My first aquarium III

My third first aquarium happened after I was at a dinner some eighteen months ago, and there was a vase with a betta on every table with instructions that someone should adopt the fish. My girlfriend knew I used to have aquariums, and challenged me to take the fish home. Resistance was futile. So, the next day, in mid-September of 2014, it was off to my local pet store, where I acquired a Aqueon Cue5, a 5-gallon "nano" tank - a little setup that was complete with aquarium, LED light, and filter, and the heater was the only thing I added. The first heater was no good, and I found that the pet store underestimated the amount of heat I needed, for temperature swings in my old-line NYC apartment can go from 55 at night to highs of 75 by day in winter, and a small heater would not do the trick, so in the end I settled for a 50W heater, and that can handle the load.

I added some gravel and some plants, and of course I got some food, and there I was, establishing a serious home for my betta friend... I even got a name for him MJF, My Jesus Fish, in honor of Mike Lemieux' book Hey Dude, Where's My Jesus Fish. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and in what was possibly a case of new tank syndrome, about two weeks later there were some symptoms that no one could explain, and within about two days, Mr. MJF was no more. I gave it some time, but I ended up getting a Mr. MJF II, who looked exactly like the first one and has now been with me for one and a half years already.

The picture on the left was Mr. MJF II about a year ago, at a time when I had my initial gravel substrate. The picture on the right is him in the hunting position, after I switched to Fluval Stratum for a substrate, and had allowed tubifex to become established in the tank, and he loves hunting those worms. By that time I also had a dark background of a picture of some aquarium plants.

Equipment

In short, it has become an ongoing experiment, in very short order after I got the tank I added CO2 injection, using both the Nutrafin Natural Plant system, which generates CO2 by fermentation, and is pretty nifty for a small tank like this, but during the day I also supplement the CO2 usually with one shot in the AM from my Fluval Mini Pressurized 20g CO2 kit. The logic of CO2 really is that you need it by day and not really by night, because at night the plants produce CO2, so the fermentation system provides the base load, and the manual operation of the pressurized CO2 provides some "peak load" during daylight time.

Pretty soon after I set up this tank initially, I did not like the little filter, and replaced the small Aqueon Quietflow filter that came with it with an API Superclean 5-20, which can be throttled down to the flow rate you want. It is an excellent filter, very flexible, and I've had excellent experience with it. I added a Fluval Edge sponge to it in order to prevent too many inverts to get sucked into the filter, or even small snails (I have an MTS population).

With my preference for plants I was not satisfied with the original light either, and for a while I added some extra lighting at midday by means of a Deep Blue Solarflare Micro 3 Watt LED, which is excellent for that purpose. However after about a year the LEDs on the original light began failing, and I went shopping for a better light. I found one that I absolutely love, the Nemolight Aquafresh 18 Watt light, which has a built-in timer function and the option to run a night light, which I do. This light could possibly handle up to a 20 gallon tank, so I run the day cycle at about half capacity, but that works like a charm, and I no longer need to run the Solarflare for extra lighting. It has to be the best aquarium light I have ever owned.

Plants and substrate

Now you wonder, is all that worth it? Well, to give you one example, out of my little tank I've been donating about one plant a month back to the aquarium store, that's how well my plants are doing, which means that there's always one that's outgrowing the tank, and that's the one I donate to the store, but then after that, I can trim as I please and mold the plants to fit the tank. So it is a living environment with a whole variety of plant growth. The plants are doing much better after removing the original gravel, and switching to Fluval Stratum substrate. For a while the micro swords had some problem staying anchored, but after a month or two of continuous replanting, their root system is growing strong enough they no longer get uprooted, not even by the Malaysian Trumpet Snails (MTS) burrowing in the substrate. For a while the betta was uprooting them also by trying to wiggle through the plants... but even that problem disappeared after the roots started to grow in. I do use some plant nutrition, both Seachem Flourish tabs, and after water changes some API leafzone.

The upshot

I guess, this is the third time for me to get into the fish hobby, hence the name of this blog, more about the second and first time later. Increasingly, I realize plants were always as important as fish in my book, but this time around I am going even further, for I became more interested in an ecological aquarium, and especially after reading Matt Owens' book: An Alternative Aquarium: A Robust Habitat, I became newly inspired to go in an ecologically balanced direction, and for one thing I introduced inverts, and for now in lieu of a refugium I have a 5 gallon pail with lucky bamboo and the original gravel, and from that the tank is getting live food about once a week or so, and some tubifex definitely are staying in the tank. I did not follow Matt's advice to collect my own inverts, but I bought them from a company called Niles Biological. For now, I have Tubifex, Rotifers, Copepods, Planaria, Gammarus, and Daphnia.- the Malaysian Trumpet Snails I inherited from the pet store with some plants. Net, net, I rarely have any algae issues, so that is working fine. And some live food will definitely help the health of the occupants.
The trouble began in earnest when an old friend from Connecticut called me a few months ago and mentioned a friend of his, whose son was moving out and left a 29 gallon tank with a stand behind. Did I want it? To be continued...