#fisch's aquarium adventure

[mutantenfisch]

Crappy video of my shrimp tank :)

I'll try to take a better one tomorrow :3

[mutantenfisch]

Cross-posting this from pillowfort.

Got two different new aquariums for 30 bucks total through ebay so i can set up one for my sister so she finally has pets again that forgive her being away three days in a row for school and also don't trigger her allergies. She will have to get gravel, sand, a safety mat for evening out any tiniest bumps on her couch table and one or two lamps by herself, but i provide plants and shrimps, which i feed only twice a week with extra protein and fibre rich shrimp food and otherwise leave them alone, so she can do the same :)

This one here however is the Big Boi, as i call it affectionately. It measures 80 by 30 by 45 cm and will be perfect for my long nurtured wish to house moss barbs, the green colour morph of the Sumatra barb. Those fish like swarming and grow up to 8 cm long, so having this length is much more ideal for them than the 50 cm small tank i already have where Cherno Alpha lives and they are also quite bossy, and like to nip on longer fins, so i can't keep them safely in Romeo Blue's rice field simulator tank, even though that one is my largest tank by far (110 cm long).

Due to moss barbs being moss barbs, i put more thoughts into the hardscape you can see here. Moss barbs poop a lot lol and i don't have enough gravel and sand to make the required 10 cm of ground cover that would be enough room for beneficial bacteria to go by using no filter and 'only' do 1/4 water changes every 2 to 3 weeks, so a filter it is to rather be safe than sorry. Instead, you can see this 'Desert Riverbed' here, with soil hidden in the places where i want to put plants under a layer of the grey gravel, and red and grey lava gravel to both provide surface area for beneficial bacteria and shape the 'riverbed'. I tried to scatter the root pieces in a way that looks relatively natural, like fallen trees brought in by a rare flood and stopped by the boulders and the larger root that looks a bit like a fancy boulder too. They will get a bushel of Vallisnerias in the big empty right corner you see up there, which will also hide the filter that needs to go in there due to the reason above. I will have to wait and see whether the barbs want to nip on the looooooong thin leaves of the Vallisneria or not. If they do, great, they'd help me keep the plant from taking over the tank (see Romeo Blue's rice field simulator, which is 2/3 Vallisneria by now, having spread from one bushel not even planted, but kept floating in the middle of the tank because my arms were too short to plant it proper) The Hygrophila that is growing in and out of Cherno Alpha's tank has become so abundant that i can simply cut off a stalk and put it into the centre root, which has a hole in it. If I'm lucky and the Hygrophila grows as well here as it already does in the other tank, this will be a nice little 'rock tree' in a few months. As you can see, I also have an artificial corner cave and a shrimp tunnel, which i got with a whole lot of other aquarium stuff for a tenner on ebay too sometime last year. Usually, I don't like artificial aquarium decoration because it does, well, look artificial. That box even included an artificial (and anatomically wrong lol) goat skull, which is absolutely awful XD. However, the cave fills the corner and the vibe absolutely perfectly and the tunnel i can cover under some Java moss that i can simply glue on top. For the cave, i am thinking about getting another Anubias, even though they are comparably expensive if we consider that i can use my own plants for free. Anubias doesn't like having its roots covered in soil, so i will simply glue it on top and with time, it will get 'air roots' that look really cool and also have a bit of a desert vibe because of the relatively small leaves Anubias nana gets.