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3000 Liter High Tech Planted Tank
- Thread starter RickyV
- Start date
The new fish have arrived! We got 300 rio amaya pencilfish! Just need to wait a few weeks in quarantine. I'm super excited! I think this will be the biggest school of them in any aquarium.
They came in very healthy and are already eating lots of food. Something interesting I've noticed is they're really attracted to black surfaces. They just hover over them like hummingbirds.
They came in very healthy and are already eating lots of food. Something interesting I've noticed is they're really attracted to black surfaces. They just hover over them like hummingbirds.
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Stunning fish.
Tank update 8/25/24
For the most part everything in the tank is doing pretty well. I decided to try my first more difficult/rare plants now that I feel more confident with the easy stuff. I added some ludwigia white and hygrophila araguai chai. The ludwigia white exploded in size. It's probably 5x the size in width/height of the ones I have home. The Chai looking the same as expected with its slow growth.
The shrimp colony in the breeding tank has been thriving, though unfortunately some bladderwort took over all the moss. Does anyone know if it can eat shrimplets? I am also seeing more and more shrimps in the main display.
The past few weeks I've been experimenting with 0 NO3 dosing, and PO4 reduced to 0.5 ppm weekly. Plants all doing well still. The red root floaters suggest there is plenty of nitrogen in the water. According to tests the nitrate level sits around 1-1.3. I wonder if the plants are getting most of their nitrogen from ammonia, or if the fish are able to provide the plants with a steady but low level of nitrate.
Emersed plants growing like crazy. Unfortunately got a scales infestation on them. Anyone have suggestions on treating this with an aquarium right under them? I've been spraying them with isopropyl alcohol, but It would be nice to know what is the safe dose that can fall in the tank.
They're growing all the way up even to the darkest areas. But then they see there is no light and consume their leaf.
The only thing I've been unhappy with is the ludwigia super red bush. I keep having big chunks uproot, or maybe have the stems snap in half. So I keep having to redo the bush. I haven't been able to grow the bush to my final vision because of this. You can see in this picture how is not all connected because of it. I'm hoping once I get the aquasoil it will help them root better.
Here is a full tank pic during sunrise before trimming.
Most recent full tank pic.
For the most part everything in the tank is doing pretty well. I decided to try my first more difficult/rare plants now that I feel more confident with the easy stuff. I added some ludwigia white and hygrophila araguai chai. The ludwigia white exploded in size. It's probably 5x the size in width/height of the ones I have home. The Chai looking the same as expected with its slow growth.
The shrimp colony in the breeding tank has been thriving, though unfortunately some bladderwort took over all the moss. Does anyone know if it can eat shrimplets? I am also seeing more and more shrimps in the main display.
The past few weeks I've been experimenting with 0 NO3 dosing, and PO4 reduced to 0.5 ppm weekly. Plants all doing well still. The red root floaters suggest there is plenty of nitrogen in the water. According to tests the nitrate level sits around 1-1.3. I wonder if the plants are getting most of their nitrogen from ammonia, or if the fish are able to provide the plants with a steady but low level of nitrate.
Emersed plants growing like crazy. Unfortunately got a scales infestation on them. Anyone have suggestions on treating this with an aquarium right under them? I've been spraying them with isopropyl alcohol, but It would be nice to know what is the safe dose that can fall in the tank.
They're growing all the way up even to the darkest areas. But then they see there is no light and consume their leaf.
The only thing I've been unhappy with is the ludwigia super red bush. I keep having big chunks uproot, or maybe have the stems snap in half. So I keep having to redo the bush. I haven't been able to grow the bush to my final vision because of this. You can see in this picture how is not all connected because of it. I'm hoping once I get the aquasoil it will help them root better.
Here is a full tank pic during sunrise before trimming.
Most recent full tank pic.
So this has taken a lot longer than expected but it is finally ready! This tank now has 24/7 livestream! Here is the link to the stream Underwater Rainforest
The main lights are on from 7am - 7pm CST/ 8am - 8pm EST/ 1pm - 1am BST. The tank has a night light but currently it is not great so I will be trying to improve that. For those interested in seeing live tank maintenance, that is on Fridays usually starting around 8am CST/9am EST/ 2pm BST. I usually spend a few hours on maintenance but it varies.
The tank has been doing well recently. A few weeks ago I added 50L of UNS controsoil to help with the poor plant rooting, and also with reducing the pH. I need to take more measurements, but the KH is now at most 1.5 DHK. The degassed pH went down from 7.8 to 7.5. I have 50L more of aquasoil on the way. Though I may end up adding most of it inside the hollow rock structures since the slope is already pretty steep.
I did have a close call with CO2 recently. CO2 started leaking out of the main nut and I over 24 hours the pH went from 6.7 to 5.8, around a 1.7 pH drop. I heard fish were doing well though. The pH controller is set to stop CO2 injection at 6.1 pH. The Yugang reactor is also built to overflow its CO2 after it reaches its maximum capacity. The best explanation I have for the large pH drop despite my failsafe is a significant amount of CO2 must have accumulated in the small room and dissolved in the tank.
I did not do a great job in the beginning with my cosmetic sand barrier so I have recently been struggling with substrate coming to the front. Not sure how to best address it since the tank is so deep. The space is also a bit tight for a diver to go in with all the plants. Best solution I could think of is just removing as much of the substrate right behind the rock barrier since all the plants there are epiphytes rooted in lava rock anyways. I also dumped some more lava rock right behind the rock barrier to slow down the substrate shifting down. I guess worst case scenario I may replace the cosmetic sand with a carpet.
My ludwigia white was not was not growing well so I removed it. But the ludwigia inclinata cuba has been doing well.
Java fern bush has been doing a little too well... I am going to start slowly thinning it to keep it from consuming the whole tank lol.
Here is how big the leaves on that centerpiece sword get.
By the way anyone know what kind of sword it is? I totally forgot what all swords we got. Here are some of its babies I have been growing in the shrimp breeding tank.
Shrimp breeding tank has slowed down in production, not sure if its because of all the bladderwort in there, or because planaria have returned to the tank.
Here is a short video of shrimps in the tank. Some of them are huge and so bright red. Anyone know what cherry shrimp variety these are? They were sold as bloody mary, but they look closer to fire reds to me.
The Siamese algae eaters have also gotten massive. They are almost double the size of the ones I keep at home. Not sure if its because of how big the tank is, or because the large quantity and quality of food here (lots of frozen/live foods). Here is a clip of them.
Emersed plants have been doing very well. It is crazy how much vines they send out in all directions searching for light. Some of them are very thick too. As you can see my duckweed index container has a bit of a duckweed problem...
Some of these emersed plants are also sending out some long roots reaching towards the substrate.
I tried setting up a daphnia culture, but I overfed them one day and crashed them overnight... Lucky have a backup at home now so I will give them a try again soon. The ones at home currently are connected to my pond so they essentially get a 100% WC every day with pond water, I am curious if that would work well with this tank. But this tank has much better mechanical filtration than my pond.
I did setup another culture that has been doing really well. Blackworms! I have them in these two tubs here connected to flow from the tank. I don't think this is the best setup for automatic segmentation, but I have found it easy to manually segment them once a week when they all gather around the algae wafers. May be a dumb question but does anyone know of anything that can kill planaria, but leave the blackworms alive? Video of the blackworms.
I have also found at least two juvenile fish in the tank that survived being fry on their own. One is the CPD and the other is a Corydoras.
Baby fish that I found and separated are also doing well. Currently have 5 CPDs and 2 Gertrude rainbowfish.
Here is a most recent full tank shot. I have been working on regrowing the ludwigia super red bush after adding the aquasoil. But I now have to rethink the height/shape of the bush in a way that wont block the camera view too much.
