Tales from the aquarium:



Volume II Part I

So after the disaster of the first tank (What will probably be called Volume I Part II when written) I decided that I would try my hand at this aquarium thing again. This time I decided to try it with live plants as I refuse to use fake ones and I do not care for the empty look of a non-planted tank. The wall behind it is just boreing and seeing the filter and heater and stuff on the back is ugly.

So I cleaned everything and filled it up with water and ordered some plants. I ordered a couple of bunches of hornwort, a bunch of red myrio, a bunch of wisteria, a bunch of rotala indica, and two bunches of corkscrew val. They fill up the aquarium nicely. I also got some substrate supliment that helps the plants as they root, and got another two bags of aquarium gravel, I now have about 2 and a half inches of gravel in the aquarium, the bottom layer is a larger gravel with the clay substrate mixed in and the top is a smaller gravel. (Most of you probably do not care but as much as I have put into this thought and work-wise I'm going to talk about it!)

So I plant the plants and start the filtration going. Haley was my Vagrant Valentine and she got me a black molly for that. The molly lived in the 1gal tank as quarentine in case she had anything.

I also made a CO2 system for my tank. Something I found out online is that fish generaly do not generate enough CO2 for plants to thrive in a tank, so often aquarium owners will inject CO2 into their tanks. Larger setups use compressed tanks of CO2 and regulators and all kind of stuff that costs hundreds of dollers. Or you can use electric methods of generating CO2, also expensive and I have heard some not so good reviews of this system (and the pressurized tanks are dangerous on the first system mentioned) And a third option is to buy a kit that uses yeast fermentation to make CO2 and deliver it to the tank. This third option can also be built fairly easily. So I set to work because I also like to build things as can be seen in my homemade plant hanger and light stand for plants that I made earlier in the year (that being SCHOOL year.) Basicaly I have a bottle, I used a grape juice bottle becuase they are pretty rigged and a good size for this project. I drilled a quarter inch hole in the top and used silicone to attach an airline connector in the hole and create a seal. After that set I filled the bottle with a mixture of warm water, yeast, sugar, and baking soda and mixed it up, this is where the CO2 comes from. I ran an airline from the connector in the top to a 4" airstone which I burried under a shallow layer of gravel at the very back of the tank. This creates a nice steady stream of small bubbles of CO2 which disolve into the water fairly well (though not all do and there is some bubbling on the surface of the water. The reaction has been going for over a week now, some people say theirs lasts for about a month before they have to change the mixture. It STINKS though if I open the bottle to let off presure! I checked yesterday (through Ph and Carbonate Hardness tests) and the concentration is about 12mg/l, I do not know what that translates to in PPG which is what all the pages I have read use... But the fish is not upset with it, so it's not too high.

The fish moved in saturday, a week after I got her. She has hidden in the plants since then.

An odd thing happened... all the plants except the red myrio and rotala got brownish and mushy and I thought they had died. And even the myrio and rotala looked a little worse than they ought to. But today I looked and the vals have started growing new, green leaves, the old ones are all dead looking. The hornwort has new growth on the top portion, I hope it will grow new on the bottom as well. The wisteria is looking wonderful with it's new growth and probably has the most of all the plants (it IS supposed to be fast growing and thus helps keep algee down by using up nutrients) and has new, firm leaves on it at the ends of each stem.

I think part of the problem was I had no fish in there to fertalize them, and I don't have a liquid fertalizer to use yet. Also I dunno, maybe just recovering from shipping and getting established. But now they are starting to look better.

I just need a good set of aquascaping tools (they are usualy long and steel, tweezers and scisors. A lot of people use surgical tools, but thsoe are expensive!)

I have noticed the water is much clearer than my other aquarium is, and I atribute that to having the plants in there.

I want my plants to pearl! That's when they start producing so much oxygen it forms bubbles all over them! That's a very GOOD thing.
- posted by Nick @ 2/25/2003 11:44:00 PM | 0 comments