Dark River Aquatics

@Patrick_Gthank you! I really appreciate that 🙂 @eatyourpeas I see what you did there 😂

Of course! It’s a banana stem from Tannin Aquatics https://tanninaquatics.com/collections/stems-and-bark/products/banana-stem-pieces They’re nifty, but pretty soft once boiled and don’t last very long - IME they’re great for making biofilm for shrimps because they decompose so quickly, and because they’re so squishy I typically don’t add many at a time but they look neat!

Pretty sure they like it here 🙌🏻 Been totally, completely, frustratingly unable to catch the pair of Apisto Trifasciata out of my 75g so I went rogue and got a pair (I think) of Apisto Erythrura Rio Mamore. They’re still small and very washed out in color, one is yellowing up and looks like a very likely female, and the other is grey and is hopefully a male. We will see! They’re very timid and camera shy but they’re eating well and the female has discovered the Coop Apisto Cave hidden behind the rocks.

Redid my 15g tank that used to house the Tefé babies into a new home for these Kribs! This is an old picture of the tank, I ended up taking a bunch of the plants out to use in other setups and the light was a bit strong anyway and the tank has had some hair algae issues for a while, so I tore it down about halfway and redid it. Most of the plants came out, did multiple heavy gravel vac’s of the substrate and siphoned out the top inch or so of substrate along the front, and added some Safe-T-Sorb & root tabs plus fine gold sand as a cap layer. The foreground carpet of dwarf sag, marsilea crenata, and Monte Carlo was pretty thick so I left it and sprinkled sand over the top, but all the other plants plus a few rocks came out and a stumpy piece of wood from another tank went in. Added plants pulled/trimmed from other tanks including various crypts, some buce, Hygrophila Polysperma “sunset” that’s mostly reverted back to green from being in a high tech tank, some salvinia minima, an echinodorus miracle, and then re-added some of the plants from the previous layout like echinodorus parviflorous, more dwarf sag, and a few others. Also boiled up some botanicals and added a coconut hut, and swapped out the filter from a little Sunsun brand hang on mini canister (which was awful and air-locked itself constantly) to a Finnex PX-360. Love these little canisters, although it didn’t fit between the tank and wall so it’s sort of resting on the rim of the tank. The stumpy wood got turned into a sort of planter, cut up some scraps of filter foam to support a couple of parlour palms, philodendron micans, and a small propagation of cebu blue plus some pinches of emersed Java moss, emersed susswasstertang, and a small cutting on Monte Carlo - hopefully these will grow in enough over time to cover up the moss and look natural. I’ll probably add more moss at some point soon out of impatience, and ended up raising the light up higher to accommodate the emergent plants and also (hopefully) help prevent the hair algae from coming back Overall I don’t think it came out half bad for a project only utilizing things already on hand, I did buy another bag of sand but other than that there was no money invested - just reusing things from storage or from other tanks. The tank has been sitting for a couple of days and has gotten a couple of small water changes, but there was enough seasoned material that went into the redo (filter media, reusing the existing substrate + hardscape, plants, etc) that there hasn’t been any ammonia spike registering on water tests so I added the Kribs last night after the lights went off. I just added a few more plants before making this post so they’re hiding behind the piece of wood and aren’t feeling photogenic, but they seem to be doing ok.

Ahh that makes sense!

Thank you! What does ORD mean? I’m not familiar with the term and Google wasn’t helpful with it, sorry!

Several weeks ago I got a stem of Staurogyne Bihar from a friend, and it’s been partially hidden in the back of the tank putting on significant growth - it differs from the other species of Staurogyne I’ve had in that it’s huge and it’s totally a background plant unlike smaller species such as Stauro Repens or Stauro Purple. Now that it’s reached the surface of my 75g the leaves have started developing lobes near the base and some slight serration closer to the leaf tip, and it’s super cool looking For another top shot type picture of a funky plant, this is a hybrid Ludwigia Glandulosa crossed with L Repens - it’s become a monster and since this pic was taken a week ago I’ve had to trim it twice. The leaves have a growth pattern similar to Repens, but have the massive size & darker, richer coloring of Glandulosa. Really enjoying it even though it’s almost too big for the tank & scape

Super duper happy with the Moliwes, they’re coloring up very well after the first 24hr, and the female is dancing up a storm! Hoping to get them to spawn out in this tank while I build them a slightly bigger home, then use this tank to raise the babies and move the pair over to their forever tank down the road 😄

Not a great picture but got a pair of Kribensis Moliwe today and I’m pretty excited! Also got a big male L183 Starlight Ancistrus, they’re all in one of my otherwise empty apisto breeding 10g’s until I can set up something betterer, but today was a good day for fish stuff! And feeling pretty good about this little 14g, added some black neons from another tank the other day and will be adding the pair of Apisto Trifasciata soon

Totally forget what this species is, but some nights I notice things that haven’t been focused on in a while and this little one is looking super cool & blue & stuff down in it’s shaded little corner of the tank just doin buce things

Thank you so much! I’m terrified to calculate the total cost 😂 so far I’ve spent far less than retail value by trading, selling plants & fish from other tanks to finance the expenses, having a lot of good friends who are generous with their plant cuttings, etc…. But it’s still scary to think about the total cost! Loving this tank a whole lot though, and for the past couple of months I’ve been selling the cuttings from it (plus fish bred in other tanks) and almost completely financed my newest build so that took some of the sting out of it!

Cryptocoryne Striolata red arrived today 🙌🏻

Made a new water box for a pair of F1 Apisto Trifasciata Rio Guapore originally bred from a wild pair I have in another tank. This was also a super fun and rewarding project because it was about 90% funded by the proceeds from selling plants and fish, and marks the first time I’ve exercised some budgetary restraint 😂 The tank is running an unpowered plenum made from an under gravel filter plate plus plastic light diffuser and knitting mesh all lashed together with zip ties. The substrate should stay lightly aerated and anoxic that way (I hope) plus the powered plenum is obnoxious in my 75g and scaping around a lift tube in such a small tank seemed too annoying to bother with. The substrate is Safe-T-Sorb enriched with laterite powder, a very small amount of worm castings, and in some places a mixture of aragonite/garden lime/diatomaceous earth to keep it alkaline for Rotala Ramosior Florida - and all of it is capped with Landen Soil plus black diamond blasting sand in the front. The scape is mainly elephant skin stone, with a few small pieces of lace rock and seiryu that mostly matched the main rocks. In addition to the substrate & hardscape materials, the hardware/equipment list is: -Aqueon 14g rimless cube tank with painted black background -Chihiros WRBG2 30cm light with added metal light shades -Finnex px-360 canister filter with coarse sponge and Purigen -Atomic inline co2 diffuser -GLA brand regulator with a 5lb tank -Woliver 25w heater from Amazon -Jardli external co2 drop checker -Aquarium Coop apisto cave hidden by the rocks The plant list so far is almost entirely stuff grown in my other tanks: -Rotala H’ra -Rotala mini butterfly -Rotala blood red original -Rotala orange juice -Rotala ramosior Florida -Bacopa Salzmanii purple SG -Hygrophila sp “creeping” -Blyxa Japonica -Anubias nana petite -Anubias congensis mini -Eleocharis mini -Cryptocoryne wendtii green gecko -Cryptocoryne Lucens -Marsilea minuta -Marsilea crenata -Micranthemum Monte Carlo -Echinodorus Opacus sp Rataj -Bucephalandra Kedagang mini I realized after setup that the tank was half resting on the 2x4’s used as the stand frame, with the back corner resting only on the 1/4” plywood cosmetic top of the stand and it freaked me out so I ended up adding a 3/4” plywood sheet under the tank which extends outwards to create a shelf. As of today it’s painted up to match the stand with a beefy cast iron decorative bracket to help support the shelf. So far the tank is eleven days old, and I’m still doing a 50% water change every morning and dosing 1ml of Easy Green after each change. The light is on a 6hr photocycle and is turned down to about 50% red, 40% green, 50% blue with the co2 blasting. It doesn’t have fish yet so the co2 is excessive, and will be reduced gradually when we get closer to adding the fish plus the light will get ramped up gradually as it matures. The foreground will probably get filled out with more plants soon too because I get impatient waiting for things to grow in naturally 😜 The only plants not doing particularly well so far are the Monte Carlo - it’s melting like crazy - and the Echinodorus Rataj has some bba that it came with, but so far everything else is doing well enough. The Blyxa is getting very red and doesn’t seem to love the transition from the established 75g into this tank but I think it’ll live All in all it’s going as well as could be expected with a faint hint of brown diatoms and I’m excited to add the apisto pair when it’s ready for them 😄

Glued some funky buces to lava rocks (Biblis pink, and white marble), planted a yuge Aponogeton Crispus Purple and rearranged a few plants in that tank, misted the emersed bins, and did another daily WC on my newest little cube 😄

@Beardedbillygoat1975 I looked into the difference between Rios & Wabens a while back, and didn’t find a ton of information but was told that the main difference seems to be the size & consistency of the patterning, and that the honeycomb spots on the Rios are slightly smaller than on Wabens. Not sure if they’re actually different species and both are still just considered “Ancistrus sp” based on what I found when I looked into it. Both are super cool though! A local guy up here breeds Wabens and I’m looking to get some from him when I have tank space available for a new strain, they’ve been on the bucket list for a while now 😄

@Beardedbillygoat1975 sorry I just realized I forgot to address your question about the differences between the 75g and the 40g - the 75 has a lot of plant mass with co2 injection & much higher light resulting in way higher nutrient demands, with far fewer fish and much lighter feeding. The 40g is fairly low light (one 60w, 5000k LED bulb in a cheap fixture over the center of the tank), no co2, far fewer plants, and wayyy more livestock with a much heavier amount of food going into the tank. I do dose micros & K periodically but it also has virtually no nutrient dosing compared to the 75g which has an automated daily dose of both micros & macros on top of other manual dosing. So I think the two tanks are fundamentally pretty different with different overall intentions, one is a simple breeding tank and the other is designed to grow my nerdy plant collection. The plenum in the 40 is awesome because it consumes a bunch of the waste chemicals produced by the tank and requires less maintenance because of it, whereas the plenum in the 75 is actually competing with the plants for ammonia, nitrate, phosphate, etc. It’s not outright detrimental in the 75 but it was a steep learning curve trying to maintain the nutrient levels because of the plenum & anoxic zone and the tank has bottomed out on both N & P more than once 😜

The greens are fun! No different from any other commonly available line bred strains that I’ve tried, I’ve heard that snow whites can be tough but I’ve found all the variants I’ve tried have been super easy to keep and breed prolifically - currently I have short & long fin green dragons, short & long fin calicos, short fin super reds, short & long fin commons, long fin albino, and Rio Paraguays. My water is pretty hard but even the Rios breed like mad, I’ve found the key to be planted tanks with lots of wood & cover, terra cotta plant watering spikes as caves, and TONS of food. I feed the absolute heck out of my BN’s with canned green beans, zucchini, and Repashy as their staples plus a wide array of other supplemental veggies, and the tanks with babies always have zucchini in them 24/7 with a mixture of other food added daily. Food food food and you will have babies IME, then feed the heck out of the babies and they’ll grow like weeds 😊 Here’s a bit of a photo dump

Trifasciata are amazing! I have a pair of Guapore F1’s kicking around that I held onto from a breeding a wild pair, they may go into this cube when it’s built 😄 So the little 5g with Father Fish’s dirt mix has had crazy amounts of hair algae, I think I used too much dirt and that the setup really required more water changes early on to stabilize (which I didn’t do) so the jury is still out on that, but error on my part is a strong possibility For the plenums I think I really like them but it’s been a learning curve - in the 75g especially. The tank does consume a lot of nitrate & phosphate, although I’m not sure how much is the plenum and how much is the plants. This is a breakdown of input/measurements so far: I dose around 20-21ppm N and 6.5ish ppm P weekly, and the tank consumes a lot of it. It currently hovers at <5ppm no3 and ~1ppm po4 on the API test kits the morning prior to every water change This is a breakdown of the mix I use daily via an auto-doser, although I’m now at 30ml (doubled) daily I also add one normal 1ml per 10g dose of Easy Green after every water change, and have a separate bottle of a DIY mix that adds nothing but 1ppm kno3 and 0.2ppm kh2po4 per dose, which goes in roughly 2-4 times per week. It’s still a pretty lean input compared to other approaches and I ran into some green spot algae early on likely from lack of P, but it seems to be balancing now I have noticed that the majority of the fish waste gets trapped by the substrate even with two canisters running, which is a little bit of a pain but I haven’t run into any real issues from that yet but might in the future - I don’t gravel vac, but do skim the surface of the substrate with a hose + turkey baster to remove crud during the water changes. The 40g has had very positive results with its plenum - it has a breeding colony of green dragon bristlenoses with a bunch of babies, cherry shrimp, and some endlers and gets fed very heavily for the BNs, and it’s never gone above 10ppm nitrate on the API test. It has a lighter plant load, no co2 (for now, although it might soon), low light, and very seldom gets nutrients added - it does get some micros & a dose of K on an irregular basis, usually just after a water change. That tank gets a light 30-40% water change roughly every 4-5 weeks A curious thing with the 40g is that I intentionally added BBA, green beard algae, cladophora, and some hair algae on pieces of wood & rock and they’ve receded pretty much completely. The clado & green beard especially were absolutely covering a few small pieces of wood that went in. There’s still a hint of BBA now but everything else has slowly died back and vanished over the past few months, and the plants are doing very well - there are a lot of crypts, vals, hygro poly, anubias, Java fern, and some others and they’re all growing well and they’re algae free. So that particular tank somehow wiped out all those algaes (and the BBA left is minimal, and only on a single rock) yet the small handful of plants are doing quite well. All things considered, as of right now I’d say the plenum systems do what they’re claimed to do and my next tank will have one 😄 Here are some pics from above of the 75g just for show & tell!

@Furry_Pleco777I hope you heal up well, that doesn’t sound fun ☹️ I’d be curious to see your longterm results with xyris, in my case it’s one of a long list of species in that tank just as part of my collectoritis so I’m not putting any special effort into it but so far it’s been doing very well and does seem relatively “easy” in a high tech setup. If I end up with babies I’m curious to try it in a higher light, non-co2 injected tank and see how it does in that scenario

Thank you!! I haven’t been focused on breeding any of the apistos as much recently, the F1 Tefé babies that I kept are doing really well but I haven’t put any effort into breeding them out into F2 yet. The best looking male went into my planted 75g just for kicks, here are a few pics of him 😄 His parents are still alive and well and spawn clockwork, but I haven’t intentionally pulled/raised any of the clutches and the female always ends up eating the eggs if I leave them

Haven’t updated on any tanks in a while but things are going well 😄 75g ended up being way crazier than intended, and starting a new 14g cube on top of it soon

@Furry_Pleco777reach out to Chantz Cramer, he’s who I went collecting with and he knows wayyy more than I do - I’m just a nerd who was happy to be along for the ride when we found these. This is anecdotal, but I was told that the area where we found the xyris (they were in sandy boggy substrate, and also growing in patches) does flood periodically and they end up submersed either partially or fully. Experientially, for whatever this is worth: I’m still keeping two tiny xyris that we collecting as well as a larger, hobbyist farmed specimen in a 75g tank with fairly bright lighting, but the big xyris arrived fairly green and is in a somewhat shaded area in the tank surrounded by crypts, and it’s slowly getting more red and growing new leaves despite not being in a super bright area. I wouldn’t call it a “low light” tank as I run a chihiros WRGB2 and a Finnex 24/7, but it’s not crazy high par either. The chihiros is on a 6hr photocycle, with 30min ramp up time and then a slight increase during the photoperiod. The Finnex is against the very back of the tank and only turns on for 30min at the middle of the Chihiros cycle (Finnex is set to max strength) just to give my stems a “high noon” blast of light, but where the xyris is located it’s shaded from the Finnex. All of that is to say, I don’t think it’s a low tech / low light species by any means but it’s not receiving insane amounts of light in my tank either and seems to be doing well. Also, for whatever the information is worth, these are some other growing conditions / tank parameters: -well water, not RO, that comes out of the tap at roughly 11-12 dkh & gh, ph of the tap is about 8.2. 30% WCs weekly results in the tank water being around 7-8 dkh, gh a little higher, and ph around 7.4-7.6 -light cycle outlined above -co2 injection with a roughly 1pt ph swing, injection starts 3.5hr before the photoperiod -nutrients are a NilocG dry ferts and I can post the exact mix if people want, but it runs fairly lean with daily injections via an auto doser 1hr before the photoperiod. N is typically a little less than 5ppm, P hovers around 1ppm, and I add one normal dose of Thrive or Easy Green weekly after every WC on top of the daily nutrient dose Hopefully that’s helpful and I would see if you can reach Chantz via Facebook (he’s in the Co2 Supplemented Planted Tanks group) because he’s a wealth to knowledge, he will definitely have info about how to grow these plants and he’s plugged into the plant community well enough that he probably knows some history of it in the hobby

These were found in the US, I was asked not to disclose the location so I apologize that I have to remain vague beyond that but we did collect them in the states 🙂

Hi sorry I’m a little late to the party here but just collected a bunch of xyris red, the person who took me collecting says they’re fairly easy but slow growing and that’s part of what drives the pricing, and that more light & co2 brings out more intense reds. I’m going to bring these babies home and will let you know how it goes, excited to try them!

I’m glad you like it, it’s just three manzanita sticks chucked in! They’re resting on their own branches at the bottom, and the bases of the sticks are propped against the back glass 🙂