I HATE CLEANING AQUARIUMS I like setting up fish tanks that clean themselves with things like snails, shrimp, and by growing plants that eat the "fruits of the fish" but what if I could set up a tank where the fish also eat the fruits of the plants? "small fish tank, no fish, free" this is the kind of listing I love to see. "small fish tank, free to a good home: no light, no stand, no time wasters" anyway I picked it up and this is what it looks like now it had all this stuff at the back for filtration, but I decided I'd prefer the extra space in a tank this small You can see I ripped it all out, but I did decide to keep the glass lid because I thought it was quite nice.
and since I was ripping out all the filter gear, I thought I'd be fitting to turn into a tank with no mechanical filter at all. so after I'd spent time cleaning it all up, I decided to get it dirty again. I chucked some garden soil in a sieve and shook it around just to get rid of the stones and twigs.
. . .
. . 'cause all you really need for a filterless tank is a layer of dirt and a layer of something to keep the dirt down.
I went with just under an inch of dirt, and I poured-in some water as well to get rid of the air pockets. and of course I caught in some sand about two inches is right for a tank this size. I dropped in a piece of driftwood and tried-out a few different orientations.
this one looked like it was growing out of the ground, and I like the way the bigger branches divided up the tank diagonally though one of the smaller branches reached a bit too far into the foreground so snapped it off. then I used the rock to anchor the whole thing down, and I glued the branch back on so it looked like it was growing over the rock. because if I didn't glue the wood down, it'd just float when I filled the tank with water.
now I approached another guy online and I bought some plant trimmings from him for a tenner. but I don't know what they are, so I'm just going to plant them and see what happens. though I did get two plants full price from a shop because I really want the tank to look like a jungle when it's grown-in so I took the old lid from before, and I got some clips to attach it.
but it didn't cover the whole top of the tank so I got a piece of acrylic and I made the other half on my own. I measured one of the pots that the plants came in, and I drilled some holes in the lid to match. Then I drilled some holes in the bottom of the plastic pots so I could take some plants and suspend them above the water.
Taking terrestrial plants like these strawberries and growing them in water is a really good way of keeping the water clean, 'cause they grow quicker when they have access to the carbon in the air. But if you put the stems directly in the water they'd rot very quickly. So I used these clay balls just to suspend them above the water line.
I added the heater because the tank is going to have tropical fish in it. and a desk lamp for some extra light. Now I'm just going to drop in two snails and watch how everything develops.
It's been about a month since I setup the tank, and the snails have just been licking the glass for 30 days; living their best life. Everything is still very, very ugly. but the plants are growing-in so they must be happy.
There's a cloudy white algae or fungus covering the bottom two inches of water. . .
. and there are all kinds of little creatures crawling all over the glass and probably everywhere else as well, but these are just signs of the tank trying to balance itself. There are millions of them just eating the dead plants and cleaning up the waste from the fish and shrimp.
Just to speed up the process a little bit, I did a water-change, and I don't think this lamp is really bright enough to grow this many plants, so I'm moving everything to the other side of the room where I can get a lot more sunlight. I'm also adding five cherry shrimp because I just. .
like cherry shrimp. Why would you not add cherry shrimp? Just like the snails licking the glass, the shrimp are probably just going to lick the sand all day.
I also took some dwarf hair grass from another tank and added it to the foreground. You can see how big a difference the sunlight makes when it hits the tank. The strawberries are beginning to flower so I'm going to leave everything alone again and come back in a few weeks.
There's a lot of new growth from the strawberry plant, probably because the leaves are literally touching the lamp. and I got my first little white flower ready to pollinate. but there aren't any bees in my room to do this for me so I'm gonna have to pollinate manually by brushing the stamens onto the pistils.
and inside the tank there's life everywhere you look. You can see the roots of the strawberry plant growing through into the canopy, and some daphnia dancing in the sunlight. I didn't think it had been long enough for the shrimp to have had babies, but I did not put this guy in the tank so I guess.
. he must have another 20 brothers and sisters hiding somewhere. I also didn't intentionally put daphnia in the tank, but they're everywhere - I've never seen this many daphnia, but they will make a nice welcome meal for whatever fish I decided to put in the tank.
I actually don't know if it'd be bad to let one fish eat 10,000 daphnia in one sitting so I'm gonna 'alien abduct' a bunch of them and feed them to my other tanks. This is the lucky guy that's going to take care of the rest of 'em. I adopted him from someone who couldn't take care of him anymore and you can see he's got some damage on his scales here.
Anyway. . he spent his first half an hour just swimming around the tank, exploring.
. and took some time to meet his new friends as well. After he'd settled down he figured out one of the bottom corners of the tank was filled with baby daphnia, and I suppose it's the fish equivalent of taking a bath in a tub full of money.
I was planning on waiting longer before adding more fish to the tank, but I thought: "Why let the honey gourami have all the fun? " so I released 10 chili rasboras. I was really never interested in this species of fish, but since the shrimp spent most of their time hiding under the grass, I thought the tank could do with a little bit more red.
. . .
. . and they've since grown on me.
The stem plants had gone completely out of control. Actually they formed a ceiling that was blocking out most of the light, so I'm gonna cut them all back but first it's feeding time It didn't take long for the plants to grow like crazy because once they get rooted in the soil they have all the food they need. In fact they grow even more quickly when they reach the surface, because then they can get carbon dioxide from the air.
But they're also getting food in the form of fish waste, so when I add things like these blood worms, they get picked out by the fish on the way down, and if any reach the bottom they get taken care of by the shrimp. Now all this fish waste gets trapped by the plants as they use it for food, so when I trim the plants I'm permanently removing all that waste from the system. Oh!
by the way, there's a second strawberry flower. so that's one for the snails and one for the fish. Eat the strawberry.
. yep, yep! Eat the strawberry.
. it's just like a little worm. just like a worm!
Eat the strawberry, come on! [sigh] the fish were not interested in the strawberry, so I ate the other one myself. mmm!
Fish poo fruit The tank was mature, and without a filter it supported life in many shapes and sizes. The snails were laying eggs, the shrimp had given birth, and the gourami's wounds had fully healed-over. I give the tank food and the tank gives me food.
For the price of some dirt and a couple of strawberry plants, I'd say that's a pretty good deal.
