First topic message reminder :



this is an update on my 75gal ecosystem project. the tank has been up for about a month now. i had really bad cyano at first, but it is all dead now, giving way to lots of GSA. hopefully it will whittle down without disappearing entirely, as it is renewable food for my omnivores/herbivores.

FLORA:

AQUATIC:
Moneywort, Java Fern, Water Wysteria, Giant Hygro, Corckscrew Val, Jungle Val, Java Moss, Hornwort, Anacharis, Swword (amazon?), Microsword, Tiger Lotus, Algae Balls, Apongeton, Water Lily, Aquatic Onion Grass...and 2 more species ive forgotten the names of.

BOG/FLOATING:
Arcorus, Water Hyacinth, Water Lettuce

HOUSE PLANTS AS EMERGENTS:
Cataractarum Palm, Parlor Palm, Lucky Bamboo, Money Tree, Lavender, Sage, Cherry Tomato, Onion, and 4 or 5 plants that i cant identify.

FAUNA:
Blackworms, 1 Male Betta, 3 Female Bettas (bettas have fry), 1 Male Guppy, 2 Female Guppies, 1 Male Balck Molly, 2 Female Black Mollies, 1 Male Blue Platy, 2 Female Blue Platys, 1 Male Swordtail, 1 Female Swordtail, 4 Otocinculuses, 2 Rosy Red Minnows, 2 Ghost Shrimp, 12 Snails (apple, pond, and something else) and their excessive babies.

The next additions to the tank will be shrimp. I have ordered 8 Crystal Blue Shrimp, and i also would like cherry shrimp and bee shrimp. After the shrimp have reproduced a lot, and the plants have gotten very dense, I plan on adding a male and 2 female gouramis (not sure what kind yet. id like dwarf gouramis but i cant find females) and im saving the bottom of the tank for dwarf cichlids.

thanks its working out great! im thinking i may want some more red plants in there, though. to offset all the green going on lol

..."although now a prominent culture of some sort of green beardish algae is taking over"


Just a heads up, when I was getting my tank together I started getting real small circles of black beard algae. Almost like little go-t's everywhere. Come to find out it was because my water wasn't oxygenated as well as it should have been. I put an air stone in and cleared it right up. I've rigged it up alot better since, cuz I'm not real big on bubbles. I don't know if green beard is the same deal or not but I thought I'd throw that out there.

Oh yea, as far as plants and my fish, they eat them, up root them etc. Hell on fins. So, I'm either taking small yogurt containers and drilling holes in them and hanging them inside the lid, or using small media bags to keep the root balls in and hanging them the same way. I think I'm passing on wild caught plants, too much risk. I'm thinking pothos, spiders, I saw where someone was using venus fly traps, I might slip some kratom in there, and whatever else I can find. Any and all suggestions are welcome on good nitrate eaters. Later - Nereus

nereus, my tank is prolly about as oxygenated as its gonna ever be at this point lol. but im assuming the beard algae phase, and whatever its caused by, will go away just like all the other different algaes have so far. i pulled that ball of it out. it was real easy. all of it was interlinked so i just grabbed a piece and kept pulling.

i tried venus flytraps but they didnt do well. but that could be for a number of reasons. it was before i learned about static solution culture. i couldnt get my tomatoes to grow in there either before i learned about that so it may be the key. floating plants are great nitrate eaters! NASA is actually running experiments right now with Water Hyacinths because they uptake so many toxins. any emergent plants are going to uptake more nitrates (at least in my tank thats not CO2 injected) than submerged plants because they can get their CO2 from the air and it is not a limiting factor in their growth, whereas the submerged plants (in my tank) have to rely on fish respiration for their CO2. my Moneywort has grown so tall now that it has recently become an emergent plant, and now its starting to reproduce.

its been a while since my last update, and its been a bit of a hectic time in the tank. the most good news is about the houseplants. the static solution culture really helped out, and a lot of the houseplants that were dying with their roots fully submerged are now coming back to life with their roots only partially submerged. the money tree seems to be the only irrecoverable one. the philodendron is doing great with itsw roots fully submerged. the new tomato plant grew from a seed into a very big plant and its spidery roots kind of clog up what was once some free space in the tank. the water hyacinth has bloomed once and reproduced twice. the bamboo grows very nicely once it gets a piece of itself above the water line. there is a thick blanket of what i call duckweed over most of the water surface now. i dont know how it got in there but it serves as a pretty efficient natural lid for the tank, and even makes me wonder if i can add hatchetfish...ive been keeping my eye out for the smaller, marbled ones i used to see all the time, but never had much luck with.

Of the bad things, there was a very long wait for the green hair algae to die down. i had to do 2 removals of it simply because it blocked out so much light for the other plants that i didnt think some of them could wait the algae out like i could. but recently, its died back some and i hope the trend continues. im not sure if anything eats that stuff. maybe the snails. buts its giving way to a little more green spot algae which is much more palatable to the herbivores.

i believe ive already mentioned that a couple of bad batches of worms nearly wiped out my worm colonies in the half-submerged cups. well, the one cup that still had a surviving worm colony got decimated by fish when i accidentally let the water line go over the cup on top of that, the only lfs around that sold blackworms just closed, and ive had trouble with receiving anything ordered online. so, for the last 2 months, im back to feeding the aquarium. i think i may plan an extra tank or something to breed the worms in, unharrassed, so that i do not have to endure such a hardship the next time i screw something up

and finally, theres the fungus. i have a confession to make. i dont quarantine my fish that often. and honestly, i always expect the tank to get diseased. i never kept shrimp before because of that reason haha. but unlike my other tanks this tank does have two different species of shrimp, and more importantly, is full of plants that it relies on to operate properly. its in my best interest not to kill either, and most medicines would. the fungus came in on a new molly i bought. it, and the three other mollies died, and the bettas were very susceptible, being that they arent as hardy as described, and that when they live together, they are naturally very aggressive. but they do tend to scuffle a bit and a fin will get ripped from time to time, and that caused them to be prime targets for the fungus. it wiped them all out. even the juveniles that were getting to be half as big as the adults. all the mature female guppies died, and some of the babies died. one of the adult platys died. the swordtails, both juvenile and mature, have endured no ill effects. nothing in the tank currently has it, but the platy died of it recently, so it was still around at that point. i have done some pretty large water changes, though i doubt the seriousness of that solution. so i am faced with the options of risking some sort of low level medication over a period of time, accepting it as a reality of the tank, or think of something else. i would readily accept it as a reality of the tank, as the more hardy fish of any of the species arent bothered by it, even the more aggressive dwarf cichlids that spend their days warring with one another. but the bettas aggression, combined with its intolerance, makes the tank a very hostile place for them. and i am very partial to bettas an anabantoids. i even tried putting a second batch in there once the fungus looked like it had cleared up and they all got the fungus and died

to end on a positive note though, there have been a few new additions to the tank. our neighbor has recently gotten into fishkeeping as well, and has started a similar project, so she gave me some of her leopard guppies to replace the adult females i lost. while i wanted to wait until after i had gotten the blackworm thing right, i went ahead and started putting in dwarf cichlids. as of now there are 4 adult bolivian rams and 4 juvenile german blue rams (there is also a handicapped one but i dont count it.). the rams do quite well in their fussing and fighting and are hardy enough to not get the fungus so far. i think i also added 2 more otos so theres 4 now. being that the lily plant is so proficient now, it has made me want to add a few african dwarf frogs. i remember i gave one to my mom in a vase with a lilly or something one year for mothers day and the plant died but the frog lived for years. but somebody at a chain pet store told me that they put the frogs on the endangered species list a year ago and they arent for sale anymore. i havent looked it up yet, but i immediately question it, because unlike with the elephant, these animals are entered into the commercial market to be kept alive, so commerce would actually aid in the survival of the species in this case, but more like a chicken, which would have been long extinct if not for the fact that they are delicious to humans.

i have changed things around a lot in the past week, and it was long overdue. i had been very busy for a while doing something with my business and have only had little bits of time to tend to things. but, positively, it did give me time enough to better view befores and afters of the slower processes that take place in the tank.

my experiment with the houseplants is coming to a close for now. it is still a very exciting experiment, but the tanks light mainly comes through the back glass, and most houseplants develop very large root systems. but to be properly hydroponically grown in this environment, the roots must not be fully submerged, meaning that their expansive root systems must stay at the water column and grow downward, blocking the light from the aquatic plants and in some cases, creating large pockets of space in the water column that are unusable to most fish. not being limited by CO2 and O2 in the water, they are also able to uptake much more nutrients than the aquatic plants that do not grow to the surface, starving them out. I am still keeping the plants that can grow as true emergents. the water hyacinth, the arcorus grass, the lucky bamboo, and one of the philodendrons will stay in the tank for now. the change shifted the balance in the tank a bit as some of the weakened aquatic plants begin to grow back and reinput themselves into the balance. but, after a week, things are looking better already. taking the cups off the back of the tank was another thing i did. i no longer needed them to hold the houseplants in place, and i wanted to modify my worm breeders to something larger and clear.

i did finally get some new worms in the mail, and i did set up the new worm farm. at first i tried my plastic window planter. i thought it would hold plenty of dirt and water for the worms, and that they could still escape through the bottom when they needed to so the fish could eat them. so i bent a metal clotheshanger appropriately and hung it in the water. it was actually working very well for the worms, and they were doing everything they were supposed to. but it was too deep for the plants with the amount of soil that was in there. if i had put more soil, the planter wouldve become too heavy, plus the worms wouldve possibly had to crawl through too much non-oxygenated dirt to get through to the bottom. it also blocked out far too much sun from the back of the aquarium.

so i went to target in the storage section and got a small, shallow, clear, tupperwarish container and hooked it to the back of the tank much the same fashion as i did the window planter. it let much more light in, and i wanted to put the worms in with no dirt so i could observe them better and see if they would still live, but getting the worms out of the window planter without getting the dirt was very challenging, and plenty ended up in the container with the worms. i ordered 3/4lb of blackworms and had put all but enough to colonize the window planter in the bottom of the aquarium. but mysteriously, the worms in the container died, while the worms in the bottom of the tank are still alive. it couldve been that the worms in the container did not have enough food, or it could be that they were receiving too much direct sun, but i think the most probable cause was that i only put one hole in the bottom of the container, and there was not enough water exchange between the container and the tank, like there was with the planter cups.

i also didnt like the way it tilted when it hung on the back by a clotheshanger, so instead of trying again with the same container, i ordered a 3-chambered dipcup that should be here any day. it is clear (not that it matters because hopefully this will be short enough to hang over the short edge of the tank.) and the 3 chambers will allow me to try the no-dirt experiment without defiling the other 2 chambers.

after a couple months with only commercial flake and pellet food, the addition of the worms to the tank has increased the overall health of the fish exponentially and even visibly. the fish are all fat and healthy, and the juveniles are all growing rapidly. the algae is lessening, and the behaviour of some of the fish has even changed. aside from pairing up, the rams have even adjusted their territories and/or reclaimed new ones. the reclusive shrimp have come out like a hive of bees and they are so clear, you can see the worms in their bellies after they eat them.

very interestingly, i see no more signs of the fungus, even among the new betta family. all the new fish acclimated to the tank almost instantly once the worms were in there. the fungus is still in the tank. maybe always will be. maybe always was. but the fish are no longer getting it because their immune systems are proper now.

my neighbor gave me a sprig of some red plant she had that wasnt doing well in her tank, and it has made me think that i could use a little ashetics in the tank, maybe even beyond just de-cluttering. i wonder what a tank of all red plants would look like. i was thinking of possibly all the plants be reddish plants, except some green carpet grass on the bottom and some green floating/emergent plants on top. i bought another red plant and some dwarf hairgrass to add to the flora of the tank