A few days ago I introduced the Bermuda inspired aquascape in my 33g cube. Here is a bit more of a progression from hardscape to more/less completion from July to October.

Hardscape – July 6 , 2013

The hardscape is quite barren, but I really wanted the represent the sandy beach.

Just Planted – July 6, 2013

After planting, the original goal was to continue to leave a lot of exposed sand, with just minimal scrubby plants lining some of the rocks.

A few weeks of growth – July 27, 2013

I added more varieties of plants to provide lots of different textures from the plants. This seems to be fairly representative of the dunes that have lots of different flora.

Several months of growth – October 13 , 2013

The plants all grew in, reclaiming most of the sand. While this is not necessarily the original intent of the scape, I like how it’s evolved and like the mixture of different plants. I never completely groomed the plants to create that final photo, but enjoyed it nevertheless. It is still up and running today, but is even more overgrown. I’ll post an update soon.

Back in April I had the pleasure to travel to Bermuda to speak to the Bermuda Fry-Angle Aquarium Society. While I was there, my wife and I took some time to site see, walk the beaches, etc. I noticed that the beaches are all lined with a gray sandstone, with scrub brush and palms above them. Many of the scrub is mixed in with dead underbrush, bleached white by the sun.

Up close, the sandstone really looks similar to basalt and the underbrush looks a lot like sandblasted manzanita. I had all of these materials in my fishroom

, so I decided to put together a Bermuda-inspired scape. I mainly used Syngonanthus anomalous ‘Madiera’ with some Staurogyne ‘Porto Velho’ in the foreground.

This picture was taken back in July. In a future post

, I’ll show how it’s evolved and grown in…

After battling BBA for a couple months, I think it’s finally starting to subside as the plants grow in my 50G aquarium. Shortly after setting this tank up, the combination of intense lighting, too few plants, and a couple CO2 outages resulted in black brush algae to cover most of the rocks, and many of the plant leaves. I also had a brief bought with green algae, which I believe was due to an insufficient bacteria colony to help break down the organics in the tank.

Recall that this aquarium was basically started afresh , removing very old Aquasoil and replacing it with Seachem Flourite Black. I also made a couple of equipment changes , adding an inline CO2 atomizer on my filter outflow and a surface skimmer on the inflow. This has helped a longtime problem with surface scum. I’m planning to keep up on the manual removal of BBA until it’s gone. Let me know what you think of the aquascape in the comments.

This week I rescaped my 75G angelfish aquarium. I wanted to open up the tank a little bit, while still preserving some of the classic anglefish biotypes by including sword plants as key focal points to the scape. I reused several plants from the previous scape, namely the Cryptocoryne pontederiifolia and Anubias barteri var. ‘nana petite’.

This is the first aquascape that I’ve done using Brightwell Aquatic’s FlorinVolcanit substrate. I completely emptied the aquarium of all of the previous substrate, leaving only the eggcrate to prevent rocks from directly contacting the glass bottom.

Then

, I placed the hardscape into the aquarium. I choose to use several pieces of manzanita laying over quartz/slate rock, to simulate a fallen branch in the river, wedge between a rocky riverbank. I wanted to simulate a stream bed where the dying tree branches gave life to other aquatic plants, namely the Kleiner Prinz Sword plants.

Lastly, I filled in the foreground with white pool filter sand. I did plant some Staurogyne sp. ‘Porto Velho’ in the sand that I hope will break it up a bit, but hope to keep most of the plain foreground intact, as it provides a nice contrast to the darker wood. Overall, I’m looking forward to seeing how this new aquascape progresses as the plants grow in. Comments welcome!

I rescaped my 50G aquarium this weekend, replacing a lot of wood from the previous scape with some new rock that I picked up from another GWAPA member. The main things that I wanted to achieve with this aquascape were to try out Seachem Flourite Black and to feature Gratiola viscidula, which is planted all throughout the rocks.

Obviously

, the plants all need to grow in now to make the whole thing look more natural. The plants are Ranalisma rostrata, Gratiola viscidula, Staurogyne ‘Low Grow’, Juncus repens, Hygrophila ‘Araguaia’

, Blyxa japonica, Ludwigia arcuata, and Hygrophila odora.