So, welcome to my blog, or whatever.. Please don't mind the rambling on this post, it's an overview of what the blog will be about, and doesn't have much of any structure or anything.. it's not an important post. I'll be explaining the terms I use, as well as what species I'm talking about and what they do. It is highly likely that when I begin actively stocking my tank, I will detail each species I introduce, both plant and critter, and explain, if necessary, why they are valuable in my setup. I will also do my best to explain why I have chosen to do my setup in this particular fashion, and what benefits and drawbacks it has.
It turns out, I'm not happy unless I have some sort of big project upon which to work when I get bored with other things. Generally, I finish my projects within a year or two, but this time I have a project with a set-in-stone deadline. Why, you might ask? Simply, I live in a state that gets winter. Not the 2 weeks of snow a year and then 50 degrees, but the kind that keeps you indoors for half the year. I basically live in the arctic, because apparently I'm not smart enough to move (yet.. that's in the plans as well, when I've earned my degree and after I've finished remodeling my house to sell it) What does that have to do with anything? Well, I can't very well have fish shipped when it's around or below freezing, so my deadline is the first day of October.
I'm building a truly epic aquarium (at least, I see it as being epic), but not just any old aquarium, I'm building a zero-maintenance, "holy shit that's amazing, where'd you get it" display aquarium, complete with live plants, a waterfall (also full of live plants -actually, just emerged growth of the plants already growing in my tanks- this will be my filtration for nutrients, as I will NOT be CO2 supplementing), and hopefully, a profit margin, as I plan to breed every species in the tank. I have selected very specific inhabitants which require similar environments, and are all exceptionally peaceful, low bioload, and should thrive and reproduce with minimal intervention on my part.
I was given an exceptionally old 55 gallon aquarium (my step-dad used it last some 40 years ago, and it had been running for a long time before that point) for my birthday, at my request -basically, I found out he still had it and said "you know, if you don't want it, I have a birthday coming up... ^_^"- which is in pretty rough shape. The glass is a bit scratched from rocks used in it, the silicone was peeling right off the glass, and it still had (eew eew eew eew eew) all the old gravel and mulm, and reeked. Basically, the tank itself needs some work.
Then, because I want to be really cool, and also because I'm incredibly thrifty (a word I was told to use, rather than "cheap", which is how I normally describe myself) I'm constructing my own rockscape, the exposed waterfall, planting and growing out all my own cuttings, and various other tasks that I can't think of off the top of my head. I plan to do all this without spending $100 -the fish, of course, are pricier, and so not included in that figure, nor are lights. Lighting is purely situational, so different environments will need different lighting.
I haven't decided just what to do for lights yet; I'm thinking about using positionable tracklights, as I will need to light 1-2 feet above the tank for my waterfall, as well as the length of the tank. My plants aren't CO2 supplemented, and I don't fertilize them in any way, so I use low-light for submerged plants, but med-high light for out-of-water plants, as they are not restricted by dissolved CO2 levels. I also have a northeastern window which will be about a foot to the right of the tank, as well as a southeastern window from which it will get both bright indirect light and maybe an hour or two of direct light at various times of year.
I have picked up most of the materials I feel I will need, after doing a buttload of research and reading how-to guides. I'll break down the items and prices as I get to the steps which require them, but the basic list thusfar is: cement and color, sand and cheap topsoil soil, lava rock chips, pink foam insulation, a couple tubes of expanding foam (medium expanding or low expanding; high expanding can have a lot more room for error and drippy mess, as it takes up 5-10X more space than when you squeeze it out, depending how thick you put it on or if it's in confined space) several tubes of silicone, some paintbrushes and scrubby sponges, digital light timers, a cheap submersible pump, and cheap heater, along with various other small things. As you may have noticed, this is a very small list of necessary items for the project, and each of these items were $13 or less, mostly in the "under $5" range. I don't put any more money or work into something than I have to, and this material list reflects hours upon hours of reading and tweaking methods others have used with success, as well as some of my own knowledge about mechanical things, ecosystems, and sheer and utter laziness. Nothing will motivate you more to spend a lot of energy on a setup than being lazy about continuous work. I much prefer 4 months of daily tasks to avoid having to do more than yearly maintenance.
This blog is going to be a tracker of this process, starting just after scraping the silicone from the tank -which I already did, it was boring, and not a terribly interesting step- so I'll document everything relevant, including some things I've already done. And I'll have PICTURES! YAY!
Keep in mind, as you read through this, that I have no functional knowledge of how this whole process will work, only research, which is far from "the same thing" so I also have a snail-breeding tank which will be used as an "experiment" tank, just as soon as I have enough MTS to move to my other current tank (thus spreading out my stock in case of unfortunate results of said experimentation). This will include such things as taking a lake sample and growing it out (in another container, to prevent contamination) and moving various critters and debris samples to the 10G to see what happens with introducing the bottom of the ecosystem to the tank, and will also be the home of my purchased species tests, such as a protozoa culture kit, and various crustaceans and gastropods, annelids, etc. which form the base of the food chain in nature.
Since I don't know how this process will turn out, but I know a lot about how it *should* work, and maybe even how to balance it, I plan to document everything, both for my own reference, and possibly to help someone in the future who has an idea as insane as my own. This means I won't hide my failures, like any good scientist, and I will do my absolute best to give full and accurate information including water parameters and appearance. Keep in mind also that I am far more concerned with minimal maintenance and a healthy ecosystem than I am with having my tank "look perfect", since it is my honest opinion that a stable ecosystem is remarkably beautiful, regardless if it looks clean. Nature is dirty. Dirty is healthy.
There are several ecosystem components I will actively be avoiding for this tank. The main missing component, which will, in reality, limit the success of the tank, is limiting anaerobic pockets in the substrate. Although these bacteria perform a function that aerobic bacteria cannot (namely, nitrogen fixing) the consequences of allowing anaerobic bacteria are horrific, and include mass-poisoning of inhabitants. An enclosed system of this sort is simply not large enough for the byproducts of anaerobic decomposition to be sufficiently diluted to be harmless. I will also have no larger predators to maintain fish stock levels, however I will be doing this task manually, as I intend to sell the offspring to fund the aquarium itself. Current research indicates that I will need various protozoa and algae, and a few more varieties of annelids and crustaceans, to form the base of my food chain. Although I will supplement the tank feeding, I plan to do so rather sporadically, as I do now. My fish are fed maybe once a week, because the tanks contain blackworms en masse, gammarus, seed shrimp (or maybe what I saw were bugs, I'm really not sure; they are tiny, and since I don't have a microscope yet, the max. magnification I can get currently is 100x) and probably a bunch of stuff I don't yet know about.
I take a very lax stand on quarantine, other than for fish, but I probably won't bother with it at all this time, since all fish will be added at the same time, from the same place. That is to say, I don't dip new plants, I don't QT my shrimp or snails, and I certainly don't clean my tools between tanks (my experiment tank will have it's own set of tools, however). Why? Frankly, there's stuff I might want on those items from other people's tanks. I did not buy pond snails, gammarus, or seed shrimp, I did not buy planaria. Whatever other goodies are there, I did not buy those, either. I don't see these things as a problem until my fish start to have problems with them, which has not yet happened. Basically, I'm hoping for hitch-hikers, something most aquarists... avoid ^_^ I actually like the idea of "see a problem, THEN find a solution" rather than trying to prevent any contamination whatever. Nature is not so clean, and these critters wouldn't be alive if they didn't serve an important function and fill an ecological niche.
So I think that's a good enough overview of what I'm planning and why, as well as what you can expect for difficulty (mostly low), materials (all cheap, except for living things) and time (a lot)
Hope you enjoy this adventure as much as I do!
