Tank journal

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SnakeIce

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May 4, 2002
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First I'm going to look back to when I set this tank up again after moving across country. I brought with me the tank, stand, substrate, driftwood and all the equipment needed to run a planted tank. I had more time than money so I thought that I would make a tank with locally wild collected flora and fauna.

March 2011
With the tank just filled I could bring back some plants from the locations I had scouted the previous year. I managed to find Bacopa caroliniana, and a Ludwigia species. Being early in the year not much new growth was there so the plants were a bit sad looking. No matter I had something to work with.

 

SnakeIce

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1.5 months later, May 2011:

I had continued to hunt up places to collect plants and tried a few that didn't work out in my level of care. I had at this point the Bacopa, Ludwigia, two native mosses (one is a fissidens), Water plantain (Alisma subcordatum) very young plants, and an Isoetes specie. Also in the tank are a few trial plants that might have grown with more care thrown at them but I was doing low tech. I had native snails in the tank, and had difficulty getting enough of the same species to get them going until a later collection time. I had purchased some pristella tetras and some of those walmart aponegeton dry packed bulbs. The aponegetons never grew.

full tank


Young Alisma subcordatum


Will continue later, Yes I'm going for a little suspense :)
 
Last edited:

SnakeIce

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I had a little more than a year before I set the tank up to find out before I did do any collecting. The plants I found nothing against collecting where I live, and over on aquaticplantcentral I found a forum section just for talking about collecting your own plants. Some people pay money to go on a plant collecting trip to Florida each year. I will say that I exercised caution and part of why you see in the first photo such a wimpy bit of plants is that I only took a little out of the stand of plants. I was careful to see that I was only taking a few plants or cuttings out of a big group. For the fish that show up in this post I likewise did my research and found nothing that said I could not collect and keep minnows in a fish tank except that one have a fishing license to legally collect them. There are some species that are under population concern and thus prohibited, but I was able to find information on those such that those would not be found where I collected my fish (that ditch was far to warm).

September 2011:
With the plants that were in the previous post I had ran out of options to try to collect for my tank without traveling further afield. I was able to spend some money at this point so I purchased some chain sword (E. tenellus), Pearl grass (Hemiathus micranthemoides), and Lobelia cardinalis (incidentally all three are found in my state somewhere). The main change in view though is how one of those small Alisma subcordatum grew up. It is that large floating leaf plant that takes up the left third of the tank. Alisma is in the same family with Echinodorus and Sagittaria so that may be the explanation for any resemblance. Interestingly enough where I collected the Alisma are also growing some Sagitaria latifolia. I already knew by reading up on possible local plants that S latifolia is not a plant that grows submersed for any length of time, but prefers to grow emergent or as a bog plant.

Since the last picture set I had also found some baby fish in the ditch where I found the Alisma. I had to wait until they were four weeks old for them to be large enough to not get eaten by the pristella tetras. I collected a dozen+ and over the weeks following had to cull the number down to about a dozen to stop disease from spreading. They were maybe half an inch when I collected them and I had my fingers crossed in hope that I had gotten one of the common minnows that grow to only 4 or 5 inches rather than one of the ones that get 6" or more. There are a lot of similar looking minnows so even though the general coloring was there when I collected them a sure identification isn't easy especially at that size.

full tank, minnows can be seen although they are blurred due to movement. I also had some Gambusia affinis in the tank.


Alisma subcordatum floating leaves
 

SnakeIce

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It did look good at that stage. It kept growing though, more leaves, an inflorescence 2 feet tall above the tank and then leaves started to grow up out of the water.

After seeing a few get burned on the lights I chopped it to get rid of it, and that messed up the tank. I didn't want to pull the roots because they went everywhere. You could see them on the bottom of the tank going to every corner if you looked up under the stand. I had a several year period where the oxidation of all those roots made the aquasoil a bit unfriendly to plant roots and everything except the moss almost died off. Other things didn't survive the first winter after I moved here locally since the tank temperature went lower than it had previously. Then my fish were getting bigger and started uprooting things. I can't grow java fern with these fish, other plants are tolerated, but not java fern. They tear it up.

I didn't take pictures for a long time because of the algae and near complete lack of desired green in the tank.

So big jump to this spring.

April 2014:
Tank temperature has come up above 55F and stayed up enough to put some of the Ludwigia back in the tank. It didn't survive the cold temperatures in the tank during the winter. The spring creeks around here come out with a temperature of about 57 or 58F so it survives there. All that survived from the previous picture is Rotalla rotundifolia, H micranthemoides, fissidens and the other moss. I had to arrange the drift wood to give cover for the creek chub now that they are larger and more skittish. Before I put the wood down that way they would crash around making the water cloudy with all their stirring the bottom.





The only thing that liked the cold was the fissidens


A couple more posts still to make to bring this to current.
 

SnakeIce

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I'd intended to take more photos, but because of how the fish have made it their tank visually the look hasn't inspired me to take photos. I don't have any pictures of the tank since then and now I've got a cyano algae problem.

I have only one of the creek chubs left and it's been that way for about a year now. Turns out the adults are territorial and the rest have all been chased to the point of jumping out. The last two that were in the tank each jumped out and I put them back in and that settled them down for a bit. But they recovered and started arguing and the next time one jumped out I didn't find it in time.

So the one Creek Chub that is left is 5.5 inches. He has torn up and killed the chain sword I bought, I can't get the java fern piece attached because he rips it off or tears the leaves up if it is attached well enough. The unheated tank gets colder at times than some kinds of plants can survive so I'm limited in what will grow and what the fish will let grow.

I've figured out how to deal with these fish so I don't cause them to release the schreckstoff warning chemical. So most of the time now they are not run by predator avoidance behaviors. But being alone the one left seemed very bored.

I purchased some wild color rosie red feeders knowing that most of them would get eaten. The 3 strongest out of 8 had lived with him for months but I had a rough week at work and didn't remember to feed as often and he ate one of them. So now the two that are left and the Creek Chub are all hiding because of the schreckstoff released by the one he ate.

So although it sounds funny I have a predator that scared himself because he ate a tank mate. It takes two to three 50% water changes to bring the alarm chemical levels down to only slightly noticeable behavior changes.
 

FreshyFresh

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Just curious where you keep this tank that is can get as cool as 55degF? My basement doesn't even get that cool.

Cool looking tank. Love the to read about long term setups.
 

SnakeIce

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May 4, 2002
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In an unheated above ground room of an uninsulated house. Couldn't afford to heat that room at the time. So the tank would get down into the 40s and dip into the upper 30s rarely each winter. This year we have a gas wall heater in that room we didn't have before so the temps average about 65ish in the tank.
 
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