Hi all,
By way of an update, my test results were showing zero for ammonia and nitrites and the first inhabitants have gone in the tank.
About a week after planting I started to get a little bit of hair algae building up. I dialed back the light intensity, and put 2 nerite snails and 8 amano shrimp in the tank. The snails are fun, but move too slowly to do much, but the amano shrimp are voracious. I put the shrimp in at about 8 in the evening, and by the next morning all trace of algae and fur on the wood had gone. Unless my algae issues get worse, I'm going to have to start feeding the shrimp. I could certainly have brought less than 8, but they are fun to watch and my son enjoys them. They are particularly entertaining when they hang upside down from the floater roots.
They snails and the shrimp are both exposing all of the shortcomings in my hardscaping layout. The shrimp are gleefully moving the aquasoil around the tank, and the snails have uprooted two of the cryptocoryne parva clumps; something I can learn from if I ever do another tank.
Since increasing the bioload in the tank the ammonia test result has not been a clear 0. It is somewhere between 0 and 0.25 ppm, but the shrimp seem very happy. I'll keep an eye on it and wont add any fish until I'm confident there's not a problem.
With respect to the plants, a small section of the in-vitro bucephelandra has melted back to the rhizome, but everything else seems happy. The Rotala rotundifolia is shooting up, the new growth on the ludwigia super red is incredibly red, and even the plants I was a little more worried about (staurogynes repens and blyxa japonica) are doing well.
Thanks for all of your help getting to this point.
Nick
