Aquarists unite: fish are friends, and food

Seeing people notice this thread made me figure I should do an update...

That tank you saw (with the memorial jug) was how it was a while back. it had been running forever with essentially zero effort from me, and I had added those plants you saw in the back.

I made one change, I added a good light from Amazon which had the right color temp, and even simulated a day/night cycle with "sunrise and sunset" phases.. That apparently made a lot of dormant plant seeds and stuff spring back to life.

The light : Amazon product ASIN B08N19TY71
The result :


I'm needing to prune out vegetation once a month now....

Kobayashi said:

Looks great, I think you just need some shrimp! I'm guessing most of the pruning you do is the water sprite in back? That stuff nearly took over my tank until I let the duckweed proliferate a bit too much and block out the majority of the light. I didn't really miss it, it was far too brittle.

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I've had horrible luck with shrimp. I've tried a few times ordering up batches of nicely colored ones.. They all inevitably just vanish (even though Mollies should be that aggro towards them). The only shrimp I've had long term are a couple Amano algae eaters, which I think at least are still around in there, I just never see them.

Aamry said:

Amazon links don't display properly for me, could you post a pic of the brand etc?

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Yeah, they screw up for me around half the time too..


Still boggles my mind, back in the day when I cared for my massive tanks I used to have (think 15-20 years ago) and I had to run crazy density CF bulbs to do decent plants. With this thing it's insane speed growth. Although I seem to have also pick up some ramshead snail hitchhikers with the amazon sword I put in the back corner.

And that's without any CO2 injection (another thing I used to do in my big planted setups).

OK. Interesting story about that tank I had a pic up up above.

As mentioned, yes I have to continually clip and prune out water sprite. Well. I decided I'd try something. Also a couple of those mollies did what they do and spit out a asston of fry at one point a couple months ago. (not long after that pic was taken).

I have a 10 gallon tank sitting on my enclosed patio (no fish, just water, I use it as a reservoir for a solar powered watering system that waters the plants on the patio). It gets natural sunlight, through some "high efficiency" (i.e. heavily IR/UV filtering) windows. It had some old dry gravel in the bottom. Over time it had gotten a green algae suspended in the water column, basically it looks like a big green cube. I thought .. Gee, maybe some of that water sprite I'm constantly throwing away could soak up any nutrients in the water column and control the algae. Interesting experiment, let's try it out.

SO one of the times I have to do a massive pruning of water sprite I scoop it out into a ziploc baggie and go dump it in that green column of algae on the patio for funzies. Push the stems into the gravel (by touch since I can't see a thing in the tank) and forget about it. We'll get back to that in a second....

Back to the main tank. Easily over 25 fry swimming around. At first I just added extra food (and ground some up with my finger) for them. Then I decide I want to be a loving and benevolent god to them... So I also order a jar of "powdered high protien ground shrimp fry food", and start putting a little scoop of that in twice a day to see if I can bolster them up some. All the time knowing I'll eventually have to take most out and find a home somewhere for them.... They seem to be thriving, and slowly growing. A few months in and most are around an inch long, healthy little assholes, gobbling up food and glorious poop strings behind them.

Back to the patio tank. Months later, it's still just a green swamp cube of algae, but now with water sprite growing in it as well. (For water I'd just been dumping in the condensate from the dehumidified we run on the patio, solar watering system keeps slowly draining it to water plants.. my tiny steps towards sustainable whatever.... So I decide I want to be rid of the algae. I'm going to black box it. Find an unused box big enough to fit over it completely, POOF no light. Walk away and forget about it for a week. At no point has that tank gotten any more than ambient sunlight, neglect, and water out of a dehumidifier.

Come back a week later take the box off and sure enough clear water with some weak but surviving water sprite (impossible to kill that shit). And what else?

One of the motherfucking fry from the main tank that apparently I didn't see and scooped up with the water sprite I had throw in the tank months ago.

And sure as hell, that little F-er is EASILY TWICE THE SIZE of any of his siblings back in the main tank, now as big as either of his parents. No food EVER added to the water, nothing but the aforementioned neglect and sunshine. While his siblings have been getting premium hand feeding twice a day of supposedly optimal fry food..... sunnovabitch....