I am concluding my comparison of the soil and worm-casting-based substrates. The picture below sums it all up — neither tank met or exceeded my expectations. Now, in this case, the winner appears to be the wormstrate, but in truth, there is no winner, and the biggest loser is me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to really conduct a fair experiment for these two tanks. I rarely dosed any Excel, and the lights themselves probably made the tanks too warm to successfully grow many plants. Factor in my travels recently, and it adds up to a lot of neglect. I’m amazed that the wormstrate was able to maintain a growing carpet of Marsilea quadrifolia. The soil tank on the other hand, saw nearly all of the plant life disappear. The only plant that really did well in that tank was Limnophila aquatica (now removed), which grows in just about anything. I want to make clear that this is not an indictment of soil substrates because I know many GWAPA members who have absolutely amazing results with soil. It’s only a failure of execution on my behalf. So, I’m tearing down the soil substrate tank, and am finally going to set up my 2.5G aquascape for the GWAPA contest. I have until October 1st to make it into something fabulous!

At GWAPA’s June 2008 meeting, we invited Bob Bock, past president of the North American Native Fishes Association, to speak about native sunfish. While this doesn’t sound much like a “plant topic,” we asked Bob to be sure to let us know which fish throughout his presentation would be suitable for a nicely aquascaped tank. Otherwise, since many American aquarists are unfamiliar with fishes in their backyard waterways, we felt it was a beneficial topic regardless.

The theme of Bob’s presentation consisted of comparing how sunfish, though unrelated to cichlids, exhibit rather similar behaviors. They are both intelligent fishes, care for their young, feed by sight, and are widely distributed throughout their areas. Conversely, sunfish have far fewer species, are solely predatory in diet, and don’t exist below some portions of Mexico. Bob then proceeded to discuss in detail many of the species within the Lepomis genus of sunfish.

One of the species that I had been looking forward to hear about was the Pumpkinseed sunfish, or Lepomis gibbosus. A beautiful fish (shown above), it is unfortunately not very well suited for a planted aquarium because it grows a tad bit too large, and uproots plants to nest. It can also be quite agressive, and thus would require much larger tank sizes.

A better suggestion might be the Longear sunfish (above), which is a medium-sized sunfish, just as beautiful, and can be kept more managebly in aquariums. Bob also mentioned how Longear males develop a lump on their heads with age similar to the flowerhorn cichlid.

Bob also mentioned another nice aquarium dwarf sunfish called the Blackbanded Sunfish, or Enneacanthus chaetodon, which he keeps several. Unfortunately for me, these are protected fish, and Bob had to obtain a permit to collect and breed them. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the presentation today, and hope to sometime collect and keep a few species of native fishes.

Last weekend, my family took our annual trip across the state for a long weekend at Ocean City, MD. Along the way, my wife and I tried to get in as many nature-related things that we could because, well, we love the outdoors!

On the way over, we detoured near Salisbury, MD to do some hiking and biking at Pocomoke River State Park. I’ve never been to this park before, but as soon as we pulled up we knew we found a great place to spend an afternoon. The river itself was covered with lily pads, a few of them just starting to send up yellow flower buds.

In addition, the parks contains some of the northern most bald cyrus trees on the east coast. I know that there are ones a tad further north in Delaware, but the sign said this is their northern limit. Nevertheless, I always enjoy checking out the various knees that pop up from the water.

The only downside of our trip there were more mosquitoes and deer ticks than we would have cared for. I suppose that would explain why we saw so many lizards and toads on the trails.

Once in Ocean City, one of my favorite pasttimes is crabbing for Maryland Blue Crabs using twine and chicken necks. The crabs are definitely down in recent years, so while the crabbing wasn’t fantastic, the sunset definitely was!

Walking along the beach, we came across another kind of crab, scurrying quite invisibly across the sand. This guy (above) was no more than 2-3 inches across, but ran like lightning. I’m glad I got him to standstill long enough for a photo.

Finally, we spent another day clamming on Assateague Island, and came home with our legal limit of clams for quite the feast of fresh steamed clams, fried clamstrips, and New England clam chowder. One of the unique things about Assateague Island is that it is home to a wild colony of horses leftover of several shipwrecks a few centuries ago. (This story is disputed, saying that the horses came from early barrier island settlers, but shipwrecks sound more exciting.) The horses have adapted to the harsh environment of the island and thrive, having to be thinned down to 150 during the famous channel swim to Chincoteague every year.

We had a great little excursion, but I’m now ready to get back to focusing on my aquariums at home.

Before our trip, everyone we talked to told us, “make sure you schedule enough time on Cape Breton Island.” Some folks told us that we could spend our entire two weeks there. We ended up spending 4-5 days there, and probably could have spent much longer.

We drove over the bridge, and headed toward Mabou, which is about 30 minutes from the National Park. Mabou, itself is a small, but cute town, and has plenty of hiking trails. Not only that, but we found out that just about every town along the coast, has absolutely gorgeous views of the ocean.

Not only that, but the landscape itself is different from the rest of Nova Scotia because it is highlands, with huge cliffs, falling off into the sea. The rolling hills themselves are forested, or are at least covered with greenery.

Once you make it to the start of the famous Cabot Trail, you soon after enter the park. The first day, we went straight to the also famous, Skyline Trail, which leads you to the top of the mountain, which has a view that pictures can’t describe. (I tried below.)

Much to our satisfaction, along the trail we first saw numberous piles of moose poo, and then finally came upon this young male moose. All of the park literature about moose states that you should keep your distance, and wait for the moose to continue on its way. Well, we came upon the moose, pulled out the telephoto lens, and got our snapshots. Waited 5 minutes. Waited 10 minutes. Apparently, we had intruded on this moose’s dinner hour, and he had no plans to cut it short. Eventually, we had to go around him and continue on our way.

As night drew close, we decided to spend the night in the park, camping under our small backpacking tent. The campsite was right on the water, giving us a beautiful night sky. Had we been there a couple months later, we would have had a good chance of seeing whales out in the distance, but instead we got to watch some birds dive bombing the water for fish.

We hiked a few more trails in the park, encountering a black bear, several carnivorous plants, and a moose cow and calf. We eventually left the park to make our way around the rest of the island. One day, we drove to Meat Cove, a town in no-mans-land at the top of the island. We read that whales are frequently sighted up there. We didn’t see any whales, but we got the great shot below.

We continued around the rest of the island, stopping at many places to take more photos, and eat a lot of fantastic seafood. I hope to get back up to Nova Scotia sometime in the future to spend even more time up on Cape Breton Island.

Admittedly, I’ve been milking my Nova Scotia pictures for all the blog posts I can get out of them. Let me fill you in on why that is. Exhibit A (for algae), see below:

Apparently, it was a bad decision for my to hang some house plants above my tank. At the time, I figured that they would help with high humidity levels, and add a nice accent to the room. Well, what I didn’t realize is that the hanging baskets leaked. I instructed my “tank watcher” to water the plants while I was away in Nova Scotia. Well, apparently, much of that water dripped through the fertilizer laden pots, and straight into my 40G tank.

Multiply that by 2 weeks worth of time, lots of light and additional dosing, and I came home to algae soup. I literally filled a quart container with just algae. I did a huge water change, and am still pulling quite a bit of algae from the tank. I’ll probably end up just tearing the whole thing down, and redoing it. It’s time for a new aquascape anyways! At least the fish don’t seem to be affected by the algae bloom.