4 gallon mushroom tank

[gastone]

A few moving parts.

First and most importantly, my son. He's nine (ten in two weeks). Mildly autistic. Abnormally hilarious. Very bright, but perhaps not in a conventional manner. And we struggle to find ways to engage him. Six months ago I was running into Petco to grab some silicone for a quick repair and he saw the betas and expressed interest. I haven't kept a fw tank since 1996 or 97. Sometime in college anyway. So I picked him up a small nano for his room and a cute beta that he dubbed, "Pollito". His favorite animals are either chicks or kiwis, depending upon which day you ask him. Pollito is Spanish for Chick or Little Chick. He's been very good about feeding Pollito and cleaning the glass, also helping with water changes and the like.

Next, I was invited to join Amazon Vine about 5 months ago. Sellers offer up items that you can request, with the caveat that you'll write a review. Without getting into it most things aren't free as you are given a 1099 at the end of the year so ultimately you get items for roughly 30% of cost. I acquire a lot of aquarium related stuff. So I ended up with a 16x5x11 tank, an led fixture, and a heater....hmmm.

Thirdly...I jumped out of the hobby in 2008/09 or so. Got back into it this past Feb. All told I'm now up to 10 nano tanks, all <30g. The goal is to create specimen tanks or focus tanks of some sort. When I left the hobby, mushrooms were a plague in most tanks, especially mine. Times have changed and man are there some gorgeous shrooms out there and I figured I wanted to start a dedicated mushroom tank. So these three pieces collided and I decided to build a Vine-supplied-mushroom-aquarium in my son's room.

Vine provided:
Tank: AquaCraft 15x6x11 4g rimless (nice little tank.  Clear glass, nice seams and very, very interesting dimensions.

Lighting: Coralview A029 Aqua Knight 30w marine led fixture - spectrum isn't bad but not not ramp up/down ability, no timer... wouldn't recommend, but in the end it will cost me about $20 so I'm fine with it.

Heater: Hygger 25w with built in probe and controller.  It's a little bulkier than I'd like so I might downsize to a 10w heater soon.  I've got a ton of Hygger stuff.  Inexpensive.  Some of it is meh, but most of it is just fine.

Purchases:

Filter: Wonderfactory HOB (this is to provide extra circulation as well as run filter floss, bio balls, and carbon)

Water movement: ZKSJ 530gph DC power head (I've got like five or six iterations of these things and like them for nanos)

ATO: Wonice smart ATO lite. stability is important, and challenging in a nano. So an ato was a must. These are re-branded a million ways from 

Sunday on Amazon, but they are all them same.  I'm using a similar one on a Waterbox 15g nano and it works well.

Bio filtration: I stole a few pounds of sand from other tanks, and a couple of pieces of small live rock as well. I've got some unsightly algae on some of the lr, but we'll deal with that later.

Livestock:

2 sexy shrimp (Thor amboinensis). It was supposed to be three, but upon acclimation, one of them swam directly into the power head. Lesson learned. Turn off circulation when adding livestock. These two are females so I'll get a male replacement soon.

1 yellow clown goby (Gobiodon okinawae). About an inch long. Maybe.

That's it. That's plenty.

Corals and such:

1 jawbreaker showing red and green markings.

1 tequila sunrise that I'm fairly certain I'm going to frag here shortly.

1 no name mint green rhodactis that I pulled from another tank. This was placed in to make sure the tank was stable and could support more livestock. Won't be there forever.

1 small reddish rhodactis that's finding it's colorings.

1 bleached rhodactis that I'm waiting to color up.  Green maybe???

Some GSP from my school tank. Thinking about running it on the back wall for a grass field look. We'll see.

1 rock flower anemone (just too pretty to pass up and it's way too small for my Caribbean biotope tank at school so until it sizes up some...)

I'd like to add an OG bounce. Gotta save up. Those things are both beautiful and 'spensive. And we'll see if anything else catches my (or my son's) eye.

Maintenance: weekly 50% water changes. That should more than suffice.

The tank:
 

Tequila sunrise:

Jawbreaker:

RFA:

Reddish rhodactis:
 

Sexy time:

The two tanks together:

 

The goby is shy and hiding.  No pics until he gets settled.

 

[jwalsh]

Looks great! Following along. 

 

How's that goby doing? And where are the sexies from?

Edited November 26, 2024 by jwalsh

[gastone]

I pulled the skimmer top off of the fw hob filter and the little goby took his chances in the current.  Poor thing.  The filter impeller then went to work on him Ouch!  So we just have the two female sexy shrimp.  Going to add a male and call it a day.  Shrimp were sourced from Christina's Coral Cabin.

 

We've added quite a bit of stuff in the interim.  Sourced some Sunkist bounce, a superman disco, Godzilla bounce, a nice orange ric...I'm forgetting something.  

 

I also picked up a nice new tank from Isaac, @YHSublime, for my son's beta.  Going to try my hand at a simple fw planted take and then turn his little 2g tank into fw shrimp tank.  That's the plan.  

Edited November 26, 2024 by gastone

[gastone]

 

Finally did some much needed tank maintenance in my son's room. @YHSublime's tank is set us as a fw planted tank.  I know next to nothing about fw at this point so we started pretty simple.  Right now there's a Beta (Pollito - my son's favorite animals are chicks), two mystery snails, and whatever hitchhiking snails I received from some Monte Carlo carpet that I purchased.  I moved some shrimp into this tank but Pollito seems to have quite the affinity for shrimp.  Pretty sure he murdered every last one of them in a matter of minutes.  We are running CO2 (mixed using Citric acid and baking soda) from a kit I purchased on AliExpress.  Sweet setup.  Easy to use and dial in. We also have a few spider plants growing out as well as some Buddha decor. I need to figure out water top off.  There's quite a bit of surface area, hence evaporation. Ultimately I'll probably go with an optical sensor and a 5 gallon tank housed under the nightstand to the right.

 

 

Next we have the two gallon shrimp tank.  I did a landscaping class at  @CapitalExoticFish last summer which is when I got this tank.  No fish in it now, just some neocardinia shrimp, red, yellow,.and blue.  I've got a very small pico CO2 kit that I have yet to hook up, but I will once the Monte Carlo establishes in the larger tank and I can transfer some over.  At school I'm going to do some revisions to my current phyto/pod culturing and I'm going to switch over a few of my pod setups to freshwater shrimp breeding. The students should get a kick out of that and we can setup a few tubs to try some crossbreeding and see what happens.  I suspect ugliness.  But that's something worth finding out imo.

 

I'm using a little 500ml water bottle and a mechanical ato.  Love it.  Dead simple.

 

 

Lastly is the SW tank.  Not a terrible number of changes.  Still only the two sexy shrimp.  Have added a few random mushrooms, a small rock flower, a small lobophyllia, and a holy grail micromussa.  It may not look great in the pics...it was wedged against the back wall and I'm afraid the back of the frag was suffering.  Pretty sure it'll bounce back and do just fine.  There's also a few random zoas.

 

[YHSublime]

WOW! The tank looks awesome setup! You're motivating me to setup the other glass boxes I have even though I said I wasn't going ta'!