Diego

Just received a shipment of plants from the coop. I have to be honest I am a bit disappointed. I found a Barbronia Weberi leech in one of the plant. I am debating now about using the plants or not. I have one tank infested by these leeches. I thought they were coming from my LFS, but it seem the coop being the source instead. I tried to get rid of those leeches but there is no easy way once they are in your planted aquarium, expecially if you have an active substrate (rich of organic matter). Unless you have a predator fish like a gourami or bigger, they are going to multiplicate and compete against snails and shrimps for food. I tried most of the chemicals you use to dip-clean plants. I restarted the tank, got rid of substrate, bleached the tank and decor, dip plants in bleach solution. No luck. One must have survived and repopulated the tank. Eggs are even stronger than the animals, so a visual inspection of the plants is not enough. Dewormers are not effective, salt is effective but only at concentrations which will kill your plant first. Are they dangerous? Well certainly they are an invasive specie. I believe they are mainly detritivores, but they can be quite aggressive for food. I had to create raised areas where I place food for my shrimps. Shrimps have no chance in getting food once the food is down on the substrate. Snails are just hopeless against those fast moving leeches. I tried using traps to catch them but you will never get them all. Lastly, they are extremely unplesant to look at and not at all shy.

Yeah, I am tired of collecting high range ph bottle, too. Wouldn't be nice if those bottle were in volume proportional to the number of drops used? I keep running out of nitrate and ammonia tests while accumulating most of the others. 🙂

I fail to see the logic in this. You don't want ending up with a depleted substrate, so you start with one already depleted and work around it. May I ask what was wrong with your dirted tank?

More important than nitrates, keep an eye on the formation of hydrogen sulfide in the thickest part of the substrate exspecially if the plant density is not very high. H2S is toxic to animals and smells really bad. Before each water change, poke the substrate to have a controlled release of the gas and to oxygenate the substrate.

The filter question is the most debated. In an established Walstad tank you don't need a filter but you need water movement for large tanks (>20Gal). An established tank is a tank where your plants are happy and act as a filter. If you buy some plants and put them in the tank, it takes some time for them to catchup (initial die-off). A biological filter might help that transition by keeping the tank cycled. I usually run sponge filters at a low air flow even after my plants are fully functional: the bubbles break the bio film on the surface and they are gentle enough not to gas too much CO2 out. I usually place a sponge filter near the water heater to improve the heat exchange. On a different thread we discussed about nitrite spikes due to over-filtering. Plants and filters compete with each others as they both consume ammonia, but while plants convert ammonia to plant matter, filters convert that to nitrite and then to nitrate. Plants like nitrate too but less than ammonia. So basically the more ammonia you take away from the plants via filtering the more nitrate you end up with.

As for normal dirt in your garden, different chemestries will develop at different depth. Stirring up the dirt should not be done as it disrupts this equilibrium, release different chemicals now reacting with the oxigen and some low oxigen bacteria start to die. This same principle applies to deep sand beds. The soil in the tank is not just a mechanical substrate as you would consider your gravel where bacteria stick to it, holds your plant down and release nutriments like ADA soil. The two initial months setting up your Walstad tank are mainly needed to "cycle" your soil, to establish the right chemestry in it so it can sustain a thriving ecosystem. As soon you submerge it, lots die and new bacteria start growing, detritus worms colonize it and many other critters will depend on it. Plants will exchange chemicals through the roots adding oxigen to the soil so that even on different locations the soil will have different chemistry. For example sulfur bubbles will form in areas with no plants as there are no roots to provide oxigen (one more reason to plant heavily).

Some cute trespassers.

My provocative and biased two cents on Walstad tanks. I run only Walstad tanks (6 currently), I have started with Walstad tanks as beginner and never got into other methods. I found they are hard work for the first two months and harder the smaller the tank. After the initial period they are cheap to run and to mantain and that is a big why! I know my plants have all the nutriments they need and they can filter the water without relying heavily on water changes. I don't gravel vacuum as the accumulation of mulm is the way to keep your soil rich after the 1-2 years mark. The drawback is that once you set them up, there is very little you can change, a kind of set-and-forget aquarium. It will run for months with only the chore of triming plants and feed the inhabitants. This is a two-fold drawback: 1) you cannot move plants, 2) you stop working on the tank ... and we know we like to be busy. So actually the two months of hard work is the most rewarding part of the process and then ... you need a new tank. My main reason to go Walstad is to have a system as self sufficient as I can, which gives the most healthy and natural environment to my shrimps/fish/snails/plants. The idea of having just gravel and being forced to bury root tabs, dose fertilizer, and vacuum dirt out is upsetting, not for the cost but for the artificiality of the process. Let me this analogy, any non-Walstad tank is like brown sugar: you extract raw sugar, you separate the molasses from the sugar, you refine the sugar into white sugar and you add back the molasses. You get what you started from, just more palatable but in the process you had to create a sugar refinement plant with the obvius impact on environment. Pointless? Let me last confess that I am also in indoor hydroponics, maybe the top of artificiality: I use LEDs instead of the sun, rockwhool and feritlizers instead of dirt and ... I do like brown sugar!

Well done Daniel, Bill and Mick!!! All your posts are very informative and inspiring.

Very interesting! Does the shell of the misterious snail coil anti-clockwise? Even more rare!

It looks like a pond/bladder snail, not a terrestrial snail. It is not uncommon to see those snails above the water surface feeding on alge or dead plants. Many snails have "dry" periods (like nerite snails) when they hang outside water for long periods. Usually there is moisture involved or they keep water trapped inside their shell.

Sorry about thinking ths in a negative way, but is this ethical? Would you do the same with any other aspect of life in 1930? Medicine? Health care? Child care? Am I correct in assuming that aquariums in 1930 were a worse place for fish/plants than they are today?

+1 on aquarium note app.

I have two small sponge filters on each side of my 20 long for creating some water flow (very minimal) and breaking up the bio-film on the surface. I experimented with a power-head and HOB but found I had to clean them (the sponge on the intake) more often than the sponge filter. Order based on flow: 1) power head, 2) HOB, 3) sponge. Order based on maintenance: 1) sponge, 2) HOB, 3) power head So HOB might be the good compromise if you need to see some plant movement and don't want to clean the intake sponge every week. For low maintenace tank, nothing beats the sponge filter.

+1 Also changing from a bright ligth to a less bright one (stingray) worked for me.

Green Velcro here 🙂 plus some basil.

Potting soil will settle, You are going to have floating debries if you are not sieving the soil, but this is not an auqarium and you don't care how presentable it is. Just use a net to remove the floating stuff if it covers too much the surface. Just wet the soil slowly and add water very slowly and you should be fine. You can cap it too: sand, crush coral, gravel, anything you have but not too much. Yes you'll need weights for some plants. But really I am making it too complicated now. If you have an empty shallow plastic tub you don't even need soil. Add weights to the plants, dose easy green and give them lights.

Plants are the best filter 🙂 Circulation is only necessary if you dose fertilizer, Having dirt in the tank will make the water so rich in nutriments that you'll have plenty. Remember this is not good if you have animals inside but plants should be good. Filtering and water movemnt usually brings oxigen and gas CO2. For plants you want the opposite as they produce oxigen and are short in CO2. Shallow water will increase the CO2 concentration and the dissolved carbon from the soil will add on that.

I love my java moss and my shrimps seem to like it too. I never throw it away and having several jars full only of java moss and shrimps. The best part is when the jar is so full of moss that it start growing emersed: those moss spikes popping out of the surface. Very beautiful.

As MattyIce said, a shallow plastic tub with soil in it and grow lights. You don't even need a substrate cap or a filter. The soil in the water will eventually settle if you not keep stiring the water. Keep the plants close to the surface and you'll get plenty of growth. Maybe a transparent lid to reduce evaporation but allow airflow.

In a dirted tank I doubt you have lack of nutrients. Maybe some enviromental factor? Does your temperature swing a lot? Is that plant very close to the light? How long ago was the tank established? Was the soil organic?

I have the opposite effect: my java moss grows no matter where I put it. I have literally a vase used for tall flowers filled just with java moss and dechlorinated tap water. Ocassionally I squirt easy green in and it is under a CFL lamp. It thrives. I think it is the water! Mine is fairly hard (GH) but low in KH. Ph 7.5. No copper at all. On the other hand my java fern barely survives no matter in which tank.

Moved to a house with no garden, started watching Foo the Flowerhorn videos on YouTube, read the ecology of the planted aquarium and got hooked on growing plants underwater. Started with shrimps and snails to help with alge and eventually moved to fish.

Between pond snails and malaysian trumpet snails, I vote for MTS as they are the livebearer of the snails. Pond snails make that ugly gelatinous sack of eggs which covers plants and glass.

An AI algorithm monitoring my tank via a video camera, classifing all species (animal and plants) and monitor them in time for changes. The AI will warn me of changes in color, pattern, size, behavior so I can early detect problems. It does not need to be very complicated, similar to what we have today on phones for face unlock combine with Google Lens. This could be an app on your phone but better if in a dedicated device attached to the tank or inside Daniel's submarine (which I like that too!).