Projects & Rambles

[Dark River Aquatics]

On 3/21/2022 at 10:37 PM, Odd Duck said:

I’ve heard of pink line before, but not seen a decent picture of one or seen one for sale.  I’ll keep searching, for sure, along with jacobsenii, is on my list of “gets”.

I’ve actually wondered if this is a jacobsenii because it’s so different from all my other types of nurii, but the guy I sourced them from (who had to move and unfortunately way downsized and doesn’t have them anymore, otherwise I’d point you in his direction) and Chantz  both said it’s nurii pink line and they’re both way smarter than I am so I went with it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Odd Duck]

Either way, it’s beautiful!

[Minanora]

Super beautiful. Super unique.

[Beardedbillygoat1975]

@Dark River Aquaticsi’d stick with nurii, in my experience jacobsonii is a smaller plant and the leaves are not quite as textured but that’s my plants others may see it differently. Mine are getting inadequate light as they’re in the sad bowl. 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Beardedbillygoat1975
Double post

[Dark River Aquatics]

I consulted someone with a large collection of crypts & far more experience than I, and he thinks that what I thought was nurii pink line might be jacobsenii pink, and that what I thought was nurii rosen maiden might be nurii pink line 🤪

Going to get some of his plants to compare in person and see what’s up, and if he’s ok with me doing so then @Odd Duckand whoever else I may be able to share his Facebook contact info with you so you can get some too 😁

[Odd Duck]

Looking forward to what you find out.  The plants may look different under different conditions.  Crypts are notorious for doing that.

[Dark River Aquatics]

@Odd Duckit’s not the same person, but Marcos who runs ChiChi’s Aquatic Dreams posted that he has some nurii pink for sale at the moment - it’s not on the main site, you’d have to message him directly and I’m not sure how much he has but he did post some on his Facebook page a few hours ago 

[Dark River Aquatics]

These photos are a couple of days apart, but I just put a new bulb over this 40g and this is the difference - looks WAY better in person in terms of color rendition of everything inside the tank, and should give a bit more juice to the plants now that there’s co2 being added.

This is the previous, 60w 5000k LED bulb (I forget the brand):

 

And this is today; with a Phillips 100w 6500k bulb (it’s the twirly lookin tube one):

The camera makes the first pic look a lot brighter than it did in person, there were some very dim areas off to the edges. I have a little wooden mount thing built to hook up an LED floodlight above this tank but I’m dreading having to move the stand to get behind it to screw the light stand on.

Sooo…. We’ll see how everything does under this new bulb, and slowly ramp up the light & co2 & fertilizer dosing over the next few weeks and see what’s up. I may just forgo the floodlight and run a second one of these fixtures side by side with the existing one….

Moral of the story, I LOVE the Chihiros WRGB2 lights on my other tanks and dont regret buying them. But cheap lights in the proper spectrum work just fine too - the 4-pack of these bulbs was $22.99 on Amazon and the fixture was like $12 from Walmart, plus a piece of scrap wood and a zip tie to mount it over the tank. So for ballpark of $17-$18 in materials it does a real good job of growing the lower demand plants in this 40g. And the 50w LED floodlights require a stand/mount of some kind too (and throw off a lot of heat), but a 2-pack of them was $39.99 on Amazon and powered my 75g for the first month or two just fine. The colors didn’t pop like they do under the Chihiros and everything’s all glowed up now, but the floodlights grew plants quite well for a fraction of the cost

 

Oh! And edit to add, I went rogue and ordered several types of Crypt Nurii from two different sources to compare, as well as some small swords for the 40g - Echinodorus Golden Sun, Gabrielii, and Hadi Red Pearl to fill up the foreground a little more 😄

Edited March 24, 2022 by Dark River Aquatics

[Odd Duck]

On 3/23/2022 at 5:51 PM, Dark River Aquatics said:

@Odd Duckit’s not the same person, but Marcos who runs ChiChi’s Aquatic Dreams posted that he has some nurii pink for sale at the moment - it’s not on the main site, you’d have to message him directly and I’m not sure how much he has but he did post some on his Facebook page a few hours ago 

I’ve purchased from him before.  Good quality plants.

[Dark River Aquatics]

Helped a friend scape his 10g today - the taco was my only addition and therefore I helped 😂

[Patrick_G]

What is the midground plant on the left? 

[Dark River Aquatics]

@Patrick_Gnot sure which one you mean but hopefully this answers it

1 - mix of anubias dark angel, and anubias pinto 

2 - pogostemon downoi red

3 - blyxa japonica

4 - an unidentified possibly native plant that I collected locally, we’ve been unable to ID so far even after sending pictures & videos & sample plants to several different people and searching through websites/books of plants native to our area. It’s a weird one, but kinda cool - thought it was a Sag or an Erio of some kind at first but I’m starting to think it’s an isoetes, it behaves/looks slightly different from everything we’ve come across as a possible ID so far. If that’s the one you were referring to I have no idea what it is yet

[Dark River Aquatics]

This is the mystery plant. It seems to be co2 dependent and slowly melts without it, somewhat slow growing, spreads with runners but the runners dont look like those of val or sag (it sends out as many as 5-6 runners at a time in all directions and forms a mat instead of chaining, and the runners are very thin and break off easily - you can see several runners in the roots of the larger plant pictured), the leaves are fairly thick and very rigid, and the plant itself is very buoyant when uprooted. I collected it next to the dock at my lakehouse (in the Northeast US) and it’s been growing there for decades, and I’ve never seen it grow up near the shoreline emersed or create any emergent leaves, never seen it send up stems/flowers/stalks of any kind, and it’s never gotten any bigger than it is in the pics

Edited March 26, 2022 by Dark River Aquatics

[Dark River Aquatics]

Doin a thing 😄

Once the top shelf is finished (that’s not the final layout in the pics) it’ll hold two 15-20g tanks underneath and up to six 10g’s on top. Planning to consolidate a lot of my smaller tanks down here in the basement for ease of maintenance and to save space upstairs, so this rack will hold some of the existing setups with room for more. And then I already have a 30” wide metal shelving unit that will have a 20tall on the bottom shelf, the Krib Moliwe’s 15g on the center shelf, and probably a few of my nano tanks on top. Then I’ll just be down to a 29g and a 40g left upstairs which will stay where they are 😄

Edited March 28, 2022 by Dark River Aquatics

[Minanora]

On 3/27/2022 at 3:50 PM, Dark River Aquatics said:

Doin a thing 😄

Once the top shelf is finished (that’s not the final layout in the pics) it’ll hold two 15-20g tanks underneath and up to six 10g’s on top. Planning to consolidate a lot of my smaller tanks down here in the basement for ease of maintenance and to save space upstairs, so this rack will hold some of the existing setups with room for more. And then I already have a 30” wide metal shelving unit that will have a 20tall on the bottom shelf, the Krib Moliwe’s 15g on the center shelf, and probably a few of my nano tanks on top. Then I’ll just be down to a 29g and a 40g left upstairs which will stay where they are 😄

Please. For me, put something under those blocks that are touching your lovely wood floors. I just can't. Ouch.

I do love that though. I wish my DH would let me build a rack for some 10G tanks.

[Minanora]

Actually I can't tell if that's real wood or not. But still! 😛 

[Brandon p]

On 3/27/2022 at 11:08 PM, Minanora said:

Actually I can't tell if that's real wood or not. But still! 😛 

If it’s laminate that worse. One drop of water will swollen it up and get soft. I’m has been down 10 years ago so they make better now than then

Edited March 28, 2022 by Brandon p

[Dark River Aquatics]

@Minanora@Brandon p it’s vinyl flooring over concrete, we’re good!

The top shelf is all screwed together and now it’s a waiting game for other supplies to arrive in the mail - the overhang is bothering me slightly in terms of stability so I may modify it a bit, not sure if it’s necessary and need to research more and think on it. There isn’t a rush to this, and I only have three 10g’s with current occupants so I’ll set up a few tanks and let them marinate and then leapfrog the fish into them so I can strip their existing tanks to move them down here and redo everything after they’re empty. The game plan is to have plenums in every tank plus a sponge filter, and run shop lights suspended above the tanks. The bottom shelf will probably end up being two 15g’s instead of 20g’s but we’ll see, a 20-tall would fit but would only leave a 7” gap of overhead space to access them and that would get annoying.
 

My basement is an absolute mess, but after this build is done I’ll move the plastic storage shelf out of the corner next to the existing rack and replace it with the 30” metal rack. Then almost all of my tanks will be along these two walls and I might actually be able to call it a fish room 🥳

Edited March 28, 2022 by Dark River Aquatics

[Brandon p]

On 3/27/2022 at 11:45 PM, Dark River Aquatics said:

@Minanora@Brandon p it’s vinyl flooring over concrete, we’re good!

The top shelf is all screwed together and now it’s a waiting game for other supplies to arrive in the mail - the overhang is bothering me slightly in terms of stability so I may modify it slightly. There isn’t a rush to this, and I only have three 10g’s with current occupants so I’ll set up a few tanks and let them marinate and then leapfrog the fish & plants into them so I can strip their existing tanks to move them down here and redo them after they’re empty. The game plan is to have plenums in every tank plus a sponge filter, and run shop lights suspended above the tanks. The bottom shelf will probably end up being two 15g’s instead of 20g’s but we’ll see, a 20-tall would fit but would only leave a 7” gap of overhead space for access to them and that would get annoying.
 

My basement is an absolute mess, but after this build is done I’ll move the plastic storage shelf out of the corner next to the existing rack and replace it with the 30” metal rack. Then almost all of my tanks will be along these two walls and I might actually be able to call it a fish room 🥳

👍

[Dark River Aquatics]

This is a terrible video because I couldn’t get it to focus, but the wiggly grey mass at the back of the cave is a herd of Krib Moliwe babies 😄

 

 

[Dark River Aquatics]

Haircut day 

 

Trimming the Rotala Mini Butterfly hurt my soul 😭

[ndfi78]

Omg, I love that tank. I assume it is co2 with that kind of growth.

Edited March 29, 2022 by ndfi78

[Dark River Aquatics]

On 3/28/2022 at 10:13 PM, ndfi78 said:

Omg, I love that tank. I assume it is co2 with that kind of growth.

Yes, it’s co2 injected - although a lot of the coloration is from strong light and nitrate limitation, I’m running a plenum to consume excess nitrate and fertilize very lightly (with easy green in this tank) - 1ml at a time maybe twice a week, and nitrate stays less than 5ppm which brings out a lot of color in the rotalas 

[Dark River Aquatics]

Today was Cryptmas 🥳

A very generous human sent me a metric ton of Crypt Jacobsenii Pink & some Nurii’s, and after comparing them the crypts I had thought were “pink line” I realized that they are/have been 100% Jacobsenii Pink and I just got them under the wrong name. And now I’m starting to question the ID’s of some of the others, the plants sold as nurii “Pahang”, “Raubensis”, and “Rosen Maiden” all look strikingly similar. Even after comparing them with the plants that arrived today I’m not sure what’s what among my existing crypts…. But either way the collection just grew! There were some Crypt Purpurea in the bags too and those are new to me, so that’s exciting as well!

Only got through planting about half the things, some are going into my 75g and some are going into another tank for holding until I redo another setup for them. Ended up having to pull out a bunch of Echinodorus Aflame to make more space for some of the new nurii’s, and planting the Jacobsenii into the carpet of marsilea was tedious but I’m diggin the overall look of a bunch of Jacobsenii growing up out of the carpet with flamingos behind. Still have a full bag of Jacobsenii left to play with, so may add more 😄

Edited March 30, 2022 by Dark River Aquatics

[Beardedbillygoat1975]

PM me the source of those crypts @Dark River Aquaticsthats an amazing hall!!