I saw this video on the front page of digg today, hilarious!
Cat vs. Aquarium – watch more funny videos
…not aquarium related, but seeing this reminds me of an older cat splat classic:
Three years ago I crossed the threshold from algae grower to plant grower when I bought a CO2 system and found an effective way to inject CO2. (I already had a power compact light, which was probably causing my algae problems, but whatever.) Now I had the whole package, CO2 and light, and that was a great thing, but according to the timeless saying, “mo money, mo problems” I suddenly had a new problem on my hands: plants growing out of control. The Hygrophila Polysperma I had at the time started growing an inch a day!
It’s a good problem to have, but I couldn’t find much information about how to control plant growth through trimming, particularly when you’re trying to make them look better than they were before you hacked them to pieces! So I decided to write a series of articles that I call: “Aquarium Plant Trimming Techniques 101.” Can you guess what it’s about? Well I’ll tell you: How and when to use your scissors to keep your plants healthy and looking good in the long term. In this series I’ll tell you everything I know about trimming plants, and each article will cover one category of plant: Stem, Rosette, Creeping, Moss, Mass, and Rhizome.
The sand border in my 46 gallon tank is holding strong, and today I figured out an easy way to clean the sandy area up front. If I place my palm against the glass and flap it hard enough, sand and debris will be pushed outward in all directions. This is great for a couple reasons. First because it reveals fresher, whiter sand. But even better, it pushes the older and discolored (green dust algae!) sand into the undergrowth of the foreground plants and blurs the line between my sand and flourite, making it look more natural.
I’ve had brush algae in one of my 46 gallon tank for over 3 years now. It’s one of those algae that are just about impossible to get rid of completely, and it’s recently come back in my 46 gallon tank. It can do well in almost any condition, including ideal conditions. I’ve only found 2 ways to control brush algae:
Siamese Algae Eater
I bought a school of young SAEs to control my first Brush Algae outbreak and they cleaned the tank of all visible BBA within a few weeks. They kept the algae completely out of sight for a long while, but as they got close to full size they started to prefer the other foods I was feeding the other fish. Even though they were eating more prepared foods, they continued to keep the BBA spotty and trimmed. I recently donated the last of my batch back to the LFS and have gained a new appreciation for the job they were doing, as the BBA has come back as strong as ever.
Flourish Excel
Seachem’s Carbon additive is meant to be a fertilizer, so they can’t comment on its uses as an algaecide. They probably also don’t want to comment on how it can also melt certain plants, but there’s no doubt that it can have a significant effect on a tank riddled with BBA.
To use Flourish Excel to control BBA, the idea is to expose the BBA to as high a concentration as possible. The best way to do this is to take whatever the BBA is anchored to out of the water and mist it down with a spray bottle. If that’s not possible, you can use a syringe or pipette to spot treat the BBA in the tank. The 3rd method, which I used in my 46 gallon tank recently, is to overdose the tank. Some people may object to this, but I’m an experimenter, so I have dumped as much as 4 times the recommended dosage into my tanks and have not had problems with it harming my fish or invertebrates. (Think: one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand while pouring…) I can also tell you that it’s amazingly effective, even on horrendous outbreaks. It even works fast. Within 2 days the algae will visibly change color, I’ve seen both blue and red while it was dying, and within a week it will be a dull white color. The downside to this treatment is that the algae isn’t removed from the tank, so it’ll be up to you to reach in there yourself and physically pull each tuft out. Not fun, but I’m doing a little bit each week during my water changes and am almost done. As always with aquariums, a little time once a week is all it takes!
OK, it’s just over a month since I replaced the glass on my 46 gallon, and here is where I’m at today:
1 month after starting the tank I cut the border to size
I didn’t trim the border until JUST before this picture was taken, and I also just put down a fresh layer of sand when this pic was taken. So up until now the border has been above the sand/Flourite levels by a good inch or so, which did a perfect job at keeping Flourite out of the sand and vice versa.
In this time, the Flourite which was originally sloped upward towards the back, has settled a bit which raised its level in the front slightly. So it’s a good thing that I waited a while to trim the border down, because if I had done it right from the beginning, it would already be a nightmare to keep the Flourite out of the sand.
Also, that 1 inch artificial dam collected a LOT of garbage in my foreground carpet plants and fouled them up pretty badly. I was mostly unaware of this because they were blocked from my view (by the border!). This was definitely a case of “out of sight out of mind” because I know that’s a common problem with carpet plants, I just couldn’t see them and didn’t think about that.
So now I’ve trimmed the border just above the line that the Flourite has settled to and added more sand to raise it to that level. My preference is for the sand to spill over into the Flourite but not vice versa, and plants to grow slightly into the sand, creating a completely natural looking effect. So far so good, more updates in time…
