(if you would like to see the original aquarium setup post, click here)
Three months have passed now since I began my aquarium in January. I have checked in on it occasionally, but for the most part I’ve been away at school. Despite my fears that the tank would become a cloudy mass of dead plants and snail shit, it is actually thriving. The set and forget method actually worked! Here is what the tank looks like today:
There have been a few notable editions since my original post. The bushy pine tree thing growing behind the rock is hornwort. It’s not actually rooted into the gravel back there. In fact, it doesn’t have any roots at all. It’s a floating plant that you could probably find in any standing body of water in New England. Back in early February, I was afraid that I didn’t have enough plants, so a vigorously growing floater like hornwort is a great plant for filling in space and suck up extra nutrients. The plant you see in the above image is actually not the original batch of hornwort that I purchased.
Sometime at the end of January, I visited my local pet supplier in search of plants. They had some brown looking hornwort in an axolotl tank. The axolotls were cute, but the hornwort itself was a bit disgusting. After searching my local waterways in search of wild hornwort for hours to no avail, however, the pet store plants seemed like my only options. Unfortunately, this specimen did not work out. The brown coloration only grew more sickly over the coming days, and it eventually shed all of its needles and died, leaving the floor of my tank a sludgy mess. The fact that I was dosing WAAYYY too much ammonia at this time might have also contributed to the fallout… oops. Thankfully, a friend of a friend happened to have a bunch of hornwort in their own tank and graciously sent me some. I would like to give a shout-out to mailman Noah and his faithful Bronco for delivering that.
This second batch held a vibrant green shade, seemingly much healthier. And it was healthier! This hornwort has thrived in my tank. It has grown so prodigiously that I have had to trim it and disperse it among other jars. I actually set up three other biospheres with the stuff, each hosting a colony of snails. The really astounding thing about the second batch of hornwort, in fact, was that it was carrying snails! Some aquarists consider bladder snails a pest, but they have been an invaluable boon to my tank environment. They are constantly cleaning the surface of the glass of algae, their poop acts as a non-ammonia source of nitrates (I haven’t dosed ammonia since adding them), and they are genuinely really fun to watch as they grow up and slurp around. The poop thing can be a bit gratuitous, though. At least, at first there was a ton of it. They broke down the old hornwort needles, but they replaced the needles carpet with a shit carpet of their own. I think the bacteria in the tank has finally caught up with it, but for a while it was just everywhere. On the bright side, if I did not get these snails, it is possible that my tank would not have cycled very much over the months of my absence.
In the above picture you might notice that the plants look a lot weaker than they did in my original post. The vallisneria on the left in particular pretty much melted. This is normal. The stress of shipping the plant and acclimating to a new water quality causes most plants to die back significantly as they re-calibrate. None of my original plants have actually died. When I visited the pet store, I picked up some cryptocoryne (crypts). Those are the little leafy plants on the left and right sides of the tank. They haven’t grown very much even after three months, and perhaps they never will. In the right environment, however, their leaves, palm-like, can grow quite substantially.
By the late February, I started to feel like I had a real living thing on my hands. The plants were growing back and propagating, the snails were getting absolutely massive, and the junk in the substrate was actually breaking down. The water was a bit cloudy, though. It has cleared significantly since then, which makes me think that the cloudiness was a temporary side-affect of the cycling process. To this day I have not actually run a test to see if my tank is cycled, so I’ll have to remember to do that before buying any fish.
My dad took an interest in the tank around this time and decided to add a bubbler. You may be able to see the plastic air tube coming out the back there. He was afraid that the tank would grow stagnant without one, and he was probably right. I did notice a little bio-film early on. That’s certainly not a problem anymore. The gas exchange of the bubbles popping might introduce some CO2 to the plants, which is a resource that many planted aquariums have trouble with.
A month later, things got really wild. The vallisneria had returned to its previous size and began over flowing the top of the tank. It isn’t called “Jungle Vallisneria” for nothing! With enough time and nutrients, the long blades could fold over the entire top of the tank. I hope to see something like that some day. It was turning red, too, which I chock up to not enough soil nutrients. I ought to buy some fertilizer tabs. It should be noted that, between February and March, the light apparently did not turn off. I took the timer off of timer mode and accidentally forgot to switch it back. The plants did not seem to mind, and the hornwort went absolutely crazy, but I also got a ton of hair algae. A shrimp will take care of that someday.
Also, pond snails were not the only variety of mollusk to inhabit my tank. I noticed this behemoth gliding around and pretty much cried:
I am optimistic for the future of my aquarium. With graduation on the horizon, however, I suppose I will have to start thinking about what I’m actually going to do with it. I suspect it could endure on its own like this for a year or more, but if I manage to escape my parents’ basement I will want to take it with me. I can also more seriously consider what kind of animal life will be living in it. A betta fish? Larger snails? Shrimps? Minnows?
I’ll leave you with this astounding image of a triple snail pileup:
