I snapped a photo of my Mini-S nano aquarium this morning. The Hemianthus callitrichoides is growing in well, however, I’m scratching my head a little bit regarding the difference in appearance of the HC on the right side verses the left side of the tank. The left side looks fantastic, with lush, green growth. The right side is growing, but many of the leaves are brown or even decaying. There’s definitely more flow on the right side of the tank, but usually that’s a good thing.

The stuff on the right side probably doesn’t have as much substrate to root itself into as on the left, so I’ve added a little bit of powder-type ADA Amazonia on the right. We’ll see if that helps improve the help. Otherwise, comments welcome!

Over the holidays, I decided to fill my Mini-S aquarium back up, and implement a new aquascape. It had been sitting dry for several months, as the room it once resided in got renovated, and I didn’t want to fiddle with the tank elsewhere during those renovations. This time, I decided to do a simplistic iwagumi-style aquascape with HC as the only plant. It took me about a week of tinkering to find the right collection of rocks, and to position them as seen below. I ordered 4 pots of Hemianthus callitrichoides from Green Leaf Aquariums, and planted it a few days later.

I snapped this picture a few minutes ago while feeding the fish in the rest of my aquariums. This is about 2-3 weeks after planting, and the only thing I’ve been dosing is Seachem Excel for a carbon source. Otherwise, I’m currently relying on the nutrients in new ADA Aquasoil (regular Amazonia and powder forms). I’d love to hear some feedback on the hardscape arrangement as it stands now.

My 50G aquarium is now an overgrown jungle of Blyxa japonica and Blyxa aubertii. There’s a little bit of Ludwigia arcuata and Limnophila sp. ‘Vietnam’ mixed in there as well with Narrow-leaf Java Fern carving out a place too.

On one hand, I’m really happy with the tremendous growth, as most of the tank is algae free minus the Eheim spraybar and a few older leaves. Also, the bristlenosed plecos that I have in here are continuing to churn out more fry than I know what to do with. The Apistogramma have a pretty good idea of what to do with them, however, but I still seem to have all females, and no breeding there.

On the other hand, the huge mass of plant growth has completely consumed the aquascape. Below you can see what the aquarium looked like shortly after planting. All of that same driftwood is still in the tank, but you wouldn’t know it, would you?

So, now I need to decide whether to simply hack back the plant growth to a more reasonable state or to rescape it altogether. I imagine that this will largely depend on how many plants I pickup at the GWAPA meeting next weekend!

We’ve started to get some cooler evenings as we’re days away from the start of Autumn. Therefore, I decided to begin the process of shutting down my raised brick pond for the year by netting out my mosquito controlling white cloud mountain minnows and bringing them indoors.

I had put a dozen outside in the spring, but so far I’ve netted about 20 adult sized fish, and quite a few tiny fry (2-3 mm). I’m going to try to collect as many of the tiny fry as possible and raise them in an extremely densely planted aquarium inside. I love putting fish outdoors, as when I bring them back inside, I almost always multiply the number of fish I have, and the colors on the fish are fantastic from all of the live food they’ve hunted down over the summer.

All of these minnows are going into my 12G bookshelf aquarium, which has a large colony of orange-eyed-blue-tiger-shrimp in it, plus about 50 juvenile bristlenosed plecos. This is a low-tech tank without any CO2 added and minimal fertilization, but there has a noticeable increase in plant growth since I’ve added the baby plecos and minnows. I guess they’re producing just enough waste to spur the plants on.

The baby plecos are also progressing pretty well. I’m keep their small bellies round and full by feeding them a mixture of veggie pellets, with earthworm or shrimp protein foods added 1-2X a week. Of course, I just noticed a brand new spawn of bristlenose in my 50G aquarium, so I’m overflowing a little bit with these fish at the moment.

Nevertheless, my 12G bookshelf tank is becoming one of my favorite aquariums to sit and watch. The bottom is always moving with shrimp and plecos scavenging about, and now the white cloud mountain minnows are constantly active in the upper water column. Comments welcome!

There comes a time when you have to chose which is more important to you, the fish or the aquascape. In the last scape I had in my 50g aquarium, I didn’t provide enough caves for my bristlenose plecos to occupy, so they took it upon themselves to dig underneath the rocks, building their own caves. After walking into my fish room enough times, only to witness muddy water, I decided that the fish have made their point, and a new aquascape was in order.

I pulled out the rocks, replacing them with hollow pieces of African bogwood. I also elevated enough pieces to provide small caves without digging. Replanting with just Blyxa aubertii, B. japonica, and Narrow-leaf Java Fern, I kept the scape pretty simplistic. I reused the sand path in the old scape, purposely allowing it to become contaminated with aquasoil, to achieve a more natural look. Overnight, so far no digging! Comments welcome!