Fish Master!

I am the fish master. Behold, my Eclipse System 6 mini-aquarium!

See all that green stuff? Those are real live plants. I have one large Java Fern that is taking up almost all the tank, and another smaller plant I forgot the name of. This is fairly amazing to me, because the light situation in the tank is pretty crappy. The Eclipse system is pretty neat - the filter is in the hood of the tank so nothing hangs off the back. But the light situation sucks ass. I only have a measly 8 watt fluorescent light over 6 gallons of water. That is almost nothing.

So I did the best I could. I selected plants with low light requirements. And they seem to be doing very well! Those plants were placed in the tank at least 10 months ago.

When I set the tank up, I decided to experiment a little. My last freshwater tank was a 55 gallon tank with only 40 watts of light (less light per gallon than the little tank has). With limited resources (being in high school and stuff) I could never really do what I wanted.

The gravel in the little tank is special. It is called "SeaChem Flourite Red". What makes it so special is that it is fractured clay. It is loaded with all kinds of good stuff plant root systems need. It is not treated with any sort of additional chemicals, and is Ph neutral. If you use it, you do not really have to add anything else to the substrate for live plants to be happy. But the stuff is not cheap. A 7 kilogram bag (a little over 15 pounds) costs around $16 - $20 (depending on the store) and can be hard to find. One bag is enough for roughly a 10 gallon tank. So as you can see, for a 55 gallon tank I would need 6 or 7 bags - which would be costly.

But buying one bag for a little tank is not so bad. One word of caution - if you use this stuff it MUST be rinsed very well. It will take a while to do this. The stuff is silty as hell. It is clay after all - so in packaging and shipping a lot of fine dust is created. But once you flush the stuff well with running water you do not have a problem with it.

I do use ONE other additive for the plants. This stuff called "SeaChem Excel". It is supposed to be a liquid carbon supplement. See, plants need carbon dioxide. But adding a carbon dioxide device to such a small tank is a major pain in the ass. Plus, this thing was in my little office at work. I could not have all this equipment in there. It had to be a simple setup. It is easy to keep a bottle of mystery liquid locked up in my desk - it is not so easy to try to hide a CO2 tank under the desk. I do not know if the Excel stuff works like it says it does - but the plants are not dead! NOTE - for a few months no Excel was added to the tank as I was not there to do it. I would just show up from time to time to add more water.

Other than that - the only thing the plants got was the nitrate from the natural breakdown of organic material and fish waste.

WOW that was long! Anyway, this is the quick and short story of the plants. Flourite gravel, liquid Excel additive, and nitrate levels in the 20 - 40 ppm range. When I moved the tank home Friday I did not test the water, but the nitrate levels were probably a LOT higher. No water changed had been done for a long time. There was a lot of algae, a sign of high nitrate levels.

Now back to the photo! See that pink fish? On the left side of the tank? That is my sole surviving "Glo Zebra" fish. I had three of them at one point. The Glo Zebra fish are genetically modified with jellyfish DNA to make them that color. Normal zebras are white with black stripes. Or is it black with white stripes? Who knows. But they are NOT pink with yellow stripes. Under UV light the Glo Zebras are green! Freaky huh? They were invented in a lab in Taiwan, and may be used to test water quality at some point. The lab makes them unable to reproduce so there is no danger of them getting loose in the wild. Plus - they are bright pink! In a natural setting they would quickly get eaten, as it would be hard to hide. There is a reason nature did not make fish that color.

Friday there were only two fish. The Glo Zebra and one neon tetra. So I bought more, to make the tank look more like it did when I first set it up!

These are my neons. I have 6 of them. They are native to Peru and like neutral to slightly acidic water. I keep my little tank at a pH of 7.0 - neutral.

I also got some glass shrimp. These freshwater critters stay very small and are good scavengers. They will eat algae and other stuff they find. They will not get large enough to be a problem to the fish, and the fish will not get large enough to eat them.

I also got a "peppered catfish". This is what it looks like. Upon release in the tank it vanished in the plant forest, so this is a photo I found on the net. So is the shrimp photo. And the next photo.

This is a "pleco" catfish. They are also called "suckermouth catfish". They eat algae.

So there you have it. All the inhabitants of my little 6 gallon mini world. At this point the tank is probably slightly over stocked - but the bio wheel can handle the load. The plants will help soak up some of that nitrate. And of course, water changes will be required every now and then.

By the way, because the tank is so small I can use bottled distilled water. The great thing about this stuff is that it is just water. NOTHING else is in it. If you do a test, everything is zero except for pH which reads acidic. This means I can make it anything I want! Water in South Florida is hard as a rock so having a neutral, soft water aquarium is a royal pain in the ass to pull off. By going deionized I solve all those problems. I buffer the water for a neutral pH (which also makes the water slightly on the "soft" side) and dump it in! With a small tank, this does not cost too much.

I would very much like to set up a 90 gallon freshwater planted tank at home. I could do a lot with that size tank. But it will not be cheap! The lights alone would run into $500 or more. Then add the 9 bags (at least) of Flourite, the 90 gallons of reverse osmosis filtered water from the fish store (lugged home 20 gallons at a time in clean plastic gas cans that have never been used for gas), and all the other stuff and it works out to a lot.