Moving, part II

As I mentioned in my last post, I moved a long-established tank at the end of July. At the new place, I housed my fish and plants in a 27-gallon tank temporarily until I had time to set up my 55-gallon tank properly. That ended up being a 3-week hiatus, while my driftwood and gravel sat outside on the back porch. Last weekend, I was finally able to set things up. It was an experience worth writing about.

The first challenge of the set-up was cleaning my gravel. In a planted tank, vacuuming the gravel is impractical, so the tank probably contained about 7 years of organic matter. Securely buried, that probably created a nice anaerobic layer where denitrification might have been occurring. Dig it up and you have a house that smells of rotten eggs. I thought a few weeks in the sun might help things, but in reality the gravel was still quite wet. And very smelly. Washing all that gravel took me about half a day, and in the end I did a less than perfect job. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted perfectly clean gravel - organic matter in the substrate not only provides nutrients for the plants, it also provides a small amount of carbon dioxide (which can be a plus for photosynthesis).

Gravel in, I got to work on the decor. Fairly simple - some slate and a large piece of driftwood. The the plants. Most people recommend doing the planting before you add water, and I found that works pretty well; if nothing else, it lets you did holes to plant without raising debris (the gravel was cleaner, not clean). My budget wasn't that large, so I didn't buy a lot of new plants, but I was hoping what I had (and what I bought) might spread out as things progressed. Then it came time to fill it. I usually use a plate in the bottom of the aquarium to break the stream of water, so as not to disturb the sediment too much, but lacking enough open space for a plate, I used a small bowl. It worked great. While a plate dissipates the energy of the water stream, the water still flows out over the sides with some force. Using a small bowl prevented this.

Now - the problems. Leaving a large piece of driftwood out in the sun for three weeks is a bad idea. As I finished filling the tank, it started to float. I ended up lowering the water level a little so that it wasn't buoyant enough to leave the ground. After almost a week I slowly topped off the tank, and things looked fine. Until today when I had to reattach some plants that had floated up and bumped into the driftwood. To my surprise, I noticed that although the wood is resting on the bottom of the tank, it's still fairly buoyant. Hopefully it will be completely waterlogged in a short while.

Holiday happenings

Updates after being away over the holidays. The good news is that I don't see any worms hanging out of my fish. It would appear that the fenbendazole worked. I need to re-treat the tank soon (it's recommended that you re-treat after two weeks) to kill any larvae that have re-infected the fish. Still, it looks good.

On the other hand, I lost a lot of fish. I came home last night to a house that stank of rotting fish. In the main tank, I lost both angels, my fighter, and all of my neons. I lost at least one Macropodus, probably more. I haven't determined what happened to the corys and the kuhli loaches - I saw one kuhli loach, all three of the panda corys, and several of the others. I see one Otocinclus, but I'm not sure about the second one. The water was horrible when I got home - I'm impressed that any fish survived such polluted water.

In the plant tank, I see a lot of shrimp, two Otocinclus and a few of the pygmy corys. I haven't seen many pygmy corys,; I'm hopeful, but concerned. The tank had very heavy algal growth - probably a consequence of having the lights on 24 hours a day for almost two weeks.

I haven't taken a good look at the Macropodus tank. There are at least a dozen fish in there, but it's very messy and overgrown. I haven't yet tried to tackle that one.

Experimenting with Excel

I bought a bottle of Seachem's Flourish Excel - apparently it's basically glutaraldehyde, which serves as a source of bioavailable carbon for aquatic plants (but not algae). It's also supposed to function as an algaecide, especially at higher concentrations, although it isn't actually marketed as such (see Seachem's FAQ; there's also a lot of talk about this on discussion fora).

While I'm terribly curious about the mechanism of action of glutaraldehyde (or whatever it may break down into), I'm mostly curious about whether the plants in my main tank are CO₂ limited. My light levels are well below what's recommended, but when people talk about planted tanks, they talk about light and carbon dioxide. Given my current light levels, would my plants be able to utilise additional carbon? I hope to find out.

New tank

After getting home from Michigan I launched into the big clean up - two major water changes in the main tank, addition of some rocks, and the addition of a lot of new plants. I also changed one of the bulbs in the "breeding" tank to a compact fluorescent bulb, since the original bulb had blown.

When I went to Petsmart to look at plants I realised that they had fairly cheap 10 gallon tanks (sans heater, pump, lights, or lid). Since I was already thinking about setting up something to try to revive all the uprooted plants in the main tank (that had taken to a floating existence), it seemed like a really good idea. So I bought a 10 gallon tank.

Since I was only planning to use the tank for plants, I figured I could use a soil base. Unfortunately, without thinking too much I used potting soil. Bad idea. It turned out that potting soil is (a) not soil (it's wood chips and compost), and (b) it floats. So that didn't work too well. I later read that if you use soil, you need to add about an inch of gravel above it (and, I suppose, make sure the gravel layer isn't disturbed when you add the water). Anyway, I ended up getting some aquatic plant "soil" from Home Depot - it's porous, fired clay. Hopefully it will do the job of a rooting medium.

Once I established the tank I realised that it needed a nitrogen source (fish waste) so I eventually added a few "baby" Macropodus. Since they are air breathers, I figure the lack of circulation shouldn't bother them. Now I just have to ensure adequate light and CO₂ - not the easiest tasks in the world.