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Marine refugee begins odyssey

B

BugFriendlyGardener

Seedling
Joined
18 Jun 2011
Messages
9
Hi to everyone out there.
I am a 48 yr old marine keeper of 21 years....i have NEVER kept freshwater. Remember in 1990, they would say " oh, you shouldn't keep marines if you've never kept tropicals".....Rubbish.

Anyway, I want a change. Partly boredom; partly financial. Anyway, low tech , planted Amazon biotope is the plan. Only just starting to sell up marine system and reading up avidly.


I'm a professional wildlife-gardener is you're wondering ....

cheers, Jeff
 
Most amazonian plants need co2 injection of some kind or another generally speaking, also, most Amazonian biotopes have no vegetative growth at all!

Good luck, not may low-techers out there and even fewer coming over to the side of the light!
 
OK thanks. it is early days on the reading front. I've seen George Farmers blackwater Rio Negro write up; then another couple of articles; Diana Walstad's book arrived y'day....
I was one of the pioneers for Marine Miracle Mud ecosystems and ran without a skimmer for most of my marine life, so happy to challenge to boundaries !
 
Why not do marine planted tanks? Seagrasses and macros?

Get your gardening on with sea veggies?

There are fewqer wars going on inside a planted tanks, things get along better and pest are a little easier to combat. Ferts, sediment etc are used more so and more pruning and gardening is involved, but you can go the other way there if you chose by selection of different methods/and species.

I will say you can produce far more plants and livestock vs the Reef and marine tank. And for much less $ and input of labor.

I'm not a skimmer fan personally, I use the macros for most everything.
ATS's are also awesome for marine systems depending on the goals and engineering applications.

I think since you are formerly marine, you know the cost issues.......and I'd assume you know about refugiums, all the testing, and of course, CO2 and Kalk reactors.

Low tech is hard to define in the planted tank genre. I'm not quite sure what it means.
I tend to define it by CO2 enrichment or not.

You can gain a great deal by using CO2 however.
This is true for soil or ADA aqua soil based tanks or the non CO2 methods.

Ca++ and Alk are not much issue, we will add some Mg++ and Ca++ and K+ as an all in one mix to booster GH.....but these can be all over the place and still have excellent growth.

Sediment + water column fertilizers work the best together, vs trying to promote just one location over the other. Plants will take from both locations, so it makes sense to do so. The same is true for terrestrial ornamental plants, most are grown with sand a bark media for the roots and then fertigated over the leaves(about 90% of production is done this way in California, about 5-7 Billion USD$ per year). Not just an aquatic plant trait FYI.

A good article to read carefully:
http://www.tropica.com/advising/technic ... light.aspx

Read this a few times slowly, make sure you understand the figures well.
I think this will help put things together much better.

Regards,
Tom Barr
 
Hi all,
Hi Geoff, as the others have said welcome, I think you will find this is a very informative forum. I'm very interested in Gardens, Wildlife and Ecology as well, but I haven't managed to make it a full time profession.

cheers Darrel
 
UP and running as of y''day after summer hols and a family death delayed things............

Tank is 60"x18"x22". Substrate 1" John Innes no3 under 1 1/2" play sand.
Lighting : 4 x 54W T5
Filtration. Sump with about 10KG Alfagrog

CO2 ...... I was going to go "low-tech". The following advice from a professional aquarium maintainer....

"Regarding the CO2; I think you can get too involved in some of the science associated with fish keeping. Ironic coming from me as I'm a biologist, but for example: I put one of the basic units designed for a 100L tank on a 260L tank just to see the effect on the tank, liquids were already being used. The difference it made to the plants was unbelievable: within 2 weeks some Cryptos that had always been pale green turned lush dark green, some Hygro rosanervis which had been struggling totally transformed into perfect pink tipped specimens. The amount of CO2 added by the little unit was enough to make the plants look exactly how they should, so in my opinion to go hi-tech and expensive on the CO2 set was pointless. I'm sure some many fish geeks would challenge this, but if it works it works. I have since duplicated this approach on tanks up to 300L with the same success.
The unit is the Tetra CO2 Optimat,"

So, cheap CO2 it is.

Planted y'day with just 3 species : 1 mother Echinodorus; c 150 Echinodorus Tenellus & c150 stems of Red Cabomba.

Will mature and wait for plants to grow on well before introducing fish. Just 4 shoals planned - Marbled Hatchets; Sterba Corys; Rummynose Tetra (40) and a pencilfish tba
 
I will probably use two units. If my advisor has seen such results using one on a 260 litre system and a 300l. I'm happy to experiment.
He looks after 119 aquariums (!) so happy to bow to his experience.
 
BugFriendlyGardener said:
I will probably use two units. If my advisor has seen such results using one on a 260 litre system and a 300l. I'm happy to experiment.
He looks after 119 aquariums (!) so happy to bow to his experience.
Click to expand...

No offense but he doesn't seem to know much about co2.
 
Perhaps you could ask your friend to join this forum :)

I would be interested to hear his views on planted tanks..

Generally speaking - with a tank of your size you would need a "full on pressurised C02 system" but even then - as the overflow would add to the gas loss, you would need to really pump in the gas to avoid algae issues!!
I use a sump on my tank as I like the system however I also use quite a lot of gas. :?
keep us informed....
 
BugFriendlyGardener said:
I'm a professional wildlife-gardener is you're wondering...
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff
Welcome to UKAPS 8) What do you do as a wildlife-gardener? I'm sure your existing experience in gardening will be transferable to aquatic gardening :thumbup:
 
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