Projects & Rambles

[Dark River Aquatics]

I guess the purpose of this journal is to document various projects, tanks, builds, etc to share what happens, hopefully gather advice & input, and to alleviate my friends from my insane babbling by having an additional outlet to ramble in 🙂 I don’t, and will probably never claim to be anything more than a hobbyist and am certainly not any sort of expert, but if someone else can learn from this then that would be super cool too

 

I currently have about 10 tanks but we’ll start with a current project, which is caring for and breeding a pair of wild caught apistogramma Tefé which I inherited from a friend. He was breaking down some of his projects and asked me if I was interested in this pair and a wild caught pair of Trifasciata, and jumped on it even though I usually like to take longer establishing tanks. Their tank is a 10g; planted, with a soil under layer and a mixed pool filter sand & gravel cap layer. They appear to be thriving and spawn regularly even in my harder well water which comes out of the tap at ph 8.2, gh/kh both around 10-12 drops (on the API kit). When I first got them I tried slowly softening their water with small additions of RO water over time until I realized they were actively spawning and appeared to be acting normally & happily in the well water so I stopped trying to change it. Other details of the tank include a random plant list of guppy grass, pogo stellatus octopus, a few types of Ludwigia, aponogeton ulcaceus, microsorum durin besar (which is not receiving enough light/co2 to turn orange yet unfortunately), and a mix of crypts. It’s a tank full of leftovers but it’s seemingly healthy enough for the fish so I haven’t messed with it much. There are two small HOB’s which recently had pothos, parlour palm, and inch plant added and there’s a healthy layer of duckweed & salvinia minima as floaters. The tank usually runs at around 5ppm nitrate with small WC’s every month or so, and it gets a very light nutrient dosing once a week. 

 

The male Tefé is a lot of fun; he very quickly learned to take food right from the tip of the feeding pipette and is very interactive, he behaves more like an Oscar in his interactiveness than most other apistos I’ve kept over the years - he’s a little bit beaten up, and my friend told me he arrived from the wholesaler like that, but his behavior is very active & inquisitive. He stays clamped most of the time unless he’s displaying for the female, which still causes me a little concern, but he’s been through several preventative medications and doesn’t appear to be ill in any way - the clamping is interesting though. 
 

They spawn every 3 weeks on average, and get a lot of frozen brine, live baby brine, But Bite granules, and xtreme nano to fuel them. The female gets moderately feisty when she’s on eggs and keeps the male away, but I’ve never noticed any particular aggressiveness out of her. The eggs do get eaten within 24-48hr if I leave them to her care, I’m assuming because the water is fairly hard & alkaline and they fungus up. After a couple of failed attempts, I eventually pulled the eggs and hatched them in a glass jar of pure RO water + methylene blue + air, and managed to hatch out multiple spawns of fry this way. The babies are now growing like weeds in their own setup which I will document in the next post. 
 

Overall I was super happy to have the opportunity to care for these fish, both for the vote of confidence from my friend (who is a way better fish keeper than I am, at least in my eyes), and to have a neat wild caught apisto pair. There was a definite weight lifted after the first successful spawn, I was a little anxious about it and felt a responsibility to them and to facilitate some babies so it was a great feeling when it was finally successful 🙂

 

The pictures attached are from when I first got them in early February 2020, their early tank setup, and a few progress pictures between then & now 

[Fish Folk]

Awesome! Love Apistos. Congratulations on successful fry. I’d love to see them growing out.

[Dark River Aquatics]

After raising the first successful Tefé spawn in a breeder box in my Ancistrus grow out tank, I set up a 15g tank dedicated to the baby Tefé’s. The original intent was to have this be a grow out tank, and eventual permanent home for the best looking keepers out of this spawn - but I went a little overboard with it.

 

The substrate is a mix of 3 parts topsoil from my yard, 1 part sphagnum peat, and 1 part Flourite dark. Above that are thin layers of more Flourite, some crushed lava rock gravel & SeaChem Matrix to build up height and keep it all more aerated, then black blasting sand along the front and Landen Soil built up in the back. The hardscape is just rocks from the woods around my yard, all scrubbed under hot water and put in place. I’ve used a lot of rocks like this over the years and have never run into any issues even if they occasionally rust a bit.

 

The filter is a small Sunsun hang on canister, I’m not wild about it but my usual choice of the Finnex PX-360 wasn’t an option due to being sold out (I’m assuming covid related), so it’s a bit noisy and sucks some air and will be replaced eventually but it works for now. Filter media is a lot of coarse sponge and some established matrix from other systems, and now has a bag of aragonite to help mitigate some mild acidification from the soil mix.

 

The plants include several types of Ludwigia, bacopa and rotala as well as pogo octopus, echinodorus parviflorus, some mixed crypt wendtii’s, crypt spiralis, crypt nurii rosen maiden, AR red mini, dwarf sagittaria, marsilea crenata, Monte Carlo, guppy grass, anubias nana petite, and several different species of Buce. The nutrient dosing has been small amounts 2-3 times a week, and the light is an LED strip I had laying around suspended about 6” above the tank - I believe it’s a NICREW of some kind, and right now it’s on an 8hr photoperiod. There’s been some minor brown diatom buildup and a baby green dragon Bristlenose was added to help mow it down and it’s been doing a great job so far.

 

I let the tank marinate for about 2 weeks before adding any fish even after the water was testing as “cycled” after just a few days, mostly to let the plants establish a bit and settle in. The baby Tefé’s were added at about the two week mark because they had outgrown their breeder box, and there’s roughly 25-30 of them although they’ll be thinned out and a lot will be rehomed. The goal is to pick out the best looking male and 1-2 females to keep the line going and move the rest out before it turns into World War 3 in there. So far they’ve been getting multiple feedings of live baby brine and/or Xtreme Nano 2-3 times a day, and they’re growing like weeds and starting to color up nicely. They’re as bold as their parents and are a lot of fun to watch. The novelty of adding them to this tank was a blast - watching them explore something other than a breeder box and experience a lot of their life firsts was amazing. They didn’t understand what glass was at first, there was a small learning curve experiencing a mild current flow for the first time, and they seemed to enjoy exploring a much bigger space that was all their own.

 

The pictures are mostly of the tank build, substrate layering, plant growth, and the Tefé babies themselves. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to add videos soon as it doesn’t seem to like the ones I try to upload from my iPhone 

Edited June 23, 2021 by Dark River Aquatics
Typos and forgot some plants

[Dark River Aquatics]

On 6/23/2021 at 3:11 PM, Fish Folk said:

Awesome! Love Apistos. Congratulations on successful fry. I’d love to see them growing out.

Thanks, I love them too! So much personality in such a little package 🙂 I just posted another entry about the babies & their tank, and have another batch in a breeder box again - I let the mom eat most of the spawns just due to space limitations but these ones have been super fun to care for. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to post videos soon!

[Colu]

Beautiful apistos fry grow out tank looks great

[Dark River Aquatics]

Tried to get some better shots of the Tefé babies, their blue markings are starting to come in well

[Patrick_G]

Your tank build photos look great! You really show how to do a nice looking scape with good plant density without getting to complicated. I think a lot of beginners tend to scape and plant to sparsely. 

[Dark River Aquatics]

On 6/24/2021 at 2:12 PM, Patrick_G said:

Your tank build photos look great! You really show how to do a nice looking scape with good plant density without getting to complicated. I think a lot of beginners tend to scape and plant to sparsely. 

Thank you for the kind words! I totally agree that planting fairly heavily right from the beginning is important, and probably overlooked. I try to find a balance between a lot of plant mass right from the beginning and leaving enough space for everything to grow in nicely - I’ve definitely overdone it before and ended up with plants competing for space & light, but balancing a tank is so much easier when you start with a lot of plants right from the onset 🙂

[Dark River Aquatics]

The next ongoing project is a 40g Breeder that’s been around for close to a year, this tank started with a piece of wood I got from a friend for fish-sitting while he was on vacation and I decided to build a scape around it. I love the idea of biotopes & naturalistic tanks, so this ended up being a pseudo-biotope-inspired sort of deal. It’s in no way region specific but the goal was to make it feel like a small stream, and to experiment with mild tannin staining, a heavy amount of botanicals, and to give BioHome media a go. The tank is now pretty heavily overstocked but runs at less than 20ppm nitrate at all times, even with 5-10 gallon WC’s every month or two and very heavy feeding (and no gravel vacuuming at all). I’m honestly not sure if that’s because of the BioHome, the plants, the deeper substrate sections with anoxic zones, or a combination but something seems to be working.

 

The substrate in the planted sections is layers of lava rock & SeaChem matrix in the deepest parts, with Flourite Dark and ADA Amazonia Light layered above that. There’s also a couple inch layer of Super Naturals Sunset Gold sand in the foreground (love that sand!) and an ever changing mix of botanicals littered around. I’ve used a lot of mini catappa leaves, Texas live oak leaves, oak leaves & twigs & dried acorn caps from my yard, alder cones, birch cones, coco bracts, sterculia pods, dregea pods, banana stem pieces, jacaranda pods, and probably a few other things that I’m forgetting about. There’s also a lot of mixed, small pieces of various types of wood built up in piles to create complexity and secure spaces for the fish - plus I like the general chaotic, natural look it creates.

 

The filtration was a bit experimental at first, I used two of the Sunsun HW-302 canisters and two of the Sunsun HW-602 booster attachments daisy chained into one of the canister’s intake pipe. The first booster is half coarse foam and half medium foam for mechanical filtration, and the second booster is full of crushed lava rock gravel mixed with SeaChem matrix for some initial aerobic bio filtration. The main canister is then full of BioHome - I used the super sized BioGravel in each tray, then poured the small normal sized BioGravel around it to maximize the available space. This filter also runs a ball valve in the outlet pipe with a spray bar and is at considerably slower flow than it would normally be. My thought process was to slow down the flow to A. not clog up the first booster as quickly and B. to give the BioHome more of chance to develop anaerobic bacteria. Whether or not that worked is open to some debate, but I’ve been happy with the low nitrate levels. The second canister is mainly coarse foam, fine floss, and a single tray of BioHome more intended for polishing and moving water in the tank itself than full cycle nitrate reduction. Oddly enough, the BioHome seems to filter out tannin staining very efficiently and I’ve had a hard time keeping the water tinted - it’s the only variable in this tank that would explain why the tannins get removed as I don’t use any chemical filtration. There’s also a small HOB added a few months ago simply to house some emergent plants, which are pothos and inch plant for now.

 

The inhabitants were gradually added, and there’s a colony of Apistogramma Borellii (1 male, 5 females, and currently 5 rogue juveniles that will probably be removed - especially any males), a small squad of 5 Black Schultzei Corydoras, 5 CW010 Gold Laser Corydoras, mixed schools of 7-10 ember tetras/black emperor tetras/purple emperor tetras, a large and reclusive L-169 Gold Stripe Panaque, half a dozen short fin super red Bristlenose that are growing out and will be moved, two long fin calico bristlenose that have started spawning and will get their own tank within the next week or two, a large female long fin green dragon bristlenose, a few otocinclus, and a whole bunch of bladder/ramshorn/Malaysian trump snails. It is arguably WAY overstocked but I spend a lot of time observing this tank and everything was added gradually and so far all seems well. The feeding is heavy on vegetables, live baby brine, and few types of Repashy, with supplemental frozen and pelleted foods. The stocking is largely because I was curious to see what this system could handle and kept adding things, keeping a close eye on the water and making sure everyone stayed fed and there wasn’t much jostling for space. I’ve only ever lost 1 otocinclus and two ember tetras (both soon after being added), and the original male Borellii lasted about 6 months and dozens of spawns before finding him dead one morning. I panicked when that happened, double checked the water quality for days, and thought maybe I missed something with my preventative medication ritual for new fish but never figured out what the cause was. Overall I’ve chalked it all up as a win, and now that a lot of the BN’s are getting bigger they will be moved out very soon. This tank was at one point grow out space for some of my Rio Paraguay Ancistrus and worked nicely for that so I’ve kept the ball rolling using it as a bristlenose playground when they’re still small, and the amount of food that goes in seems to help keep the ecosystem strong.

 

The plants have changed a bit over time; there are some large red/bronze crypt wendtii, some smaller crypts that i forget the name of (maybe Beckettii?) jungle vallisneria that approaches the 48” mark before I trim them, corkscrew val, dwarf sag, a large dwarf lily that has started putting out babies, some mixed buces, Anubias jalapeño, Christmas & Java mosses, helanthium tenellum, some interesting green algaes, and recently an outrageous amount of duckweed that managed to sneak in. One of these days I’ll work up the energy to purge the duckweed but that’s a pain. The lighting is a cheap Beamswork LED strip on a 7hr photoperiod, and this tank gets light nutrient dosing weekly.

 

I’m in the process of building a planted sump for this tank that still needs to be plumbed in, so that will be its own post somewhere down the road.

 

The pictures are snapshots of the build, the tanks evolution, some of the inhabitants, and the recent addition of a large branch of wood resting on top with pothos runners from the neighboring tank’s planted sump and runners from this tank’s eventual new sump

[Colu]

Love all the leaf litter looks really natural 

[Patrick_G]

A beautiful scape. The left side gives a wonderful suggestion of where the stream bank might begin and the litter suggests that maybe this is a slow side channel or eddy. Overall a great representation of a little slice of nature! 
 

oh, and the black Corydoras are cute a heck! 

[Dark River Aquatics]

What do you do when you order a bunch of dwarf hairgrass from the Coop, and each cup comes overflowing with grass & runners and is way more than you banked on getting? I figured it was great justification for setting up a nano tank 😄

 

Luckily there was a sale going on at one of the box stores and I got a small 3g cube for cheap, and decided to scrounge rocks from the woods behind my house and put together a dirted shrimp tank. I already had plenty of dirt, aqua soil, aragonite, a light, some misc plants, and cycled coarse sponges aplenty so I ordered a Finnex PX-360 and a ball valve, sourced a few other filler plants from a local store, and put this together in an afternoon. I am a complete psychopath and love canisters, so the Finnex + ball valve seemed like a logical move because why not put a full blown canister on a 3g?

 

The equipment is an Aqueon 3 cube, Finnex PX-360 filter full of aged coarse sponge pulled from other filters, a Two Little Fishies brand ball valve on the outlet hose to throttle it, a Nicrew 7W LED gooseneck lamp (started with a 10W and decided to scale it down after the first week), and dirt/Flourite/Fluval Stratum for the substrate with rocks straight from my backyard. The substrate was mixed with equal parts yard dirt, sphagnum peat mix, and Flourite dark for the base layer mixed with water squeezed out of established canister sponges to seed it with goop & bacteria, then capped with Fluval Stratum. I’ve had great luck with this approach in the past and IMO there does seem to be some magic that happens using straight up soil with a lot of established filter goo - the cycling process happens quickly with the initial ammonia spike, and this tank was able to process the ammonia down and produce nitrates within 48hr. It still takes the normal amount of time for the tank to age and fully establish but hard well water and soil is a great combo IMO.

 

The plants include cryprocoryne Tropica, dwarf hairgrass, some marsilea crenata, hydrocotyle tripartita Japan, a misc unidentified stem plant from a local store (haven’t bothered to ID it yet but if anyone knows the name that would be awesome), and a couple of cuttings of two small types of Buce - I believe they’re mini coin and Kedagang mini but might be wrong.

 

The inhabitants are a handful of cherry neocaridina from a friend of mine, all mixed grade but reproducing like crazy now. They are quickly filling up the tank and some of the juveniles will be moved into a new 75g I’m setting up soon for a growing ancistrus colony. There’s also a big red/orange ramshorn snail, and of course some bladder snails because they’re ninjas and some eggs made it in.

 

At this point the tank has been set up for 2-3 months give or take, there’s a decent amount of green hair algae & green spot algae, I’ve messed with the plant arrangement slightly due to the dwarf hairgrass going wild along the front, and I seldom do water changes anymore. I’ve never fed it aside from occasional very tiny pinches of Bacter AE and just let the tank do its thing. I did end up needing to put some aragonite into the filter due to the ph slowly declining from the soil, but the aragonite buffered it right back up and the ph has been stable ever since. The largest piece of rock seems to be shale of some kind, which has a few small rusty spots but in the past I’ve never noticed any detrimental effects from rusty rocks and after doing some research it would appear that rust isn’t harmful, and the shrimp don’t seem to mind it so I’m keeping an eye on it but am mostly unconcerned unless there are any changes in the shrimps’ health or behavior. It’s not going to win any scaping awards but it’s producing baby shrimp at a nice clip and I recently had to trim the stems and replant the crowns, and despite the algae (which I’m not really opposed to having, it can stay) it’s a mellow little tank and fun to watch. Some of the plants are showing signs of nutrient starvation so I might start dosing the water soon, but will probably just let it ride and see what happens. Pictures are mostly of the build with a few of the critters 🦐🐌

[Patrick_G]

Argh, I have the same tank and light but it doesn’t look anywhere near as nice. 

[Dark River Aquatics]

On 6/30/2021 at 11:42 AM, Patrick_G said:

Argh, I have the same tank and light but it doesn’t look anywhere near as nice. 

I think it looks awesome! Love that piece of wood and the sand

[Dark River Aquatics]

Hopefully I’m not the only lunatic here who likes to get creative with Repashy - Tonight’s a la carte item for the apistos & cories is Igapo Explorer, some freeze dried tubifex cubes shredded up in a cheap herb grinder, and a sprinkle of daphnia for extra complexity 😄

[Dark River Aquatics]

Just a small update after a relaxing tank maintencey sort of afternoon - removed 99.9% of the duckweed from the 40g today and generally spruced it up, and removed the rotala macrandra from the back left corner of the Tefé 15g and replaced it with some hygrophila sunset and a few stems of ludwigia ovalis. It feels good being able to see into the 40g better now that the duckweed isn’t blocking a lot of the light 😄 The Tefé babies are also starting to show some patterning in the tails! Super excited about that

 

Planning to finally plumb that planted sump on the top shelf of the rack into the 40g tomorrow, got the bulkhead siliconed up this afternoon and properly sealed, cut and dry fit all of the overflow pipes, and potted up the last few plants to fill it out. I absolutely love planted overhead sumps, there are a few pictures of the setup on my Oscar tank attached - with some luck and a lot of Easy Green this one will be as lush!

[Dark River Aquatics]

It’s been a busy week and a decent amount of aquarium stuff got did! Hopefully I’ve figured out how to format these posts a little better too

 

Before getting into what I had planned to post about, the Oscars did a thing this week… Apparently they are M&F, it’s the first time I’ve seen them spawn and luckily they’re the world’s most placid Oscars and they didn’t get very defensive or aggressive towards the other fish, and the eggs appeared too white to be fertilized and were eaten overnight…. Phew, because I am in no way physically, financially, mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with a bajillion baby Oscars…

 

But on to the intended post - I did finally plumb the planted sump onto the 40g last weekend and didn’t get around to posting it until now, but it got did!

 

This sump project actually started about two months ago, I found a big plastic tub planter thing at Home Depot - no idea what the volume is, I’m guessing around 8-10g maybe? It’s a peculiar shape but it works. The original plan was to try red mangroves so I did some research and the internet told me they like a fine, silty, compact substrate with some open water on top. Considering there would be open water in the sump, I thought it would also be a neat idea to keep cherry shrimp & scuds in this sump and let the babies wash through the overflow down into the main tank as an occasional treat for the fish - a freshwater refugium if you will. It’s probably over-engineered but I ended up putting a divider into the sump to have a mix of soil & deep sand on one side, and a simple thinner sand bed closer to the bulkhead with more of a water column over it. The substrate is soil from my yard mixed with flourite, probably 2” deep, with about 3-4” of Black Diamond blasting sand over it, and a couple inches of open water above that. I intentionally mixed the layers together a bit as the sand was being added, so it ended up being closer to 1” of dirt/flourite, an inch or two of dirt/flourite/sand, then a couple of inches of sand to fully cap it.

 

I usually make overhead sumps with a mix of flourite & lava rock gravel with plants directly rooted in the substrate, but for this setup with a few inches of inert sand and a few inch deep water column I decided to use hydroponic baskets for the plants - this would allow the use of flourite/lava rock which I’ve had good results from and trust to get the job done, it would support the plants much closer to the water surface and ensure only the roots would be submerged, and it would make the setup more modular allowing easy rearranges of stuff. The mangroves would be loose in the sump, and various sizes of modular plant baskets would give plenty of options for different selections of plants and flexibility in their arrangement. I started with peace lily and parlour palms and added more species over time. I also got a heater just and made sure it would fit - I allow the room to get fairly cool in the winter and with a lot more evaporative cooling from the flow with no cover on this sump, the heater is there as a fallback safeguard in case the tank ends up cooling down too much.

 

I cut & fitted the bulkhead in place, and used some zip ties to cinch the side walls together and prevent bowing/flexing/sagging when the container is filled. The internet told me mangroves like a decent amount of light, so I ended up ordering a gooseneck LED lamp with three separate 6500k 25w heads, with a built in dimmer & timer. The lamp is secured on a stand  of 2” PVC that’s just pushed into the substrate and secured to the side of the sump with some zip ties - with this will allow a lot of flexibility in the height of the lamp heads to adjust it over time as the plants grow. I’m not wild about the color rendition - it’s very yellow compared to the other tank lights and I find it obnoxious, but overall the setup seems to work well.

 

Then I basically let it sit for close to 2 months. With the amount of soil used I wanted to give it plenty of time to cycle and make sure I wasn’t attaching an ammonia bomb to the tank, so I let it marinate for a couple of months with occasional water changes and took my time adding plants. Unfortunately the mangroves aren’t doing very well and I’m not quite sure why - I took a week to acclimate them to freshwater, and they have direct 75w of light for 12hr a day but a couple have withered away to nothing and the remaining ones are still green but haven’t grown much. I’m not sure what I’ve been doing wrong and I’m not much of a mangrove keeper yet…. But! The other plants are going gang busters. The peace lily has multiple flowers, the parlour palms are growing steadily, and I’ve since added:

-green pothos 

-marble queen pothos

-anthurium

-green arrowhead

-monstera deliciosa

-horsetail rush

-chameleon plant 

-inch plant

-lucky bamboo

 

Turns out that the baskets are not, in fact, as modular as I thought - some plants like the peace lily, arrowhead, and anthurium have developed extensive root systems very quickly and anchored themselves into the deep substrate bed. At least they’re happy though.

 

Last weekend I decided it was time to get the whole thing running. I fitted some 1” PVC pipes to use as an outlet, and found a cheap HOB at Walmart to use as a diffuser / water catcher thing with the lid & cheap stock mediate moved. It also houses a sponge block with some more pothos, mostly just to maximize the available space and to grow in over time and add to the jungle look. The outlet pipes are PVC cemented together in certain places and friction fit in others to prevent leaks but also allow it to detach easily as needed, painted black to look a little better, and I spent some time playing with the orientation of the elbows and drilled holes in the end of the outlet to minimize noise - it’s completely silent now aside from the flow exiting the HOB and isn’t any better or worse than if the HOB was powered and running on its own.

 

 

It’s been running for about a week now and so far so good. It’s powered by one of the two Sunsun canisters running on this tank, I simply added some extra hosing to the outlet and attached it to the sump, and gravity does all the work returning water to the tank. There’s also a ball valve on the outlet to throttle the flow down a little bit - I’m a fan of gentle, slow filtration and have no idea how many GPH this system is but it doesn’t matter as long as it has some moving water. The container on the bottom shelf of the rack houses scuds, and I’ve already added a couple scoops of them to the sump and they promptly disappeared into the roots. Cherry shrimp will go in soon, I have a bunch growing out in another tank and they’ll be added probably with a small amount of leaf litter to cultivate food and the freshwater refugium will hopefully work as planned. I’m really liking it so far 🙂

 

Lastly I ate an avocado the other day and decided to repurpose some of those little black plastic plant pot things as a holder for the avocado pit, and attempt to grow that as well. I just cut the bottom off of one pot, glued it to a second one, and voila - we have an avocado cradle! If the mangroves end up failing, as they seem to be, hopefully this thing will still give some height and varying leaf texture to the setup.

And that’s it! The 40g is now running significantly more plant mass, the overall system is looking pretty good to my eye, and hopefully the fish will end up with an occasional snack of baby inverts. Thank you to everyone who has been reading my rambles, I’ve been enjoying making these posts!

[Dark River Aquatics]

Hmmm, looks like I still need to practice with the formatting a little bit but we’re getting better! Progress, not perfection 🙂

[Dark River Aquatics]

Little update because the little Apistogramma Tefé babies aren’t so little anymore and the plants are starting to go wild 🙂

 

And something of the 75g variety with Co2, lots of plants, an anoxic plenum and my breeding colony of Ancistrus Rio Paraguay will be happening in the basement soon! I’ve set up a lot of tanks with void spaces in the substrate but this time will be trying all of the hardware & substrate materials that Dr Kevin Novak talks about on his YouTube channel to see how well it works - the Rio’s need a larger setup anyway and the goal is to try out an anoxic substrate, farm some plants, continue to breed the Rio’s, and get some cherry shrimp and some TBD flavor of guppies going all in the same tank. A friend found this monster piece of wood for the tank recently and I’m slowly piecing together all of the other supplies and ironing out the final plan for it - the equipment gathered so far is:

-wooden stand to hold a 75g, and a 40B plus a smaller tank or two on top 

-2x 50w LED floodlights

-Low flow UGF with STS clay, flourite, a sprinkle of natural soil and Landen Soil for the substrate 

-GLA Co2 regulator

-Sunsun canister (with UV bulb removed)

-natural wood & rock sourced from a local dam & forest

 

[Dark River Aquatics]

This post is mostly just because I’m in full nerm mode about plants and am excited 😊 Currently piecing together the plant list for my newest tank and the fun of tracking down offbeat, neat species is a thrill - the obsession is so real!

 

I want to aim for some rarer, slower growing species of plants and take advantage of one of the rare occasions where I do co2, and the hope is to get them propagating - so far I have:

 

-Cryptocoryne Nurii Rosen Maiden

-Cryptocoryne Pink Flamingo (in the mail from the Coop!)

-Microsorum Durin Besar

-Anubias Nana Petite Pinto

-Lagenandra Silver Powder

-Lagenandra Green Variegated

-Lagenandra Red Variegated

-Buce Godzilla

-Buce Brownie Blue

-Buce Mini Coin

-Buce Kedagang Mini

-Buce Catherinae Red

-Buce Brownie Helena

-Buce Serenade

 

Also have lined up: Crypt Nurii Pink Line, Crypt Silver Queen, and Crypt Poseidon. So excited! If anyone has suggestions for beautiful, uncommon, harder to find species of crypt/Buce/anubias/etc and suggestions of where to source them or where to browse I’d love to hear!

[Taco Playz]

I love that wood. And the Apistos!!! Great job

[Odd Duck]

@Dark River Aquatics Nice plant list!  Really like that wood piece, too.

I’d love to get a line on that Microsorum ‘Durin Besar’, the Buce ‘Serenade’, the Crypt nurii ‘Pink Line’, and some Crypt ‘Silver Queen’.  That Crypt ‘Poseidon’ looks really interesting, too.

I’m all about anything I can grow with pinks or reds (or any unusual colors, really) that doesn’t require injected CO2 (even if I won’t get *as much* color without).

[Dark River Aquatics]

Thank you @Taco Playz and @Odd Duck!! The plants I have already largely came from a hobbyist friend who’s sort of like a Plant Dean, he gets the most incredible stuff and he’s very generous with his knowledge & propagations/trimmings, I’m lucky to know him! Both the Tefé pair and the Durin Besar came from him, and the two little Durin Besar I have are currently in less that optimal conditions in a medium light 10g and both just look like regular old Java fern but I’m hoping with co2 and more intense light some of that crazy orange will come out. A quick Google search shows that some is available from Liquid Creations 🙂

 

A few other rarer species I already have came from an awesome person who sells plants through Facebook, I’m not sure if he’s cool with me posting his info publicly but I’ll check with him and if he’s ok with it I’ll send you his info. I’ve always been very happy with his plants and his prices are very reasonable, the nurii Rosen maiden was $25 for a 6-7 leaf mother plant and it’s already created a baby in less than 6 weeks in my medium light, non-co2, dirt/Landen soil Tefé baby tank! 
 

The baby plant is the two little green leaves in the middle, it’s a bit hard to make out in the pic because my iPhone 6 has a potato camera but it’s growing like a champ. Hopefully I’ll be able to pass along his info!

[Dark River Aquatics]

@Odd Duck He is fine with it, his name is Binh Le and this is a link to his Facebook - shoot him a message if you like, I’m pretty sure he still has nurii rosen maiden / pink line available as well as some nice assorted buces and a ton of various other plants 😄

 

https://www.facebook.com/binh.le.5851

 

[Odd Duck]

@Dark River Aquatics I’ve already got a lot of the plants you have on your list.  I only had to look up 3.  😆 Apparently we have similar taste in plants!  I’d very much appreciate a link if your friend is OK with it.