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150 gallon indoor pond from IBC water tank…. For breeding mormyrids and rope fish


Phoenixfishroom
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Building an indoor pond with 2 canister filters made from 5 gallon buckets. Thinking about getting fancy with a hygrometer, ts meter, thermometer, conductivity meter, dosing pump, and some pumps running from a reserve tank to rain bars all hooked to home assistant or something similar. The plan is to mimic the wet and dry season by controlling all of those factors and also programming the lighting for longer and shorter days to match the seasons. 
the tank will be an African river biotope with my 13 Petrocephalus simus, 5 ropefish, 10 alestopetersius brichardii (although Once the rope fish get bigger I may not want to risk keeping such rare and expensive fish with them they are about 3” full grown… probably too big to get eaten but I may get a different species of African tetra or barb that is about that size Fir dithers instead), and some livebearers to play the roll of self replicating tasty snack, as well as some shrimp and scuds as c,earners/snacks. It is probably going to take a long time to have all the fancy stuff installed but I plan to have the pond up and running for the fish to live in next month. 
if I can find a 150 or 180 gallon tank cheep enough I may move the whole show over there and spray paint 3 sides black to keep it nice and dim like the like. The substrate I use is sand mixed with river clay so the water gets a slightly murky look to it… they prefer it that way.

this is by far my most ambitious project ever, on many levels, but I do feel pretty confident about my odds of eventual success.

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On 4/27/2023 at 9:10 AM, Phoenixfishroom said:

Building an indoor pond with 2 canister filters made from 5 gallon buckets. Thinking about getting fancy with a hygrometer, ts meter, thermometer, conductivity meter, dosing pump, and some pumps running from a reserve tank to rain bars all hooked to home assistant or something similar. The plan is to mimic the wet and dry season by controlling all of those factors and also programming the lighting for longer and shorter days to match the seasons. 
the tank will be an African river biotope with my 13 Petrocephalus simus, 5 ropefish, 10 alestopetersius brichardii (although Once the rope fish get bigger I may not want to risk keeping such rare and expensive fish with them they are about 3” full grown… probably too big to get eaten but I may get a different species of African tetra or barb that is about that size Fir dithers instead), and some livebearers to play the roll of self replicating tasty snack, as well as some shrimp and scuds as c,earners/snacks. It is probably going to take a long time to have all the fancy stuff installed but I plan to have the pond up and running for the fish to live in next month. 
if I can find a 150 or 180 gallon tank cheep enough I may move the whole show over there and spray paint 3 sides black to keep it nice and dim like the like. The substrate I use is sand mixed with river clay so the water gets a slightly murky look to it… they prefer it that way.

this is by far my most ambitious project ever, on many levels, but I do feel pretty confident about my odds of eventual success.

(This is by far my most ambitious project ever, on many levels,
but I do feel pretty confident about my odds of eventual success)

I kind of pictured what you are working on & my 1st thought was 
that's going to be 1 hell of a job putting all that together & what 
it's going to look like after it's all done & running, it's going to 
look really cool, I hope you will have a video on it after it's done.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 4/27/2023 at 2:11 PM, Fish Folk said:

Got any photos of your fish?

Yes! I snuck some fish that aren’t part of this project in too. In no particular order the dorsal band/torpedo whales, LDA046, a.brichardii, Indian dwarf muddies, parasycidium bandama, reticulated corydora, very young Pseudohemiodon apithanos, gravid cinnamon khuli, ropefish, and zebra kutu s.nigriventris. Now I kind of want to go and post a fish photo album. In the appropriate location…. I definitely have more lol

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Edited by Phoenixfishroom
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I have a lot of very good connections and am able to get pretty much any freshwater fish I want once I set my mind to doing so. I love oddball fish and I really like the idea of sitting down in front of a tank full of fish that you can’t go see really anywhere else. I got 4 of those p.bandama from my LFS. I just happen to go in there and they were like oh you gotta see these you’re gonna want this. They were 30 bucks each so I only got four of them and I went back the next day to get more and they didn’t have them. They were all gone. I spent the next year trying to find more of these things, and I finally was able to track down the one guy who brings them into the country, then convinced him to skip the distributors and sell to me because I knew more about them than he did (I found the only scientific paper ever written about them and had it translated to English lol.) And that was the beginning of my addiction to large schools of rare, exotic fish… just having them isn’t enough I need 15 of them so I can see them behave naturally. It is fascinating. Those dorsal band whales might be my favorite. People think you should keep mormyrid fishes alone but you should not, they have large brains and evidence suggests they communicate in a form of language with their electric organ. I have 10 of them I bonded with them, they take food out of my hand (some of them do anyway) and they are the reason that I’m building the ridiculous indoor pond because I want to be the first person to breed them in captivity. I am also trying to breed the LDA046, I am about to import three of them from Canada and then I will have nine and I think that’s a significant breeding group. It hasn’t been done, but regular Chubbys have bred in captivity and these are closely related.
Because I’m a crazy person I’m also trying to breed the mudskippers. I spoke to a researcher who has done it, and and putting a lot of effort into replicating his techniques. If I’m going to have them, I might as well have them in the most natural environment I can create for them and try to get them to make more of themselves so that we don’t have to take them from the wild.

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