120x40x50 - 8 month later

Several moths passed from when I posted my last pictures. Aquarium now is eight months old and you can see some changes in the planting. The picture above was made after last trimming. Bolbitis heudelotii and Microsorum sp are now much more grown up. You can also see that background in the middle has now much more clear space. The old Anubias leafs were cut off and new ones are visibly smaller and longer. The Taiwan moss is pretty much invisible as it was cut very short to kind of restart it and stop it from overgrowing the setup. The easy way if doing it is just to limit the feeding for the fish and they will pick up on the moss :) works. After feeding get back to normal moss is picking up again.

 The number of fish grew to 30 overall. Still lot of space for additional fellows.

120x40x50 - Day 21

Aquarium is three weeks old on the picture. I took the picture when I was changing water. The overall condition is very good. No sign of any algae in the tank. The ottos and shrimps got rid of any diatoms, it looks pretty clean all around. The only issue currently is Anubias. The rizoms are roten in mny places. I think this may be related to the whitish fungual/microbial cover that is visible on drift wood after setting up a tank. It went away pretty quickly and it looked like ottos are eating it as well. Still in places it was visible the most, Anubias rizoms are rotten and the leaves are detached from them. Not all Anubias is affected but lot of it is. I have no such effect in the other aquarium where Anubias is atached to rocks.

120x40x50 - Day 15

Days fly by and it is now already day number 15 for my tank. On day 11 I had to do trimming on Hygrophila Polysperma as it already reached the water surface. Today I will have to do some more cutting. Yesterday I checked the water condition and both ammonia and nitrite is untraceable. This allowed me to put some shimps (Caridina japonica - so called Amano Shrimp), also my four Harlequin rasboras and few new Ottocinclus. Right now everything looks really promising, the cleaning crew (shimps and ottos) made the standard diatoms grow under control and no algae is visible at the moment. Plants grow pretty nicely. Below are pictures from today.

Soil and hardscape preparation

I setup my 240L aquarium over a week ago. During the setup I made few photos of the preparation process. I started with soil, I used ADA Tourmaline BC, ADA Power Sand Special and ADA Aquasoil. First I spread Tourmaline BC on the bottom. Tourmaline is a mineral compound that looks like a black dust. It is released slowly and is electrostatic which invigorates bacteria that leaves close to the bottom in the soil. I did choose for a small path in 2/3 of the width of the aquarium, so I made sure to not put any soil there. I'll fill it later with sand. On the Tourmaline I did put around 5L of ADA Power Sand Special. I made a thicker layer where plants will be planted and almost nothing in front where it will be mostly covered by stones and wood. Power Sand Special is nutrient rich soil, kind of a garden soil, with small stones. There are different sizes of Power Sand: small, medium and large.You use it according to the size of your aquarium. In my 120cm tank I could use large or medium. In my case I had medium size. The size corresponds to the size of the stones. The stones allow for better water flow and it allows for making sure that anaerobic conditions will not easily occur. Here is the look after puting a small layer of aquasoil amazonia (new) on top of power sand. Power Sand is visible on the right hand side, left side has a cover of aquasoil on it.  

I scaped a little road, the front of the aquarium will also be filled with decorative sand. The Aquasoil should be kept moist, and it should not be left there to dry so I was watering it a bit, you can see the dark patches on it, this is the color it will have in water: very dark brown. 

When I did put the first layer of the soil in the tank, it was time for hardscape, I started with roots, as they are the skeleton also for plants. I did not plan to put many big stones, only some to make the transition between sand and planted parts more natural. I kept the proportions like 1/3 to 2/3 for the wood. I used branch wood, it is very usefull if you plan to put lots of plants attached to wood like Microsorium or Anubias. Here is the left hand side view after looking for good composition (3 different roots combined). 

And here is the right hand side. - three roots combined as well. the bottom part will be used as a skeleton for Anubias. The exposed cuttings of the wood, will be covered by plants and stones, so will be invisible for the viewer after some time.

Here is how the setup looked like when I finished setting up wood. 

When it was done I started the lengthy planting process. I had to attach around 50 plants to wood and rocks, moss to wood and plant the background. When I had all the plants attached to wood, I put the wood once again inside, this always imposes some changes in the initial design. I did put additional Aquasoil to fill in the gaps and scape a slope on the back side to expose the stem plants a bit higher behind the wood. During this process I found some other way to arrange the wood, so you can see on the picture below that the end product looked a bit different than initial scape, but the general framework is same.

Small stones cover the wood as well to keep it from getting to the surface. Branch wood will need some time to make it soaked enough to not have the willing to fly away. After some time I will remove those stones. After setup was ready I attached my two filters, one of them has full biological setup, other one contains active carbon as well to clear the water from all the chemicals etc. that could be present in wood and on the plants. It will also help to reduce colorization of water by the wood in the initial stage. This carbon will be removed after 3-4 weeks and will be replaced by biological media. CO2 was started with 2 bubbles per second. I will not fertilize the water for the next two-three weeks because if you are using Aquasoil and Power Sand a lot of nutrients will be released initially to the water column. Also what is expected in that setup is that NH3/NH4 will rise in the initial week or two, so I was making water changes every day, than every second day. Finally after three weeks the schedule should change to changing water once a week. On day 9th I had NH3/NH4 level around 1mg/l, NO2 already is balanced to 0mg/l and NO3 went down to 10mg/l. (After two days levels were: NH3/NH4: 8mg/l, NO2: 5mg/l, NO3: 120mg/l).

Algae prevention part 1 - Plants biology

There is a lot of material on the web which treats about the algae prevention in one way or another. Anyone who own an aquarium has had this problem one or more times. Algae occurrence has made many of us stop their hobby forever. I decided to put on my blog all the information I could find and learn about this topic, both to organise my knowledge and to share it with anyone interested. This will be divided into several posts. First one is about plant biology, so what do we need to know to understand what is going on in aquarium.

When you start keeping aquarium as a hobby you will soon find out where the life as a whole began. All the life you see around you is only possible due to the smallest creatures you can find: bacteria. They were the first life forms, they made our atmosphere as it is right now and so on. Without them you would not have oxygen to breath. Yes, there would be no plants as we know them if not cyanobacteria known for aquarists more as blue-green algae. Yep, that one made the big oxygen crisis as they call it and wiped out most of the life present on earth from life beginning: anaerobic bacteria. That's the past. For any aquarist cyanobacteria is a big issue mostly due to the fact that it is not an algae but bacteria, what means that killing it may kill all the beneficial bacteria as well. Back to the topic. Bacteria is very important for aquarium and its inhabitants. You have all different types of them, I covered some in the post about the nitrogen cycle. The beneficial bacteria for any planted aquarium will be one that allows our plants to have healthy growth. This includes bacteria that bound different micro elements to make them available for plants (nitrogen is one example). So what does water plant need to grow? As they say picture is worth thousand words so here is one:

As one can see there is significant part of periodic table there. So where are those bacteria in this picture? Generally plants are not able to get nitrogen as a gas from atmosphere, bacteria is used to bound nitrogen into digestible form. Same thing goes for many other molecules. Plants are using leaves and roots to retrieve nutrients from the environment. The plants in aquarium are divided into two groups: real water plants and "fake" water plants. The real water plants will get most of the nutrients from the water column through the leaves, they have small root systems and grow pretty fast under water i.e. stem plants like hygrophilia or rotala. "Fake" plants will take most through the roots, they have big root systems and grow pretty slow under water i.e. echinodorus family. Knowing the plants you have will help you identifying best way to provide the required nutrients for your plants. On the picture you can see that the nutrients are divided into four groups: structural, macro, secondary and micro elements.

1. Structural elements
Most of the plant mass is build from structural elements: carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.
Those elements are required to build the main plant structure and energy deposits: sugars. Carbon is the most important component and represents about 60% of whole dry mass and it is consumed from CO2.  Hydrogen comes from water, oxygen from one of two sources depending on availability of light. When light is provided and photosynthesis occurs, it comes from water molecules. A side effect of this process is oxygenation of water. When light is off, plants "breath" by consuming oxygen diluted in water. Fortunately plants consume less oxygen than they produce in photosynthesis, that's why we have enough of it to breath. When light is turned off and you have fish, shrimps and other inhabitants in your aquarium, it is worth to aerate water. In this way you provide enough oxygen for plants and animals.

2. Macro elements 
Another ingredients required for plant growth are macro elements. Those are nitrogen, phosphor and potassium. Macro elements are used in all metabolic processes occurring in plant.
In water environment nitrogen exists in several forms: as a diluted gas, as ammonia (NH3/NH4), nitrite (NO2), and nitrate (NO3). Plants are not able to consume nitrogen in a gas form and ammonia and nitrite are toxic. These parameters should be kept as low as possible.  The most useful form of nitrogen in aquarium is nitrate. It is produced by bacteria in nitrogen cycle.
Phosphor also can not be consumed in raw form, plants get it from phosphate (PO4). PO4 is present in most fish food as well as is produced by dying leaves etc.
Potassium  can be consumed in its raw K+ form and can be provided in several forms i.e. as a liquid fertilizer.

3. Secondary elements and micro elements
Secondary and micro elements are required as a trace elements. Those are usually available in the soil or/and may be provided with a fertilizer.
In high concentration micro elements are toxic to fish, so make sure you follow the dosing instructions provided with fertilizer.


4. Light
That is the most important element, that a plant requires to grow. Without light and structural elements photosynthesis would be impossible.

Plant growth limits
A growth of plants can be limited by any of elements described above. That makes balancing an environment very challenging. If you have high-tech tank with lots of light, CO2 fertilization etc. but your iron level is too small, plants growth will be affected, leaves will loose colour etc. The same amount of iron in low-tech tank can be more than enough as light is already limiting factor. The outcome of this complexity is a fact that till now there is no one answer about how to fertilise plants and make environment algae free. There are multiple approaches for this and those I will pick up in next posts. This means that there is either too many elements available or at least one is limiting the growth.
Main thing to know about limit growth is that in most cases if one element has to limit growth it is best to choose PO4 for it. In environments where CO2 is limited or NO3 is limiting factor, algae growth is inevitable. Cyanobacteria is in most cases related to NO3 deprivation, CO2 is responsible for may types of algae and its supply is the most tricky to set up correctly. In the next post I will explain different methods that specify how much which element should be provided in aquarium to maximise plant growth and minimise algae.

120x40x50 - Day 4

Four days after the setup. Hygrophilia is growing nicely already. The ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels are sky high (kind of usual for Amazonia) so right now changing 50% of water second day in a row.

New setup 120x40x50

Today I finished a new setup for my 120x40x50 cm aquarium. It is based mostly on epiphytic plants like Anubias barteri (barteri and nana), Bolbitis heudelotii, Microsorum sp. I went for the Jungle look and feel. The main parameters for this tank are:

• KH = 3 (50% tap water, 50% RO + minerals)
• GH = 5
• Temp (C) = 25
• PH = 6.8
• CO2 = 1 bubble per sec. using ADA Pollen Glass Beetle 50D 

 In the background there is set of different stem plants like Hygrophilia polysperma, Rotala rotundifolia green and few other species to make it more interesting. I used Taiwan moss on wood for the first time so I hope it will look good. I used Power Sand Special and Aquasoil Amazonia NEW from ADA as a substrate plus a bit of decorative sand in the front part. The hardscape consist of branch wood and manten stones.

Aquarium started on 7th April 2012.