Thanks! A couple of reasons why I am trying this...first of all, I love red devils and I have been able to keep them in a tank with an undergravel filter but have never been able to keep them in a tank with plants. They are nature's bull dozers! Secondly I am going to be building a home in a couple of years and I want to put some large - i.e. built into the wall, 1000+ gallon aquariums in the basement and I want, if feasible to use plants to purify the water, to develop my own biotope. I want to begin dabbling with this to develop a sense of what I am getting into. I have also considered installing a second glass wall as a divider, running the length of the aquarium and about 2-3 inches from the back. The gravel in this section would be free from the undergravel plates and would be optimized for growing plants, and the light would be optimized for growing plants also...then putting some plastic plants in the foreground siliconed to something that would keep them away from the 'dozers. I would probably also put a pleco in with the plants to keep the glass clean...can anyone suggest some aggressive plants to put in this area? I have thought about water hyacinths. I live in northern china - about the same latitude as southern wyoming - and if their seeds were to get into the local water supply the plants would not make it through the winter...actually, it might not be a bad idea to plant them in the local rivers for a season to clean them up. Plan B would be to construct a shallow tank on top of the lights with a sloping tray and water pumped up from the tank below pouring down on the tray where the algae should be growing. My preference, though, is to have everything in one tank so that there are no extra pumps to wear out, hoses to leak, tanks to clean, etc.
Thots?
T
