Hi, I hope everyone’s good?
Been an extremely long time since I made an update, life’s extremely busy now I have a little one to look after.
The tank has changed drastically since the last update. The tank had become extremely overgrown and quite frankly a mess. The planting was a combination of echinodorus, nymphaea and aponogeton which had become huge. I couldn’t see the fish and the tank was full of algae due to the flow being hampered by the plant mass. A rescape was definitely in order. My original plan was to have two islands of hardscape and plants with a sort of valley in between however due to the plants I chose this disappeared pretty quickly. All the swords, what I thought was all of the lily’s and the aponogeton went. I was left with crypts and java fern to play with. None of these grow too tall so my originally plan of an open valley should hopefully remain. I’ve had a rogue lily pop up at the back but I think it looks quite nice as long as I keep on top of keeping it a manageable size. I’ve also added some rounded cobbles to give the tank a more riverine feel.
As you can see from the full tank shot, fish stocking has also changed. Some fish have been moved on and some I have unfortunately lost. The little one is very interested in the tank but some of the stock I had previously would be terrified if you approached the tank.I wanted something that would be bold, colourful and not scared of people approaching. I decided rainbowfish would be my best bet. There are not any species in here anymore that I would class as blackwater species so I’ve upped the tds to just over the 100 mark to keep both the rainbows and the remaining species happy. I’ve selected a mix of species, there’s a fair sized group of melonataenia boesemani, a few
Glossolepis pseudoincisus, melonataenia mairasi and chilatherina alleni Red wapoga to add to my existing tetras and catfish.The boesemani shoal may need to be thinned out in the future as they’ll end up a pretty sizeable fish however they grow extremely slowly and for now everything is fine. The rainbows appear to be doing well and the species that have remained are doing well with the slightly harder water.
One benefit with the slightly harder water is all of my crypts have exploded in growth. They survived previously but never thrived or spread. Now most species are throwing runners everywhere and growth is very healthy. I’m happy with how the tank has turned out and it should be more manageable going forwards with the plants I have chosen.
I’ll try not to leave it so long before my next post and will try and keep you updated with the tank!
Cheers