.  Keep going.  It really is the way to go because you then learn so much on the way.

🥇⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐


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## Big G (11 Jan 2021)

hogan53 said:


> Hi
> I'm sorry to say that the H Pinnatifida and some other plants are destined for the big compost heap in the sky.....some plants really do need Co2 or they are destined to fail and cause a organic mess and that affects water quality!
> Using some species of substrate plants as epiphytes is doable but once again they do need Co2 in the water column!
> hoggie


Just to play strawman for a moment but I have H. Pinnatifida in my one 'always low energy' tank and a second in my 'used to be high energy- now low energy' tank. Ok, it's no Triffid but does ok. The frond in the original tank in fact threw off a 'baby' which is now doing ok if having a protracted infancy. What they all do have going for them in this less-than-ideal tank is quite a good amount of PAR due to their location & proximity to the light source-  so making the inverse square law favour them? Just a theory.


As an aside 

A. Yes, super-hots should be accorded the respect of the wrong end an RPG. Made the fundamental error of seed saving from a Carolina Reaper/Orange Habanero hybrid (unplanned) without using gloves and/or sufficient care.
Several hours later I had the temerity to scratch my eyelid. The next hour was....emotional. The subsequent 4 were unpleasant. The next 24 or so were uncomfortable.

B. Do you have the ability to manually adjust f stop and shutter speed on your camera? Change lenses? Happy to offer a few simple tricks to add depth but bottom line - (in relation to a standard 50mm lense in a full-frame 35mm SLR or equivilant);

The further you move towards telephoto from 50mm i.e., say 150mm, the more flattening or sense of compression you'll feel between visual elements at different distances in an image. The reverse is true.

A shallower depth of field will compliment a less compressed feel but if overdone, comes at the expense of depth of focus.

This can be previewed and compensated for by the 1/3rd, 2/3rd rule of focal depth at  given plane.

In practice - using a 35mm (length not format) lense, focussed at about 2/3rds into the front to back(depth of the tank) and shot on f4 or f5.6 and placed on a tripod to counter shutter-shake should give you what you want. Turning down/up the intensity of your light will give you the f stop/shutterspeed combo you want (about 100th of a second).

I'm not a pro but used work in the industry. Pro's here might say I'm full of merdè. Caveat emptor.

C. This journal is a complete hoot to read and chimes on many levels. Bravo 
Bg


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## GHNelson (11 Jan 2021)

Big G said:


> Just to play strawman for a moment but I have H. Pinnatifida in my one 'always low energy' tank and a second in my 'used to be high energy- now low energy' tank. Ok, it's no Triffid but does ok. The frond in the original tank in fact threw off a 'baby' which is now doing ok if having a protracted infancy. What they all do have going for them in this less-than-ideal tank is quite a good amount of PAR due to their location & proximity to the light source- so making the inverse square law favour them? Just a theory.


Yea, not a problem were all here to expand our aquatic plant keeping knowledge In all different water parameters
I have tried on a number occasions to grow H P in hard water just doesn't like it eventually for me.....withers away and goes in the compost bin!

Ive got some on order from our 👑King of Pinnatifida growing Konrad.....I will give it another attempt😤
hoggie


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## Karmicnull (11 Jan 2021)

GreenNeedle said:


> you are enjoying the journey, moving along at a pace that lets you enjoy what you have rather than what you could have


You have no idea!  Father Christmas arrived with a 40cm Optiwhite cube for the room that acts as my home office, and I have now planned out my Aquascaping budget spend well into 2022.  February will be the light, March, the hardscape, April the filter, and so on.  You would have thought that having the cube sitting there (currently acting as a very expensive stand for my  Tesco sandwich box Shrimp quarantine tank) without the immediate funds to do anything with it would be torment, but in actual fact I get a buzz about what the future holds .


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## Karmicnull (11 Jan 2021)

Big G said:


> Turning down/up the intensity of your light will give you the f stop/shutterspeed combo you want (about 100th of a second).


I think this is the nub of my problem.  I tend to shoot at user defined shutterspeed and f stop, with ISO varying as the automatic parameter- but from experience doing other low-light photography I don't go above ISO 64000 as the resolution makes it not worth it.  At the moment even with my tank light at 100% I'm stuck at f4, 1/50th of a second - which is well into blurry fish territory.  I do a fair bit of flower macro photography (example here). The flowers don't see you coming and then spend the time deliberately avoiding your focal point and laughing.


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## Big G (11 Jan 2021)

Karmicnull said:


> I think this is the nub of my problem.  I tend to shoot at user defined shutterspeed and f stop, with ISO varying as the automatic parameter- but from experience doing other low-light photography I don't go above ISO 64000 as the resolution makes it not worth it.  At the moment even with my tank light at 100% I'm stuck at f4, 1/50th of a second - which is well into blurry fish territory.  I do a fair bit of flower macro photography (example here). The flowers don't see you coming and then spend the time deliberately avoiding your focal point and laughing.


Interesting. The only things I can suggest off the top of my head is to turn the pump/filters off, use a tripod and bracket on shutter priority, dial up the quality and hope for the fish to have a senior moment on-plane. 

Belt and braces? - HDR if you've got it.

Is there a way of feathering in another stop or two with a second diffuse point source like a lamp with a pearlescent bulb? A grow lamp perhaps? Something that's not too directional.

Get the angles right and you'll kill and internal spectral reflections. Maybe throw on a moderate polariser if its proving difficult.

If the kelvin of this second source is different from your tank light you should get some amazing, punchy saturation and colour balance/palettes too. 

I might also check out something like dpreview and take a look at your lenses curves for abberation. Some are not quite 'cooking' where you expect them to be in my experience.

Guess this is how I might approach it. Really surprised your getting back f4 at 1/50th. At such a high ISO too. Maybe the lights are deceptively low. You're getting that ballpark back off spot, zone and matrix?

I daresay I haven't brought a thing to the table you haven't already tried or already know well.

I like to picture a little community of fellow aquascapers round the world all having a little knowing chuckle over this journal and a cup of tea. Certainly allows me pleasantly step out of what occasionally feels like something from The Purge franchise for a moment.🙂


Peace

Bg


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## Karmicnull (19 Jan 2021)

Big G said:


> I daresay I haven't brought a thing to the table you haven't already tried or already know well.


Oh I wouldn't say that at all - you are many f-stops ahead of me in terms of photography depth-of-knowledge!
I'm going to use your post above as a reference point for ongoing experimentation.  In the first instance I've cottoned on to your 'diffuse light source' or, translated into the vernacular 'make it brighter you plonker'.  I think the key here is 'diffuse'.  I've been religiously closing all my curtains to stop reflections off the glass.  But if the light source is in the right place, that problem should go away.  Also I'm wondering if a polarizing filter would help with glass reflections?
Anyhow I did a quick experiment and went upstairs to the Marina, with it's cheap and cheerful Chinese LED lighting from Ebay, and that was way brighter (F7, ISO 4K, 1/60).  So my Nicrew is definitely underpowered even at full strength.


 


So I'm going to play around with extra ambient lighting and see where I get to.  I will also at some point play around with proper tripod-etc shots - inc. HDR - but that involves a degree of organisation that usually escapes me.

On the plus side - as these photos show - I've cracked the shrimp-rejecting-my-offerings problem!  It turns out all you have to do is starve them!  I'd got so used to the shrimp just magically sustaining themselves that it only belatedly occurred to me that with at least half a dozen offspring and no handy pooping fish, they might need some nutrient.  so I dipped into my near infinite supply of frozen marrow cubes, more out of hope than expectation, and to my utter astonishment found that they had turned into shrimp magnets - with the first diner arriving in less than five seconds.  
This is the marrow after about 30 seconds.  I think they were hungry.



That was a few days ago - at the moment they are thoroughly enjoying some sweet potato, and the - it turns out around 30 or so - babies in the main tank downstairs are all feasting on nettle.  I feel I have justified the huge bag in the freezer and the last four months of flak!  I also have a tentative plan to use the quantity of shrimp on the marrow in the main tank as an overfeeding index.  If there are none, I'm almost certainly overfeeding.  If I can't see the cube for jostling red bodies, my fish have probably already expired from starvation.

Cheers,

  Simon


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## Karmicnull (22 Jan 2021)

Fish update

Did I mention that I now have Pearl Gourami?  The past few weeks have been a fascinating demonstration of Pavlovian conditioning.  When they first arrived, they sprinted from their plastic bag as soon as acclimatisation was over and vanished behind the mountain range.  I didn't see them again for a long, long time.
Blaise joined me the day after they arrived, when I was tankwatching.
"Where are they?" he asked.
"You only get to see them through a telescope.  Any time something big approaches the tank they're like 'Right - I'm out of here' and they don't hang around to see whether the big thing is friendly or dangerous,"
"Actually that's pretty sensible. Extras in action movies could learn a thing or two from Pearl Gouramis."
Which, whilst true, wasn't great for the passing viewer.  Thankfully, however, familiarity does a great job of overriding sensible. Over the next couple of weeks, the Gouramis gradually realised that the looming shape and consequent clattering and banging in the cabinet were a precursor to food. When they relaxed a bit and hid less, nothing bad happened. As an added incentive they weren't getting the Cherry Barbs' seconds. Now the situation has reversed to the point where Léonie dipped her finger in the tank and it was mobbed by speculative Gouramis on the off chance that it was a particularly large and pink bloodworm.

I had planned to have three (one male, two female), but the LFS had four, and I felt guilty leaving one behind, so I took all three females.  According to the tank builder at aqadvisor.com that puts me at 101% capacity, so the tank is now offically full.

Now they have relaxed, they have started to exhibit their natural behaviour. I think it's a good thing to have 3 females, as the male thinks he is a warthog.  More specfically, he thinks he's the grumpy warthog who is the lead character in 'Sniff Snuff Snap' by Lynley Dodd.  For those of you who don't frequent the same highbrow literary heights that I do, the grumpy warthog spends the day chasing other animals away from the waterhole, only to have them sneak a quick drink whilst his back is turned.  When he finally stops chasing them and returns to the waterhole for a drink, all the water is gone.  And so it is with the male Gourami. As far as I can tell, his mission in life is to chase all the others out of the top part of the tank.  And this becomes twice as important when food arrives.  The females won when the intelligence genes were handed out: they tag team, so one leads him on a merry dance whilst the other two eat their fill. When he finally gets back to the food, another will pick up the baton and allow herself to be chased around the tank, and so on.  They only stop when all the food is gone. He hasn't starved to death yet, so there must be some point at which he stops chasing and starts eating, but I haven't spotted it yet.

Some photos from the 30 mins or so when the tank catches the winter morning sun.


 





 



Cheers,

  Simon


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## mort (22 Jan 2021)

Love pearl gourami, definitely a shy fish to begin with but once settled they really colour up. There was a good article about them in last month's practical fishkeeping where they were kept as a large group in a biotope tank, the males in particular looked stunning.


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## Karmicnull (24 Jan 2021)

Last weekend, I decided, was time to tame the Pogostomonster.  I've spent the last 6 months reading tales of people with high tech tanks having to remove or replant 50% of their biomass whilst my lot of plants trundled along not really getting the hang of the whole growing thing.  Until one day I suddenly realised I could no longer see my mountains.  The Pogostomonster was sprawled all over them like a squat frondy beast from an H.P. Lovecraft novel.  So I dedicated last Sunday afternoon to a leisurely session of pruning and rehoming, accompanied by plentiful quantities of Shipyard IPA.  I took most of the Pogostomon out, and then with the aid of my trusty reel of black cotton, resettled it into - I think - a more aesthetically appealing arrangement.  I have discovered that I have a LOT of Pogostomon.  
I also relocated my Java moss and my Spiky moss to be lower in the tank - my working theory is they don't need as much light, so if they're lower, they'll also get less thread algae.  One week on that seems to be working, ish.  When I cut back the spiky moss I discovered to my surprise that my Hydrocotyle tripartita was actually doing ok - if not growing as aggressively as some of its neighbours.  Well, not growing at all to be honest.  I've moved all the stuff around it so it can be better lit.  Hopefully that will help.

Here's a before and after:













mort said:


> Love pearl gourami, definitely a shy fish to begin with but once settled they really colour up


Yeah mine have definitely done that.  They are absolutely stunning now!

Cheers,

  Simon


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## mort (24 Jan 2021)

They will continue to improve as well Simon. Have a look at the adult pair here https://www.seriouslyfish.com/species/trichopodus-leerii/  and I've seen more red/orange in some mature males before. 

I'm guessing yours are still small going by the fact your snail in the first update pic looks about the same length. They will continue to improve over the next 18 months or so. They really are a lovely underrated fish.


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## Karmicnull (24 Jan 2021)

mort said:


> Have a look at the adult pair here


Blimey - you're right.  I hadn't looked at that picture since I actually decided on them - there's still a way to go!


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## Karmicnull (19 Feb 2021)

Well damn.  Launched into my periodic count to check I still have six Panda Corys.  It would appear I now have seven.  And I know fine well they've done it deliberately to wind me up.  They always mess about when they see me starting to try and count them.


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## Karmicnull (19 Feb 2021)

Léonie has decided that the new arrival is called Bobetta.  Bobetta is about 1cm long and astonishingly cute.  According to Seriously Fish, to get this far I reduced the PH to 6.5, did a 70% water change, and then increased oxygention and flow in the tank.  Once the eggs were laid I moved them into a separate spawning tank, where I fed the fry microworms and brine shrimp until they got big enough to move to an adult diet.  I must be getting old because I can't for the life of me remember doing any of that.  Bobetta was an accident.  But we're not going to tell her that.

Here's the irony: up until this evening I had no clue that Bobetta existed, and she has thrived on my neglect.  But now I know about her, if I carry on doing nothing and she dies _it will be my fault._ Aaaargh.

So that leads to my question and my request for help.  According to aqadvisor.com my stocking has just crept up from 105% to 107%.  What's the implication of overstocking and what do I do to compensate? I'm guessing the answer is more and/or bigger WCs?  If the Pandas make this a habit it's going to become a bit of a problem!


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## Hufsa (19 Feb 2021)

105% to 107% doesnt make a difference imo. You can just carry on like youre already doing.
You'll very likely get a few more Bobettas though, best start thinking up some names 😁
Can you arrange with a local fish shop to offload some once you get too many?

If youre changing any significant amount of water once a week, youre already leagues ahead of all the other overstocked fishtanks out there.
I think its the people who want to have 500 fish and also never do waterchanges that have problems with overstocking.
The aqadvisor is quite conservative and youre barely over 100%  No need to sweat


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## Hufsa (20 Feb 2021)

Just to add as an example, when I say overstocking I dont mean cramming a bunch of angelfish into a small tank and saying its fine if you change more water.
But having a colony of happy fish in a suitably sized tank who start breeding and bumping up the population numbers a bit, that is a different thing.

If I were in your particular situation I would see if I could build up to maybe 5-6 babies of salable size before delivering a batch to your LFS.
5-6 is a number that is easily sold as one group based on common recommendations, so would be easy for the LFS to sell without having lone corys hanging around here and there.
Do your regular waterchanges, feed your fish with moderation and sit back and enjoy seeing life being made in front of your very eyes 
Its one of the best parts of the hobby


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## dw1305 (20 Feb 2021)

Hi all, 


Karmicnull said:


> I still have six Panda Corys. It would appear I now have seven.


I think that you will get some more. <"Panda Cories"> are quite likely to <"raise a trickle of fry">, when they are happy. 


Karmicnull said:


> According to Seriously Fish, to get this far I reduced the PH to 6.5,


They are good in hard water and about the only locally bred _Corydoras_ you ever see here (water about18dKH)


Karmicnull said:


> Bobetta is about 1cm long and astonishingly cute.


_Corydoras_ have the cutest fry any way and _Corydoras panda_ is cute even for a _Corydoras._

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (20 Feb 2021)

Hufsa said:


> having a colony of happy fish in a suitably sized tank who start breeding and bumping up the population numbers a bit, that is a different thing


Thanks for the confirmation -  in my head that's what I was thinking.  A lot of the advice here  boils down to:  Get a feel for your tank.  Does it look happy?  if it does then it probably is.  And yes if I end up doubling my population I'll definitely be phoning round the LFS's!


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## Karmicnull (20 Feb 2021)

dw1305 said:


> they are good in hard water





dw1305 said:


> _Corydoras_ have the cutest fry any way and _Corydoras panda_ is cute even for a _Corydoras._


I'm on that page.  When I was researching I was all over Venezualan Corys as the hard-water variety I would get.  Then I walked into the LFS, saw the Pandas and there was no competition 🥰


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## Karmicnull (9 Mar 2021)

I messed up.  Two weeks ago I killed all the shrimp in my little 12L Marina.  I didn't mean to.  I didn't even know I had. but they died by my hand. Literally. It was my first major prune - some of the AR Mini was poking its head above the waterline, and the tank was generally overgrown.  I set to with gusto and ended up with a heap of cuttings.  I potted them up and added them to a new underwater potting shed.  A couple of shrimp smuggled themselves in with the cuttings, which was fine - I thought there was enough in the potting shed to keep two shrimp busy. They were fine for the next few days, but by Wednesday, they were looking a little sluggish and unhappy.  I figured maybe the potting shed was a little unstable still, so I netted them and put them back in the Marina.  It was then that I realised that the shrimp in the Marina were in a bad way. All bar one or two were dying or dead. I did a reflexive 96% water change (2x80% in practice), but it was too late.  24 hrs later they were all dead and I had the the unpleasant task of extracting around 20 corpses from the tank. I'm sure there are as many again that I didn't find.

I spent a sleepless night trying to understand what had happened - clearly I'd done something, but what?  Then I was emptying some rubbish into the bin and saw the two empty sachets of Frontline.  I can't be 100% certain, but it seems highly likely that's what did it.  The cats were frontlined on Saturday, I did the WC on Sunday.  It's not that I don't wash my hands after stroking the cats, but I do it reflexively - without really paying it attention.  There's every chance that the cat visited mid wc and I gave my hands nothing more than a cursory rinse after having petted her.  And then spent half an hour wrist deep in the tank.  So far, somehow, the main tank seems ok (I did a WC for that too, and planted some of the cuttings from the Marina in it).  I'm crossing my fingers that it's not just taking longer due to a lower dose.  I've looked up Frontline and the active ingredients are Methoprene (stops unhatched eggs from developing) and Fipronil (attacks the nervous system).  Fipronil is the biggie which is highly toxic to fish and inverts.  Methoprene has a half life of 30 hours in water.  Fipronil's half life appears to be 12 hours in well lit water, but the things it breaks down into are even more toxic than Fipronil, and there's much less data on how persistent they are. I'll just have to wait and see.

I was (and still am) pretty upset, which is why this post has been so long coming.

Pre-prune



Water emptied




Death Trap.


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## Simmo (9 Mar 2021)

That’s sad news, but virtually impossible to forsee. Your main tank looks fabulous, what a hige change since you started!


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## aquascape1987 (9 Mar 2021)

Sorry to hear about your shrimp losses @Karmicnull. Try not to beat yourself up too much about this as @Simmo said above, as it is an easy mistake to make, especially with shrimp. Shrimp are often very sensitive to chemicals, and it’s common for people to learn the hard way that something you wouldn’t think of as being dangerous to your aquarium, is highly toxic to them. And is often toxic in minute trace quantities, so you can easily poison them by mistake with normal household activities, even after washing your hands. I once went through a phase of mass shrimp deaths on a daily basis, only to work out in the end that my EI micro mix was contaminated with something that was killing them. Never worked out what it was, but it became apparent after 3 episodes that they started behaving very strange within 5 minutes of dosing on micro days, and by the evening I had lots of freshly dead shrimp. It took me 3 micro days and many shrimp deaths to work it out, which made me feel very bad about it. I scrapped the old mix and made up a new micro solution, and the shrimps stopped dying, so I figured it must have been something contaminating it that wasn’t in the recipe.

Keep your chin up, and take it as a lesson learned the hard way! 😀

Perhaps flea tablets for the cats could be a solution to avoid this in future?


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## Karmicnull (14 Mar 2021)

Thanks @Simmo and @aquascape1987.  I will learn and move on, but I won't stop kicking myself.  Still, I'm grateful that the main tank was untouched, and that's the silver lining I'll hold on to.

On a more positive note ostracods have recolonised the Marina, which answers my question about when it will be safe to put shrimp back in, so I dropped an advance guard of three in and I'll see how they do.  There's always a bit of algea on the sides of the Marina, but without the cherry shrimp in there, it's really noticeable how much more there is. Weird as I've never seen them grazing the sides.  
The sides in the main tank are pristine, which is entirely down to the Bristlenose.  He is reticent about it, but the moment the lights are out he's out and polishing the glass, like a proud car owner on a Sunday afternoon.  I've got one of those magnetic glass cleaning sponge things, and since getting the Bristlenose I've never used it. It cost more than him too. Here's an FTS to show off his pristine home.



The whole family remain fascinated with the Bristlenose. A while back Blaise and I were watching baby shrimp.  
"now the shrimp are breeding, will any of the other fish breed?" he said.  
"From what I've read it's possible that any of them might breed, but the corys are most likely to. they'll probably eat their own fry if they do, so don't get your hopes up.  The Gouramis make bubble nests which sound really cool."
"What about the Bristlenose?"
"We've only got one Bristlenose."
"Hasn't he heard of Mitosis?"
"Fish have to mate to propagate, you dipstick."
Blaise was unimpressed.  "Well that's a bit of a design flaw, isn't it," he said.  
I think the Bristlenose's standing in his eyes just nosedived.

Meanwhile the Pearl Gourami have had an abrupt behaviour change. They had got much more relaxed with all the comings and goings in the living room to the point when my fingers would be nibbled at feeding time.  Here they are hanging out under the water lettuce.  




Once they had calmed and got used to the tank, the dominant male started getting more and more territorial. Also one of the females may not be female; hard to tell but based on the top fin, which has grown out considerably, she could be a he. Hmm..
I presumed the four of them were working out a pecking order, as the argy-bargy was not limited to the dominant male - it was spread out across all of them. Here's one face-off I caught:




This all came to a head one evening about a week ago with  an awful lot of splashing and some frantic sprinting around the tank, following which all four of them have vanished behind the mountain and have been hiding there ever since.  The females will come out to feed if I stay fairly still, but the male is not to be seen.  The Cherry barbs have all been a bit skittish too, staying much closer together, although they have gradually expanded their range to cover the territory abandonded by the Gouramis.  Really strange how the dynamic of the tank has changed.






 



On the plant front, some of the slower growers are now really well established.  The Crypt. wendtii tropica has turned into a fantastic feature plant, and the Anubias nana bonsai has spread roots all over the reef rock.  








As for the shrimp, they remain supremely unconcerned.  We spotted 4 berried females the other day - here is one.



Cheers,

  Simon


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## Simmo (14 Mar 2021)

Looks fab! Gouramis eh? Tsk! 👍😀


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## Karmicnull (27 Mar 2021)

An indices post!  

First off the Frogbit index.  A while back I was down to one lone frogbit, it having been outcompeted by the water lettuce.  I banished the water lettuce from the marina and gave the frogbit a chance to recover.  It did!  And moreover it then got a bit pale and wishy washy looking  - which I diagnosed as iron deficiency, so I dosed a bit of iron, and hey presto - green happy frogbit.  This is the first time I have used the frogbit index in anger, and I am dead chuffed.
A couple of snaps.  The first one is a reminder of the frogbit low point, with just one lonely plant huddling by the filter well away from the water lettuce, and the second from yesterday - you can see the older pale growth, and the new happy leaves.


 



The second index is my home-grown - and definitely untried - shrimp index.  I was slightly concerned that I was overfeeding my fish.  So I dropped in some shrimpy delicacies to see exactly how hungry they were.  




They almost completely finished off a cube of marrow and some nettle overnight - they've never come close to doing that before. If they're that famished, I reckon I'm probably not overfeeding.

Cheers,

  Simon


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## dw1305 (27 Mar 2021)

Hi all,


Karmicnull said:


> I was slightly concerned that I was overfeeding my fish.


The Cherry Barbs do look a bit chubby.


Karmicnull said:


> I banished the water lettuce from the marina and gave the frogbit a chance to recover. It did! And moreover it then got a bit pale and wishy washy looking - which I diagnosed as iron deficiency, so I dosed a bit of iron, and hey presto - green happy frogbit. This is the first time I have used the frogbit index in anger, and I am dead chuffed.


I still get that feeling of achievement, even now.

cheers Darrel


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## Karmicnull (11 Apr 2021)

dw1305 said:


> The Cherry Barbs do look a bit chubby.


Yeah - I have concluded my 'shrimp index' is essentially a good measure of how many shrimp are in the tank, rather than anything more sophisticated.  I've reduced feeding slightly and put the barbs on a new exercise regime.


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## Karmicnull (16 Jun 2021)

It's been a while, but hey, this is a low tech tank, so there's no hurry, right?

What I've learned over the last few months, is that if you want something to get on and grow right from the off, pick a plant which has 'weed' in its common name.  Asian marshweed.  Slender pondweed.  Star grass.  Ok that last one doesn't quite work, but it's actually the most bonkers of the three.  I added Potamogeton Gayi (that's the pondweed) and Heteranthera zosterifolia (that's the Star grass) and they immediately started growing.  The Star grass in particular I have to trim every week.  What's that all about?  If I wanted to trim plants every week I would have added CO2.  Pfft.

Here are the pondweed and the Star grass just after a trim.  Apologies for the shrimp food skewer that features heavily in this set of photos.  I have a lot of frozen marrow that the shrimp need to get through before the next lot gets harvested.



These two plants are in sharp contrast to everything else (apart from the Pistia, but that's floating, so it doesn't count).  All the other plants have grown at a regal, tortoiselike pace.  Until May.  Maybe it's something to do with the spring, but 8 months in, everything has just started going for it.  The Vals you can see in the photo above is now doing its Gigantea bit.  I've been able to remove my airline potoon, as the Vals now does that job, nicely keeping the water lettuce away from the spray bar.
My Crypts are all growing like crazy. The C. Wendtii tropica has spontaneously generated a second plant a good 3 inches away from the original.  And the Helanthium Bolivianum (Chain sword), which was, I thought, just taking an awful long time to die, has suddenly doubled in size and started putting out runners.  Someone on this forum commented that they found at some point a mature tank found 'balance'.  I reckon this tank is there.  Largely despite its owner, rather than because of him.




Towards the right hand side of the tank, the Pogostomon helferi carries on being as happy as can be.  It has decided to be a tree, in fact.  Which is completely not in proportion with the mountainous effect I was shooting for with the glimmer rock.  It's kind of the Godzilla of trees, glowering over the whole tank.  Not that trees can glower, but you know what I mean.




I also decided to admit defeat on the Alternanthera Rosaefolia, and planted a pile of AR Mini in the corner of the tank, as I have that coming out of my ears elsewhere.  So far it hasn't died, and adds a nice splash of colour.  Here is an Arty Tank Shot to show it off.




And finally the obligatory FTS, without which all viewers leave feeling somehow cheated.




Cheers,

  Simon


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## Cait1 (17 Jun 2021)

It’s looking good. Your writing style reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Small Gods,‘ which I suppose makes you the god of this particular scape. By which I mean, this journal is highly enjoyable.


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## Karmicnull (25 Sep 2021)

A much longer update is in the offing when time permits, but I've just pruned one of the leaves of my Vals - 106 cm!


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## Karmicnull (26 Sep 2021)

Also I'm really not sure what is "mini" about AR mini? In the somewhat neglected Marina, mine is reaching for the sky!


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## Karmicnull (12 Oct 2021)

I started my journey into Aquascaping on the 31st August 2020 with 5 plants, a couple of rocks, and a big ol' heap of curiosity.  This is a somewhat belated anniversary post.  During the last year I have:

Killed a host of plants (I laugh at your 'easy' rating - I can kill _anything_!)
Struggled to deal with rampant plant growth threatening to overwhelm my fragile ecosystems (ok, I can kill _almost anything)_.
Caught MTS right in the middle of the lockdown.  Long MTS.
Inadvertently caused shrimp genocide in one tank (top tip - don't do a w/c when your partner is frontlining the cats).
Bred a hundred or so shrimp in another tank despite a Betta who as far as I can see lives on shrimp fry.
Using a sandwich box from Tesco as a shrimp quarantine tank, successfully cured a shrimp with _Cladogonium ogishimae_ in time to stop it spreading through my entire shrimp population.
Beaten various forms of algae.
Failed to grow java ferns that aren't black and spotty.
Built up three tank's worth of frogbit from one single plant.  And now have to bin a tank's worth every week.
Defeated a Hydra invasion.
Done my first intentional aquascape with driftwood, Frodo stone and silicone glue.
Had a few fish die on me for no readily apparent reason. Apart from the jumper. The reason was pretty obvious there.
Accidentally built up a school of roughly 12 Panda Corys who spend all their time shagging and every now and then pop out another sprog. 
Spent an evening happily blanching and freezing nettles.
Kept a small spiky moss in a ramekin on my desk where others might have a pot plant (I popped it there one pruning session whilst I worked out what do do with it.  That was 7 months ago and it's still there).
Discovered that my complete inability to tell one Buce from another hasn't at all dented my obsession to collect one of every single variety.  I do find the periodic ads on the forum reassuring, though - "Mixed collection of Buces for sale.  Not quite sure which." I am not alone.
Possibly irreparably damaged my bank balance.  
I thought I might celebrate with a few pictures.

*The Chain Sword*

September 2020:



October 2020:



November 2020:



Jan 2021



April 2021



May 2021



August 2021




October 2021




So there you go.  It takes about a year for a Bolivian chain sword to properly get going in a low tech tank with no soil to speak of.  The same is true for the Vals - which you might spot in later photos.

*The Panda Corys*
I started with 6, then got a baby, then three died (including the baby 🙁) because - I think - I was under feeding them, then I bought two more, then suddenly there were 8 and then, uh, 11?  12? 13?  Who knows.  What I do know is that when they got to about 10 they hit a critical mass where they are enough so that they are always active and about and doing wildly bizarre Panda cory things - all of which are extremely tactile and involve constant physical interaction.  Hands down my favourite fish.





*The Tank itself*
I still have plans to improve this - Having rigorously analysed a whole host of spectacular tanks from others on UKAPS, I've realised that less is sometimes more.  So I'm going to ruthlessly remove a crypt at some point in the next month or so.

August 2020. Back in the hobby after a 35 year break.



October 2020. Do you feel y'all had - just maybe - been influencing me over the last couple of months?




December 2020. The rise of the Pogostomonster



April 2021. You can still just about see some of the pink rock on the left.




August 2021. Ok it's gone now.




September 2021 - the Pogostomonster is finally tamed!




Cheers,
Simon


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## PARAGUAY (12 Oct 2021)

Two things come to mind with your journey Stamina and Robert the Bruce🙂


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## Hufsa (20 Nov 2021)

Is it allowed to wish for an update to this journal for christmas 😊


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## Karmicnull (20 Nov 2021)

Hufsa said:


> Is it allowed to wish for an update to this journal for christmas 😊


Life is interfering a bit but I have something in the works. Will be a couple of weeks, but definitely before Christmas!


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## Simmo (20 Nov 2021)

Great journey and a smashing tank!


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## Karmicnull (2 Feb 2022)

Whoa.  It's February. Where did the time go?  

The tank isn't looking great at the moment (more about that later) but the fish appear to be happy, insofar as I can tell.  I haven't had extensive training in reading fish expressions - and their little fishy faces aren't terribly expressive to start with.  But I think they're not grumpy.  Apart from the Bristlenose, of course.  But he's only happy when he's grumpy, so all is good.  
Mentally I feel like I've levelled up.  After a boss fight with sunlight and thread algae over in the cube, I got a pile of loot and some power ups.  I'm now a level 2 aquascaper, which means I get harder algae to beat, the plants are all fussier, and I have less time to deal with it all.  The rate things are going I don't think I'll ever make level 3.  But that's ok.  I play computer games badly.  I'm used to dying a lot.
Anyhow, the loot.  Courtesy of UKAPS sales forum, I upgraded from my Nicrew ClassicLed Plus to  a Chihiros A901 plus.  There were a couple of reasons for this.  Firstly the Nicrew kept falling off the coasters during WCs (back in the annals of time you may recall I perched the Nicrew on some drinks coasters to give it extra height.  It has not been what I would call a robust solution). Secondly, the Nicrew was only about 75 cm long, and the plants at the ends of my tank were really not growing particularly successfully.  So I installed the Chihiros, and it didn't fit under the hood.  About half an hour of hacksawing later it had much shorter legs and fitted just fine.  To my astonishment it's not wobbly.  I really don't understand that as I have the DIY skills of a horse.  That's probably doing a disservice to horses.

Here it is!




I kicked that off running at 30%.  An immediate benefit was that the timer that came with it doesn't reset every time there's a power cut.  We get a lot of power cuts.   Also, hypothetically - because I could turn it up much brighter - it should be easier to take good photos, right?  Not so far, apparently .  A slight disbenefit was the BBA explosion.  It turns out 30% was still too intense.  I turned it down to 25%.  When I checked earlier this evening my BBA had developed BBA, so I've turned it down again to 20%. I did a web search.  It turns out the Nicrew is rated at 1,150 Lumens and the Chihiros at 14,200. Hmm.  May yet have to turn it down further.   In the mean time I'm slowly ramping up a bit of glut - slowly as I want the Vals to have time to acclimatise.  The intent is lowering the light will stop re-occurrence, and the glut will kill off the existing incursion.  The other effect of the extra light has been some GSA on the glass.  Interestingly you can't see it with the naked eye, but it shows up beautifully in photos.  I was a little outraged by this  - after the first misplaced fit of enthusiasm a year and a half ago  I've never cleaned the glass on this tank, and I'd completely forgotten how to.  Eventually I realised that all those tools I'd enthusiastically purchased so many months ago  ("Seven in one aquarium maintenance kit for all your fishy needs.  £1.") were buried right at the back of the doodads drawer for a reason.  So I dug out an expired credit card and reluctantly started cleaning.  My aquarium glass is now a bit like the back seat window in the car on a cold day, with a little hole polished in the condensation to let you look out.  
All this of course happened after I'd taken photos, rather than before.  Be prepared for spotty photos.
On the plant front, I've had some winners and some losers.  The Heteranthera zosterifolia (Star Grass), which grows like a weed in some of my other tanks, enjoys going black and shedding all its leaves in this one.  The AR mini has also all died off.  By way of comparison, a photo below of the AR mini in one of my other tanks - no one warned me you needed a tight lid because it would try and escape...



Limnophila sessiflora on the other hand is just as happy here as it is everywhere else, and needs to be put back into its corner on a regular basis.  The Pogostemon is, ok, but I think I broke its spirit when I dismantled the Pogostemonster, and it's never been the same since.  Here they both are.




Excitingly I've pruned my first crypt - the big bush of Wendtii Tropica you can see above was sprouting offspring all over the place.  They are now floating in my potting shed, awaiting this weekend's new scape.

Quick interlude for a Panda Cory, because, well, Panda Cory!





And the final, possibly most exciting plant news is:  The Return Of The Hydrocotyle!  This was dead.  I spent my first 9 months in the hobby painstakingly killing it.  In the "plants" tab of my aquarium spreadsheet it is marked as a zero (where 4 is thriving and 0 is, well, dead).  I've not seen it in this tank for six months, and then, boom! It reappears and is now happily interlacing itself through the Pgostemon.  This leaves me in a quandary on how to update my spreadsheet.  I don't have a Lazarus category.




To close, here is an arty tank shot, and, of course, the FTS.










Cheers,
  Simon











OK I've been watching way too many Marvel films.  We all piled into the cinema to watch the latest Spiderman, and duly sat through the end credits for the now mandatory extra scene.  Then I got up to go, and my children all yanked me back down for the extra scene after the credits after the extra scene after the first lot of credits.  So consider this your end-of-movie final scene.


I've been reading with interest the Lean Dosing thread. In that, @Hufsa directed us all towards a fab Vin Kutty video, and from there I found my way to the brilliant Rotala Kill Tank thread over at the Barr Report (disclaimer - I've only read the first 3 hours of it, and am currently on page 30 of about 50).  I've been taking extensive notes - obviously in my "ferts" tab rather than the "plants" one - and was even forced to start a new tab for memorable quotes.  Despite not having read the whole thing I'm going to take the liberty of badly paraphrasing this epic of data and insight in one infogram:



 Vin himself summarises by saying "_If you go back and read the 50+ pages of this journal, you should come away with the same conclusion. Lots of nutrients in the substrate with nothing in the water column is the easiest method. The most difficult method? High KH water + inert substrate + EI. Most other methods fall somewhere in between in difficulty._"

Which explains quite a bit.  Given this tank is, well, High KH, inert substrate and 20% EI (bearing in mind it's low tech).  I've accidentally made a Rotala Kill Tank.  Hey.  

I'm rather pleased with myself.  Vin did it in 50 pages, and I did it on my first day with some help from a chap  in an LFS who (it turned out)  also knew nothing about planted tanks.  I am now determined to grow Rotala.  I'm giving myself a challenge to succeed before the next Labour government (somewhere between 3 months and 30 years).  I'm going to follow in the hallowed footsteps of @plantnoobdude and @John q,  buy a Rotala (and on a matter of principle some Pinnatifida) and go for some form of low -N dosing and a pile of root tabs.  Haven't worked out what yet though.  I've still got another 20 pages to go first.

Cheers (again),
Simon


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## erwin123 (2 Feb 2022)

Vin is using  the word"Rotala" as a synecdoche for Lythraceae  (_I've achieved one of my life goals which is to use the word synecdoche in an internet forum_). So you should look at not just Rotalas but Ammannias, Cupheas, etc.

Some Rotalas are actually very easy to grow  and you don't need kill tank conditions to grow them well, such as Rotala Rotundifolia and its variants like "Blood Red" & "Hra", Rotala Indica 'Bonsai'. I'm sure there are more, but these 2 are currently in my low tech tank.  So when it comes to Rotala for your kill tank, what you want are the Macrandras and its variants, the more exotic the better 

 I like Vin's description of the top right hand corner as "one guy in Cedar Rapids"


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## Hufsa (2 Feb 2022)

Yay we're all going on an adventure! 🤩
Im sure some of the lean dosing haters are secretly laughing at us but I think trying different methods is fun and exciting, a good way to learn more about how it all fits together, so they can laugh all they want.

Love the update, and the infogram! 😍
Im excited to see the rescape 

One little note, I think your panda cory would be even better with a slightly cleaner substrate, its barbels and fins could be a little bit longer, but its not like super bad as it is. I say it with the best of intentions 

Cheering you on from Norway!


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## erwin123 (2 Feb 2022)

To be fair, I think there is a common misconception when beginners read about EI is that too much ferts causes algae/harms the livestock and its totally right for the EI folks to set the record straight on this matter.  I confess that before I came to UKAPS, I also thought that too much ferts caused algae and that EI folks did large water changes to reduce the amount of ferts in their tank! 

Actually, whether I dose high or low, I always get some algae, but as long as my plants are generally healthy, I'm ok to live with a certain amount of algae in my tank.


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## Garuf (2 Feb 2022)

I feel your pain with the high kh, next time I have to uproot I’ll make sure that the tap water isn’t rocks masquerading as water.


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## Hufsa (2 Feb 2022)

erwin123 said:


> To be fair, I think there is a common misconception when beginners read about EI is that too much ferts causes algae/harms the livestock and its totally right for the EI folks to set the record straight on this matter.  I confess that before I came to UKAPS, I also thought that too much ferts caused algae and that EI folks did large water changes to reduce the amount of ferts in their tank!
> 
> Actually, whether I dose high or low, I always get some algae, but as long as my plants are generally healthy, I'm ok to live with a certain amount of algae in my tank.


Definitely agree, that is an important bit of the learning experience to undo all the old nutrient fearmongering. I was thinking more along those who say there is absolutely no benefit to do lean dosing, and that all plants basically have the same requirements, which seems not to be the case.

Edit:
I would almost say if one wants to try lean dosing to solve algae problems, they are not ready. If one wants to try it to grow a certain family of plants better, thats a better outlook.


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## Karmicnull (2 Feb 2022)

EI is the perfect regime for a beginner IMO - it doesn't matter what your water is, what your substrate is, you're going to be able to grow most plants.  Low, tech, low light, ~20%,EI, and tap water is I think the best way in for someone new to planted tanks.  Chances are you'll get good plant growth and minimal algae problems without too much effort. Once you've got that under your belt you can branch out - RO water, CO2, Lean, whatever takes your fancy.


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## Hufsa (2 Feb 2022)

Yeah that really is the genius of EI, its the most foolproof method.

I will be lagging a bit behind y'all (love this word) with the experiments, since injected CO2 is new to me im gonna run foolproof EI for a while to make sure ive got all the basics nailed down with gas also.


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## Karmicnull (2 Feb 2022)

Hufsa said:


> I think your panda cory would be even better with a slightly cleaner substrate, its barbels and fins could be a little bit longer, bu


Thanks - I think it may be more gravel than dirt per se - the substrate is kept pretty clean by the shrimp.  I've been gradually trying to remove the gravel during WCs, but it always comes up with a host of shrimplets, so I need to have time to rescue them.  There is already one existing nice sandy patch for the Corys to cavort in.  Usefully it's at the back of the tank where I can't see it.  More learning in scape design needed there I fear.  I will redouble efforts to give them a mostly sandy tank.


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## Hufsa (2 Feb 2022)

Usually barbel damage is from bacteria load and not sharp gravel, plus you know, fins


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## Karmicnull (2 Feb 2022)

Thanks - didn't know that.  My new learning for the day!


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## Hufsa (2 Feb 2022)

😊 I should add, if you say that to some cory keepers they will be quite triggered and be all "tHeY ReQuiRE sAnD OmG grAvL BAd", but its more nuanced than that.
Corys ARE found on gravel in the wild on some occasions and their barbels are perfect, there is video proof out there. 
I think Cory from Aquarium Co-op did a video on it.
They should have a decently sized area of sand in the tank, but thats so they can engage in natural sifting behavior.
If you keep a dirty sand substrate it doesnt matter how fine grained it is, if the bacteria load from below gets too high the barbels will be eroded and sometimes also the tips of the fins, since they spend so much time on the bottom.
I just wanted to prepare you for some potential pushback on your new learning 😁


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