# The new ice age



## Karmicnull (26 Jan 2021)

"Look at me; I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway. Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fiords all my life, for a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award. In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do, and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again, because I happen to like them, and I’m old fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough.  Equatorial! What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day!" _- Slartibartfast_

Reader warning:  This is a low energy journal.  The frequency of updates is going to be, well, glacial.  And they will keep pace with, and possibly exceed progress.

Father Christmas (in the guise of my mum) was kind enough to deliver a 40cm rimless cube for my home office.  The plan is to keep a Betta and a few other inhabitants in it.  My rough plan has everything ready for the Betta by August.  But that might prove to be too aggressive a timeline, so we'll see.  The catch is that my home office has 3 outside walls (ex-garage) and the temperature in the summer gets pretty hot for sustained periods.  so I'm going to run this tank warm in the summer (28 degrees) and cooler (23/24) in the winter.  I take my inspiration from _this_article in seriously fish that talks about temperature variation.  The filter will be a sponge filter - or possibly two to provide some backup.  And I'm going to run 50/50 tap water and rain water.

At the moment the cube is acting as a glorified stand for my shrimp quarantine tank and its solitary inhabitant.  She's getting steadily better and I hope will be able to join her shrimpy friends in a few week's time.  Her struggle with Cladogonium ogishimae is being documented _here_. 

The scape will be Betta and shrimp friendly.  I'm going to use this tank as the destination for any CRS babies that are reverting to wild type, to keep the other tanks marginally redder, and also because then they'll be harder for the Betta to spot so he'll be less likely to eat them.

The next purchase is going to be lighting.  That will come in February (the New Ice Age has a monthly budget, and January's got used up paying the Christmas credit card bill ).  I've been perusing lighting for Nano cubes for a while now and I am moving up, rather than down the confusion curve.  Should I use a spot or an LED bar?  If it's a spot what's the advantage of a Kessil over a Lominie?  If it's a bar, why is it that Chihiros offer about 6 different alternatives that would all fit a 40CM rimless?  As usual when faced with a daunting choice overload, I'm going to create a stupidly large spreadsheet of all the lighting options.  It will have lots of columns in it and I will be able to filter on a tonne of variables.  Lumens, PAR, Cost, Power, Degrees, Temperature, Star sign, etc.  Whilst this will leave me none the wiser, at least I will feel like I'm in control. 

Here's a picture of the (still wrapped) quarantine tank stand. 






Cheers,

  Simon


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## afroturf (26 Jan 2021)

Nice tank for the betta/shrimp combo, personally I prefer Kessil/spot light led's for small cube tanks I think they suit the dimensions more than the bar type light like twinstar etc. I too have a 45cm cube tank that I plan setting up in the future and am likely to go with either a Kessil or Aqua illuminations prime. I look forward to your choices and how the tank progresses.

p.s. hope the shrimp makes a full recovery


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## dcurzon (12 Feb 2021)

*taps fingers...


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## Mikefaz (14 Feb 2021)

@Karmicnull, If you ever made that spreadsheet, I’d love to see a copy. I’m pretty much at the top of the “confusion curve” in my quest for lighting on a 40cm nano tank. 
I don’t mind the thrill of the chase when it comes to buying new toys but this is getting ridiculous!


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## alto (14 Feb 2021)

Karmicnull said:


> then they'll be harder for the Betta to spot so he'll be less likely to eat them.


that so depends upon the Betta (or whatever the avid shrimp eater fish may be) ... have you never watched the ASEF focusing intently on the MC carpet, stalking shrimp movement beneath 

S.l.o.w.l.y looking forward to this journal progress


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## Karmicnull (14 Feb 2021)

dcurzon said:


> *taps fingers...





Mikefaz said:


> I don’t mind the thrill of the chase when it comes to buying new toys but this is getting ridiculous!





alto said:


> S.l.o.w.l.y looking forward to this journal progress



Yeah Yeah, I get the message.  Good things come to those who wait, my old Geography teacher would have said.  Anyhow here is the lighting update.  In fact - here is a picture of February's purchase:




Ok - you got me.  That's not a light.
As you might have guessed, this is all @Andrew Butler's fault.

Using ruthless second-hand car salesman tactics of awesome product, great value and fantastic delivery, he forced me into spending the February budget on Frodo Stone.  Well, February and part of March actually.  Inspired by the superbly constructed aquarium mockups that he and others have, I got out my parcel tape, raided our never-ending collection of Amazon packaging and built my own 40cm Cube sandbox.  Since then the family have been trooping in and out of the room and trying different designs.  Our household WhatsApp group has turned into a min version of the Ukaps Rate My Hardscape Forum.  Here are some examples:


 




 



Having a range and variety of Frodo stone I now have means that I can experiment with different combinations without feeling the obligation to fit every stone in - This is advice I've read elsewhere on this forum, and it definitely makes a difference.  On my first tank it was like "I've got these three stones and I'm damned well going to use them".  Now I feel liberated.  Except of course I've only got two pieces of wood.  Clearly more wood is needed.  The wood I've got was bought from the LFS back when I didn't have a clue.  I think it's spiderwood, but I haven't really investigated deeply.  I'm wondering what wood to get next.  There's a ton on Ebay, or I could hold out until lockdown is lifted, and make a trek to Aquarium Gardens and browse in person.  I've been pulling together a Pinterest board of nano-cubes that I really like.  It reminds me of that point as a spotty teenager when I walked into the hairdressers holding a photo of Duran Duran and saying 'I want to look like that'.  I ended up sitting in the pub with my mates squinting and going "If I look at it from this angle I can definitely see an element of Roger Taylor.  If Roger Taylor had dead straight mousey-blond hair, that is."  I have no doubt that my attempt will be the cut price pub-circuit Roger Taylor lookalike of the aquascaping world but I will still love it.



Mikefaz said:


> If you ever made that spreadsheet, I’d love to see a copy. I’m pretty much at the top of the “confusion curve” in my quest for lighting on a 40cm nano tank.


I'm about halfway through, having been distracted by the large injection of Frodo stone.  Happy to share once I've done it.

Cheers,

  Simon


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## Mikefaz (16 Feb 2021)

@Karmicnull the stone looks good. Never fails to amaze me the multitude of ways there are to combine a few object into different shapes. Currently going through the same with some river wood. 
I bit the bullet with a light in the end, I was getting lost in the detail and loosing sight of the goal. Had a happy hour playing with my new chihiros c2 rgb earlier, first impressions are positive.


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## Wolf6 (16 Feb 2021)

I like the corner setup most, it has a pleasant vibe and plenty of planting options.


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## Karmicnull (16 Mar 2021)

I may have to rename this journal 'the potting shed'.  Certainly for the immediate future, at any rate.  I have stolen a leaf out of @Hufsa's book and 'potted up' all my cuttings from the other two tanks in little glass jars. I picked up a couple of plants from UKAPS sales, and then @Aquarium Gardens finally managed to do a blockade run. I got all excited and bought a pile of plants from them. The result of which is that my potting shed is now full and I am most of the way though April's budget.

Current potting shed list:

AR. Mini (from the Marina, where it grows like a weed)
Anubias Nana (this is the one that melted completely away in the main tank, got shoved into the Marina on the off chance, and now has 2 tiny leaves)
Ceratopteris Thalictroides (Siliquosa) "Water Sprite"
Cryptocoryne Petchii
Heteranthera zosterifolia (Star Grass) - courtesy of @Kezzab
Hydrocotyle leucocephala (Brazilian Pennywort)
Hygrophila Costata (Touch and go whether it will thrive - it's been gradually languishing in the main tank)
Hygrophila Siamensis 53B - just a couple of little cuttings from the main tank
Limnophila sessiliflora (Asian Marshweed)
Ludwigia Mini Super Red
Microsorum xxx (various little plantlets that detatch from bigger ferns and go on adventures in the current until they wind up lodged in moss somewhere and I rescue them)
Pogostemon Erectus
Pogostemon Helferi (escapees from the Pogostomonster)
Potamogeton Gayi (slender pondweed) - thanks to @SRP3006
Rotala Rotundifolia Orange Juice (I know this is a bad idea but I really like this when I've seen it in other folks' scapes).
Taxyphyllum Barbieri (Java Moss)
Taxiphyllum Sp. 'Spiky Moss'





As the more astute amongst you will have inferred (or spotted in the pic above), in order to have plants, I need to have light.  And that's one of the interesting challenges of this tank.  As well as being in a room that's going to get pretty hot in June and July, it's also in a room that gets a lot of daylight.  Largely because of the ceiling.
This is the ceiling:




Based on this I came to two conclusions.  First off, I don't need  a full on light - I just need a top-up light.  Secondly, I might as well go for the long photoperiod (12 hrs) that @dw1305  and @Geoffrey Rea  are using.  Geoffrey has a really well laid out explanation somewhere in UKAPS that sets out the difference between intensity and duration for lighting.  In essence high energy CO2 tanks are doing 6 or 7 hour sprints under supercharged conditions.  My low tech tortoise will amble along happily for 12 hours with the equivalent of a fiat punto's horsepower.  That's the theory, anyway.  I'll let you know how it actually works out in six months or so.
Anyhow, based on all that I got a cheap 15 quid, 15 watt light off Amazon (I was too impatient for an even cheaper £6 one from Ebay/China). At the moment I'm using a free and pretty unreliable manual timer (I switch it on when I start work, and I switch it off when it starts getting dark). I'm going to upgrade to a more reliable timer - that operates at weekends too - at some point towards the end of April. Or May if the budget accidentally gets spent on something else more glamorous. Or June... Yeah, alright, maybe Christmas.

Also some hitchers rode into town on my new plants. Bladder snails and Ramshorns. They have immediately set about their cleaning duties (that's the deal: if you move in you have to do the cleaning so that I don't), and have been made welcome. Despite the fact that I've already got diddy little Ramshorns, I'm particularly pleased about the new ones as they are a lot bigger and, I reckon, leopard Ramshorns. They are gorgeous.





Meanwhile we've carried on trying out new scapes in our highly sophisticated mockup cube.  The interesting challenge is how to make it look interesting from three sides, and also a comfortable envornment for a betta and its tankmates.  This is the view from my desk:







Wolf6 said:


> I like the corner setup most, it has a pleasant vibe and plenty of planting options.


Yeah - that's definitely the advantage.  Across the family our votes are split widely - each option has pros and cons.



Mikefaz said:


> Never fails to amaze me the multitude of ways there are to combine a few object into different shapes


And that's absolutely the kicker at this point.  There are just so many options!  The need to experiment with lots of potential hardscapes also prompted a test £15 purchase of wood using Ali-express, which is breaking new ground for me.  This was successful and rather more exciting than expected due to fantastic parcel tracking capability which let us watch wood from two different sellers get packaged up and make its way from the seller to the airport, across europe to the uk, through customs and eventually to our front door.  Interestingly one took 3 days longer than the other even though they were both part of the same basket when checked out, and both arrived at the airport in China on the same day.

Here are a couple of the consequent "Oooh look - lots of new wood!" hardscapes.



 




Geeky Stat section
I was playing with my plant stats the other night, and did a little pivot table on the plant requirements (light, temperature, PH, hardness, C02), their rating (hard/medium/easy) and my success with them.  What I found was this:



 

 



Based on the available data it seems that lighting requirements are the biggest indicator to success (or not) in my low-tech tanks, convincingly ahead of CO2.  Using this info I'm going to make a prediction about my new plants:





Cheers,
  Simon


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## dcurzon (16 Mar 2021)

interesting with the glass jars... care to elaborate on them?  What have you put inside them?


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## Karmicnull (16 Mar 2021)

The bottom layer is Tropica plant growth substrate, then next is Tetra Active Substrate, which as far as I can see is clay balls, and then topped off with some decorative gravel from the LFS.  The gravel is there primarily to stop the clay balls floating around, as the Tetra substrate on it's own is a PITA to plant into.  Also it makes the jars look pretty.
I did the same in the Marina, and my working theory is that's why the AR Mini has gone bonkers.  In retrospect I put way too thin a layer of soil in my main tank.  This is corroborated by the H. zosterifolia in the potting shed which has already put on a good couple of inches since the photo above.  You can see the root growth from the AR here:


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## dcurzon (16 Mar 2021)

and then just drop the whole jar into the flooded tank?
this is almost like a terrarium within an aquarium


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## Karmicnull (16 Mar 2021)

Yep. Flood the jar, plant it up, then drop it in!  It means (1) I can get plants without having to have the hardscape done, and (2) I can get all the 'adapt to living underwater' bit that emersed plants have to do out of the way.


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## NatalieHurrell (17 Mar 2021)

I love the second "Oooh look - lots of new wood!" hardscape layout!


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## Karmicnull (12 Apr 2021)

It's the 12th April.  Unlockdown has started.  Everyone is celebrating by going to the pub!  Well, almost everyone.  My priority was a visit to @Aquarium Gardens which is booked in for Thursday morning.  Yay!  I will be buying a big piece of statement wood.  Although if I'm honest with myself, the chances that I'll leave without accidentally buying a plant or two are vanishingly small.  One I've done that it will be time to finalise the hardscape and plant up.  I am mildly excited.

In the meantime, the potting shed has acquired a gardening team.  Largely because I'm far too lazy to deal with algae myself.




True to its name the potting shed has had a few comings and goings.  About half of the Potamogeton Gayi and the H. zosterifolia have moved into the main tank where they are doing a great job - finally! - of hiding the filter intake pipe.  Conversely I bit the bullet and pulled out the remains of the Hygrophila Costata from the main tank and potted it up here.  We'll see if it recovers now it has some decent soil to root into.
FTS and view from my desk below. To date the long duration low intensity lighting approach seems to be working, but it's early days yet.









One thing I noticed which rather surprised me was that I was seeing pearling.  That's not supposed to happen in low energy tanks! I thought it might be a symptom of not enough flow (local O2 saturation and no current to move it away from the plant).  So I added another sponge filter, which had absolutely no effect whatsoever, but made me feel better, so I'm leaving it in.  I actually quite like the aesthetic, tbh.  My current theory is that the airstones driving the sponge filters must be doing a reasonable job of oxygenating the water, especially near the surface.  That coupled with the long lighting period is meaning I get pearling in the top 1/3 of the tank from about mid-morning onwards.





Cheers,
  Simon


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## Karmicnull (15 Apr 2021)

Karmicnull said:


> My priority was a visit to @Aquarium Gardens which is booked in for Thursday morning


I spent a very happy hour this morning with the excellent folks at AG getting inspiration, wood and plants in equal measure.  Got back home, popped the new plants into the potting shed and went back to work for the rest of the day.  Sue came in at about 5pm.  She looked at all the plants, looked at all the wood, looked at all the Frodo Stone, and said "You're going to need a bigger tank."


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## Karmicnull (22 Apr 2021)

I'm going to take this opportunity to pass on my first ever pro tip.  This was shared with me by one of the chaps at AG, and I've resisted the desire to keep it to myself.  Instead I shall wow everyone with my new scaping nous. 
I was having a moan about how long it takes me to do WCs - in contrast to some people on this site who spend at most 6 hours a _month_ on all their tanks, I can comfortably spend 6 hours in just one weekend across my three. And that goes up if I  have a bit of a potter whilst I'm at it. In particular I reckon at least 25% of my WC time is spent peering into buckets full of tank water trying to find the cherry shrimp that are inevitably in them. Especially the little shrimplets that I am fabulous at hoovering up even though I can't even see them when they are in the tank.  
When I explained this to the fellow at Aquarium Gardens, he nodded pensively.  "What colour are your buckets?" he said.  
"Black."
"Well there you go." He nodded in the direction of their store room, where half a dozen orange buckets were stacked neatly against a wall.  "If you use orange buckets it's much easier to see the shrimp."
Whilst this was not a direction in which I expected the conversation to go, I have taken this advice to heart, and now, like the seasoned pro I am becoming, I have squishy orange buckets.  Here is an arty photo of them.




I am confident that with squishy orange buckets, I too will be able to do water changes in less than 6 hours a month.  Onwards and upwards!

Cheers,
Simon


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## dcurzon (25 Apr 2021)

Yes!!! I picked up an orange bucket in B&Q for 97p and it does seem easier to spot cherry shrimp (despite being a reddish colour) that in my black bucket!

Sad to say it doesn't speed anything up though, I still have to lug a bucket of water either up or down a flight of stairs


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## Karmicnull (27 Apr 2021)

A post WC update.  As @dcurzon has already confirmed the use of orange buckets is definitely a major step forward on the shrimp-spotting front.  I stress tested this by doing a full canister rinse-out.  Unsurprisingly I found half a dozen RCS all happily living inside my Aquael, and was able to spot them and rehome them with comparative ease.


dcurzon said:


> Sad to say it doesn't speed anything up though


I'm not quite in the same boat here.  Whilst the heady 90% reduction in WC time I was dreaming of has mysteriously failed to manifest, I do think I will save about 30 mins all told across the three tanks, which is probably more a commentary on exactly how rubbish I am at catching shrimp in a black bucket than anything else.  But I will gladly take that 30 mins!


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## Karmicnull (15 May 2021)

I've been pretty busy for the last few weeks, so this post is a little late, but: the Scaping has happened!  It took all three days of the bank holiday weekend.  If you've been following this blog you'll know that I've spent the last two months playing with hardscape and working out what I wanted to do and what worked in a 40cm cube.  I came to the conclusion that the scapes that I'm really enjoying at the moment are the ones jam-packed with plants in a semi-island surrounded by a ribbon of sand.  In particular Wookii's and Deano3's:



Wookii said:


>





Deano3 said:


>



I'm happy to report that I've totally failed to achieve anything remotely close to either of these - but I had a lot of fun failing!

First off I emptied the Potting Shed into three 35 Litre storage boxes, and cleaned it out.



That was pretty much day 1.

On day 2 I started on the hardscape - well most of it, anyway.  Having previously tried the cigarette filters and superglue approach, I found that, whilst it worked, it didn't really survive the "Karmicnull school of hard knocks" love that I give my tanks.  My agility and dexterity know no bounds.  This time I went the silicone way, and used a tube of black JBL Universal silicone adhesive.



 



The advantage of this is that it takes 12 hours to dry so you can fiddle with stuff rather than getting in a sweat over having exactly the right positioning first time.  The disadvantage is that it takes 12 hours to dry.  That meant the final bits of the hardscape had to wait until the next morning.  So here's how it looked at the end of day 2:



 



Then I added the final bits the following morning, and the hardscape was done!

















All the wood is glued either to other wood, or onto various pieces of frodo stone, which in turn are resting on egg crate, with the intention that the I absolutely don't have to worry about floating or accidental thumps (of which there have been many).

Planting will come in the next post!
Cheers,
  Simon


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## Karmicnull (15 May 2021)

And now the planting.  In strict keeping with UKAPS best practice, I planned for this to take about two hours, and it took four.  And I ended up with a ton of leftover stems.  I still have two plastic storage boxes full of them and shrimp;  they all grew  far too much over the last 3 months. Hmph.
Anyhow, here's the end result.



 





 





 





 







Plant list:
_Alternanthera Reineckii 'Mini'
Anubias Barteri var. Nana
Anubias Petite
Bucephalandra Kedagang
Bucephalandra Red
Bucephalandra Wavy Green
Cryptocoryne albida brown
Cryptocoryne Petchii
Heteranthera zosterifolia (Star Grass)
Hydrocotyle leucocephala (Brazilian Pennywort)
Limnobium Laevigatum (Amazon Frogbit)
Limnophila Sessiflora (Asian Marshweed)
Microsorum Pteropus Windelov (Lace Java Fern)
Pistia stratiotes ("Dwarf Water Lettuce")
Pogostemon Erectus
Pogostemon Helferi
Potamogeton Gayi (slender pondweed)
Schismatoglottis prietoi
Taxiphyllum Sp. 'Spiky Moss'
Thread Algae_

Cheers,
  Simon


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## Karmicnull (22 Jun 2021)

An environmental update.  I have bigger flora and fauna updates to come, but for now I'll stick to the environment.
As mentioned earlier, this room has 3 external walls, so it can get pretty hot.  It also has a lantern roof so it gets pretty bright.  To deal with the heat, I have invested in an aquarium fan and hooked it up to an Inkbird controller.


 



The room has peaked at about 33 so far, but the fan has kept the tank to below 27.5.  I also plugged in a heater when the good weather broke (Eheim 75W thermo control), and between the two of them they are keeping the tank between 22 and 25.5 pretty comfortably almost all the time (target range 23-23.5).

So that's the heat dealt with.  Now for the light.  There are some really good posts that explain the balance we want to achieve in our tanks between O2, CO2, Ferts, and light.  I think Darrel has periodically floated a fab picture that shows this. We dose EI to remove ferts from the balancing act, and trust surface perturbation to get Oxygen in the water.  So that leaves CO2 and light as the balance we need to strike.  Which is why when you run a low tech tank you need to have less intense lighting. But my low tech tank is in a stupidly bright room, and gets 14+ hours of light during the summer including a good 2 hours of direct afternoon sunlight on the rare UK days where there is sun.  Hmm*.
So as always I've turned to the interweb, and UKAPs.
The collective UKAPS knowledge base told me I should therefore add CO2 to redress the balance, and go high-tech.  This is great in theory, but this tank was going to have a Betta in it.  That's a commitment made to my daughter after I foolishly took her to every LFS within an hour of home whilst pulling together my first tank, and inadvertently helped her develop a Betta obsession.  I'm far more scared of my daughter than I am of UKAPS, so the Betta stayed in scope, and high-tech was ruled out.
Whilst I pondered, the plants grew, and so did the algae.  The glass walls turned out to be the perfect incubator for GSA, and the water inside turned out to be the perfect incubator for thread algae.  Every weekly WC, I was diligently scrubbing away with the credit card, and spooling out meters upon metres of threads with the toothbrush.  Whoa.  I am way too lazy for that to be sustainable.  Time for some serious research.  First off I bought some Red Onion Nerites.  Then I read somewhere that Horned Nerites were even better, so I bought some of those too.  They definitely made an impact on the glass.  My GSA now had pretty snail tooth tracks in it. Despite some misgivings, I started dosing Excel (Glutaraldehyde) as an alternative source of carbon since I couldn't go high tech.
Good, but not enough.  I bit the bullet and got 8 Otos.  Specifically Otocinclus macrospilus, although it took me a while to ID them (LFS were clueless). There's a ton of misinformation about Otos in the interweb, along with plenty of learned experience on UKAPS that they are fragile, and arrive half starved.  From what I have read, whilst tank glass and bits of courgette are great, you really need to sort out plenty of aufwuchs for them.  Aufwuchs is the German name for the slimy coating which grows on the leaves of aquatic plants, decomposing leaves, etc.  Aufwuchs is composed mainly of diatom algae but also includes animals such as rotifers, mini crustaceans and protozoa.  And that mix is apparently essential for happy Otos.  So I decided to add botanicals to my tank for them.  Cue my daughter: 
"What's that brown thing down by the stones?"
"Oh that's botanicals."
"No it's not.  It's half a leaf."
"That's what I said.  Botanicals."
"Father, why is there half a dried oak leaf in your tank which you have given a stupid name to?"
I've tried to instil a sense of aesthetics in her over the years , but clearly I've failed. 
Anyhow, I now have 8 happy Otos, who have blitzed the glass, diligently eat plant leaves, love courgette, nettles and sweet potato, occasionally dine on half a hikari wafer, and have an abundance of aufwuchs. It's still early days though - apparently 2 months is the point at which you can be comfortable that your Otos have settled in and are ok.

That just left the thread algea.  I added 4 Amano shrimp - this was the tactic that worked for my other tank.  The Amano shrimp got fat.  I should have probably added about 40 for them to make a serious dent. 
The two places where the thread Algae was most prevalent were the moss and the leaves of my Frogbit.  I bit the bullet, and admitted to myself that really my thread algea had the odd bit of moss in it, rather than the other way round.  The moss went. Then I spent several late nights digging through obscure websites (that 20th page of google hits) on how to get rid of thread algae.  UKAPS said:  Go high tech or have less light intensity.  The internet said the same.  The thread Algea grew.  Finally I found one corner of a planted tank website with a host of people who had experimented with higher doses of Glute to promote plant growth and discourage algae.  I also found several people who were using H2O2 - very carefully - as well.  So I ran a two part experiment:
---
Part 1:  gradually up my excel to 2x the recommended daily (non WC) dose.  This I did with no ill effect. To my slight surprise all my stems are growing like crazy (or at least like crazy compared to full low-tech), which is a pain as I now have to keep pruning them.  Doesn't seem to have affected the epiphytes though.  Livestock appear oblivious.
Part 2:  Prior to weekly WC: 
  (a) Switch off / remove the filter, and dose 1ml per 3L of 3% H202 (I took my sponge filters out temporarily).
  (b) Put a powerhead in for 15 mins to make sure the H202 is properly circulated everywhere.
  (c) Do W/C.
  (d) Put filter back in.
  (e) Immediately do daily dose of glute (I saw this described as 'hit the algae when it's down').
---
I did the H2O2 treatment two weeks in succession, and my thread algae has, for now at least, gone.  I'm hoping that the Glute and the Amanos will mostly keep it in check, as H202 strikes me as a pretty blunt instrument.  If I do have to use it again I think I'll take out all my botanicals as well as the filter whilst I'm doing it.

Cheers,
  Simon

*The bit where I reassured Sue "This is my third tank, I know what I'm doing.  I've carefully positioned it out of the sun; it'll be fine!" turns out to have been a spectacular exercise of self-delusion.


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## dcurzon (22 Jun 2021)

Suggesting to the other half that you know exactly what you're doing, is the problem here... :O


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## Karmicnull (22 Jun 2021)

dcurzon said:


> Suggesting to the other half that you know exactly what you're doing, is the problem here... :O


You're not wrong.  After all this time you would have thought that I'd know better!


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## Karmicnull (17 Aug 2021)

It's been a while since I updated.  Blame life.  I do frequently.  First off the thread algae is gone.  The H2O2 plus Glut double punch worked a treat, and since then I've been dosing 3ml Glut a day (slightly under double the recommended dose).  This is a necessary evil as I can't control the sun, and the tank is in a very sunny room, so the 'low tech means low light intensity' mantra is disobeyed from the off.  As I mentioned earlier, the light intensity meant lots of GSA on the glass, and being lazy, for me that meant Otos.  I bought 8 in the last day of May, fully expecting them all to die, based on what I've read.  One made a doomed bid for freedom after about a month and I found his (her?) corpse far too late. So far, the others seem happy.
Here are all 8 of them in the sunniest corner of the tank - interestingly all the animals in the tank seem to love the sun, and congregate in this corner when it is shining on the tank.  My photos don't do it justice at all - there's something about sunlight which is magical.




 For the record their diet is Aufwachs from oak leaves, plenty of GSA from the glass, half a hikari algae wafer a day (which they share with the shrimp and snails) and a couple of chunks of marrow, nettle and/or sweet potato over the week (also shared with snails and shrimp).  As you can see below it goes down well!




And one more photo for luck - this of one of the Otos doing her (his?) Jaws impression.


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## Courtneybst (17 Aug 2021)

They look so plump and healthy!


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## Karmicnull (17 Aug 2021)

Courtneybst said:


> They look so plump and healthy!


Yeah - I took those photos back at the start of July, and they've bulked out even more since then.  It's not that they're much bigger, they just come across as more solid.


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## Karmicnull (19 Aug 2021)

I use 50/50 tap water and rain water.  The rainwater always has a green tint to it - I think that's because I just don't get through it fast enough and it has as a result got reasonable volumes of dissolved organics.  Coupled with the oak leaves and the driftwood, I've ended up with a sort of blackwater-ish tank.  I spent a couple of weeks combing the internet for ways to make it less tinted, before sighing philosophically and deciding that I would enjoy it rather than fighting it.  It works, as the  ten Copper Harlequins I added are, according to seriously fish, a sort of blackwater-ish fish.  They appear, insofar as I can tell, to be very happy.  Sometimes they do the fishy opposite of flume riding, where they swim through the dense planting at the back of the tank to the sponge filter, and take turns to jump into the stream of bubbles and get propelled to the top of the tank, occasionally breaking the surface.  Then they rush round to the back of the queue and wait patiently until it is their turn again.
I have Cherry Barbs in my other other tank, which hang out together, but in a very chilled fashion.  In comparison the Copper harlequins school tightly and are much more nervous of anyone approaching the tank.  
Here are few pictures of them making their way through the gloom!  As a free bonus there is a cameo by a piece of marrow.









Cheers,
Simon


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## Cait1 (21 Aug 2021)

I like the black water look, personally. I can’t get over your fat little otos! Absolutely adorable.


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## Karmicnull (23 Aug 2021)

The final inhabitant of this tank is Elton.  Given the entire tank build was designed around his comfort, and he's also drop-dead gorgeous, it's not surprising he has a big ego.  Here he is hanging out amongst the frogbit roots.







The Otos are completely oblivous to Elton, but the Copper Harlequins give him a wide berth.  The shrimp largely ignore him, but are slightly wary if he gets too close.  My plan had been to select colourless shrimplets from my other tanks to populate this tank, and therefore breed a shrimp population that would be harder for him to see or catch, and in passing select for colour in the other tanks.  Win-win, you would have thought.. The colourless shrimp I added to the tank had other ideas, and have been exclusively spawning bright red offspring.  The cheeky scoundrels.  Fortunately Elton turned out not to be that bothered with them, which was a relief.  He does definitely go on shimplet hunts though - I've seen him go after the very little ones on occasion - but his way of hunting leaves something to be desired, so largely the shrimp are safe.  Essentially he swims right up close to his intended prey, pauses and has a breather whilst he makes sure they are not moving at all, and then pounces. 
Here he is, making absolutely sure that his prey isn't moving, pre-pounce.




 This tactic is spectacularly successful with flake and other floating food, but works less well with prey that is actually alive and can amble off whilst he catches his breath.

I'd thought the dense planting at the back of the cube would act as a safe haven for shrimp, but it turns out it's his favourite part of the tank.  He's always vanishing into the undergrowth, presumably on protracted shrimplet hunts, and quite often sleeps there, cocooned in plants.  Here he is off on one of his forages.




He also likes the surface - labyrinth organ definitely put to frequent use!




Taken together, all these things make feeding time rather tricky.  Any food with a propensity to sink has to be dropped almost literally in front of his nose if he's going to get it before it sinks to the bottom.  As well as being scared of Elton, the Copper Harlequins are also scared of me, scared of going to high, and scared of going too low.  So they won't feed if Elton is nearby.  They'll just watch the food sink until it's too deep for them.  I'm training all the fish to know that tapping the spoon on the side of the tank means food. and I then stand at arms length and drop tiny amounts of food that the copper harlequins will hoover up before Elton arrives.  Then it's point feeding for Elton.  If I add too much food, or food that sinks too quickly, or spook the copper harlequins, it's lost and the only folks who benefit are the shrimp and the snails.  This isn't really compatible with being in a hurry.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do when I'm back in the office, and need to feed them to my schedule rather than theirs.

Cheers,
Simon


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## Karmicnull (8 Oct 2021)

I like to think I take a half decent photo of a flower.  The same cannot be said of fish or aquatic plants.  And especially not of this tank.  It always looks a bit crap in these photos compared to how it looks in real life.  Not that it holds a candle to many of the other tanks featured across UKAPS.  For every shot that you see up above there are 20 or 30 that ended up on the cutting room floor.  In particular I seem to take numerous photos of my reflection - I'm really good at that.  So this time I worked really hard on not taking photos with reflections in them.  And I'm happy to say I succeeded.  Instead I now have photos of some really, really dirty glass.  Nevertheless, I forge on.  

My limited experience of aquascaping, and fishkeeping more generally, has shown me that it is always out there.  Whatever it is, it's out there somewhere.  In this case I was holding out for a bottom feeder that would give the shrimp and snail a run for their money and didn't need to come in a group of 6 to be happy.  My Glowlights refuse to go within 10cm of the bottom of the tank - I think they may be allergic to it, or something.  Perhaps they come out in spots, or get really itchy tails if they get too close.  My younger son was convinced eating vegetables made him come out in spots, so I'm sure it's possible.  Whatever the reason, any sinking food that passes that 10cm mark is lost to them.  And the Otos are strictly veggie so they're no help.  Elton is too busy rooting through the undergrowth for shrimplets, so the snail population booms.  I trawled planet catfish for "really small solitary catfish that will eat the food the 'quins miss" but got no hits.  And so I waited.  And hoped.  And waited.  Then one day, BAM! my LFS published their weekly fish list online, and there they were:  L010a.  "Well, duh," I hear you mutter, "I could have told you that."  But for me L010a is like a magical gift from the heavens that fits my personal ecological vacancy far too perfectly to be a coincidence.  And for those of us who don't speak Catfish L numbers, they are Rineloricaria sp., otherwise known as Red lizard whiptails.  And they are spectacular.


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## Karmicnull (20 Feb 2022)

Well it appears to have been four months since I last updated, and - far more excitingly - it's a year to the day since I planted the tank!  

So what does it look like a year later?

Generally speaking, the plants haven't died - which is a massive improvement on my previous two tanks, so I've clearly learned something along the way.  Some of them have even grown, which is a bit of a pain really.  I have to keep pruning them. That's not the easy life I was planning on. The whole point of being Low Tech is that I don't have to put a lot of effort in.  Clearly the plants didn't get the memo.  Especially the Limnophila Sessiflora.  If you are looking for an unkillable weed, look no further.  Here's a bit making a break for the wrong side of tank and trying to bully the AR mini into submission.  





The Anubias Nana, which I melted back to the Rhizome in my first tank, is now happily ensconsed in it's corner.  It's next to some Pogostemon Erectus, which looks exactly the way it did the day I planted it.  If only all the other plants were as well behaved.





The one plant I thought I'd killed was the Hydrocotyle leucocephala (having also, I thought, killed my Hydrocotyle tripartita in the other tank).  And then one day both Hydrocotyles popped up in completely different points of the tank alive and well and growing healthily.  UKAPS is all about using our collective experience to gather data points that gradually paint a picture about what works and what doesn't.  In that spirit I submit an opening hypothesis that the Hydrocotyle family of plants have some form of short range communication that lets them do coordinated reveals in order to deliberately confound their owners.  I'm thinking possibly Bluetooth, but I'll let resident scientist and chief data collator @jaypeecee data mine for the further detail we'll need to establish if that is indeed the case, or whether it's perhaps ZigBee, LoRa, or even (perish the thought) 5G.
Here's the unexpected fairy ring of Hydrocotyle.




You may note from the photo above, that, like many on this forum I have become Obucessed.  According to the plant tags I've hoarded, I have Biblis, Catherine Dark Carpet, Green Jade, Kedagang, Pygmea Bukit Kelam, Red, Sintang, Theia Green, Theia Red and Wavy Green.  Most of which reside in this tank.  That has proved to be not very thought through.  By way of example I give you this photo of Bucephalandra Biblis Red Kedagang, um..., of a Bucephalandra.



You get my point.  None of them look _exactly _like they do in the emersed Tropica orAquadip photos.  And I failed to make meticulous notes of which one I put where.  
Just to reinforce the point, here's another one that may or may not be Sintang.  Or Theia Green.



I've come to the conclusion that Bucephalandras are like whiskies.  You can take two side by side and it's kind of obvious which one is a Glendfiddich and which  is a Lagavulin, but if someone puts a whisky in front of you and says "Go on then - you say you like whisky.  What is it?" you're stuffed.  In fairness I did once identify a mystery malt that someone bought me at the end of a very long and boozy evening in Edinburgh, but that was largely because the chap who bought it was English, and it was the only readily pronounceable brand in the pub.  
Sorry.  I'm digressing.  Onto the moss.  I'm going to gloss over all the moss that is happily growing in places where it isn't supposed to - especially intermingled with the aforementioned Buces.  Instead I'm going to focus on the moss that is doing what it's supposed to - and what you see in all the fab photos from real aquascapers - where it attaches to and starts growing over the wood.  In this case partially emersed. 




 I think it looks dead good, so I spend many happy hours gazing contentedly at it.  

Anyhow, onto the fish.  First off the Red Lizard Whiptails (L010a).  I think they are all grown up now, and are definitely benign rulers of the substrate.  They will happily let shrimp climb over them, and put up with Otos curiously nosing them, but when they want something (usually an algae tablet), they are a bit like mini underwater bulldozers, and woe betide the snail that lies in their path. Here are a couple of photos.  @Garuf this may be of particular interest to you so you know what you're getting into. 













There is one melancholy note in this update.  We arrived back from a week away at the back end of last year to find a fish skeleton and some fat shrimp.  Sadly Elton had not survived the holidays. Anecodotally I've heard that it's not unusual for Bettas to only survive for six months or so, but I'm still suspicious that I contributed in some fashion.  I have much to learn about fishkeeping.  We debated over whether to replace him, and eventually we might, but for now we decided to take a Betta break and seek an alternative replacement.  
My thinking about fish sourcing has been turned upside down over the past year, almost entirely due to discussions and links shared on this forum.  So I was extremely happy to source some wild caught Green Neon Tetras (Paracheridon Simulans).  I'm sure it's not as clear cut as it has been promoted, but it makes sense that wild caught amazonian fish are a relatively sustainable industry that it is dependent on the rainforest thriving, so on balance a lot better than buying a frozen burger.  They went into the quarantine tank / potting shed for a few weeks, and then into the tank about a month ago.  




Interestingly whilst the Copper Harlequins and the Green Neons both are nominally middle dwellers, the Green Neons are definitely mid-low and the Copper Harlequins mid-high.  so they fill different spaces in the tank.  The Green Neons are way more fearless in the tank then they were in the quarantine.  Whilst they were quarantining they hid behind the plants and only came out very cautiously.  I fully expected them to vanish into the undergrowth and never see them again when they went in, but from the get-go they were bolder and happier in open spaces.  I wonder if the Copper harlequins acted as a dither shoal for them.  They do sometimes hang out together.  Although the Green Neons make the Copper Harlequins look enormous, which was slightly surprising.  















That leaves the Otos.  
They are, I think, happy and healthy.  Interestingly, when they are nestled up against the wood and stone they are fabulously camouflaged - when I go Oto counting (is it just me or does everyone spend vast amounts of time counting their fish to check all are present and correct?) I can frequently not realise that there are three right in front of me unless they choose to move.  My own in-tank game of Where's Wally.  Well it would be if one of my Otos was called Wally, at any rate.  In fact even then that would be tough as I can't tell them apart.  I'd have to call them all Wally.  Then I'd be playing Where Are The Wallys, which somehow isn't the same.  
Sorry; digressing again.
I'll close off with an FTS for form's sake.  If I get my act together I'm sure there will be another update before Christmas.





Cheers,
  Simon.

Oh!  In case you're wondering why the photos have improved somewhat, it's because I upgraded lighting.  After staring wistully at Kessils for 6 months, I had a stern financial conversation with myself and shelled out for a Lominie Asta instead, which is really rather good.  I keep it turned most of the way down to minimum apart from when I'm taking photos, at which point I whack it up to max.


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