Oh yes! GHA!!! Say it is so!

[Daniel]

I have been waiting for this green hair algae to grow in.

So often I read, oh no, I have algae or I have tannins or mulm. Most of these are found in the waters where our fish come from, so why do these displease us?

It probably come down to tidiness or a sense of order. We want that tidy perfectly manicured lawn with mat grasses from Asia and Africa.

But a native meadow has both chaos and beauty. There are more niches and more interactions when we loosen our grip slightly and enjoy nature as she paints with a more subtle hand.

Sometimes we act as heavy-handed maladroit deities of our aquatic worlds with only casual curiosity of the biological dance playing out before us. Should something new and natural appear our first impulse is to destroy it.

Our tanks should be beautiful to us. That is why we have them. But beauty is eye of the beholder and there is beauty in algae and tannin and mulm.

 

[Alesha]

Beautifully said, @Daniel. And I loved the video. You gave me something to think about this afternoon.

[Daniel]

It reminds me of an episode of a BBC documentary I watched where 2 British explorers are living with the Kombai tribe for a year in New Guinea. It is seemingly very authentic and when one of the hosts, Mark is punished for laziness by being pushed to the ground naked and beaten by the tribes’ women, he turns to the camera with a twinkle in his eye and says ‘back in London they pay good money for this'.

In one thread

  

And in another thread

What is one persons punishment is another's ‘back in London they pay good money for this'.

Edited September 9, 2020 by Daniel

[Ken Burke]

It’s tempting to ideals, right ph, right light, right hardness.  But if we do, we miss something important and the fish really pay for it.  Better to shoot for consistency over a target, and coral the chaos.  Now, if my green hair algae wasn’t brown.... Or invading my java moss

[Ben Ellison]

I find that with planted tanks the less maintenance you do the better they grow. Obviously the parameters have to stay in range. But in my best tanks I don't gravel vacuum or clean any glass but the front. Sometimes I feel the less human interference the better.