niko

Very cool video of the joy of making an aquaterrarium, complete with ransacking a real Japanese garden and catching your own gobbies. (You may really want to get gobbies after watching the video.)

Just be careful - halfway through the video the voice doesn't seem weird any more. Watch how you talk after watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGHtwWcafI

Also check out hohoho's other videos. They are very cool. With the childish and simple joy of aquariums that the videos convey you may be reminded why you got in this hobby in the first place.

chrislewistx

That was very cool, thanks for sharing. I am curious did something prompt you to search that out, or was it one of those random Youtube clicks?

I really enjoyed that video, and find it very interesting. I do not even understand what is going on some of the time. Like the screen rolls in the bottom of the setup. Is that used as a bio filter surface? Also, the gobbies, wow!!! What an intriguing little fish. When they showed it in the wild its camouflage was so effective I almost didn't see it on top of that rock. I'm glad I am not a bird that feeds on aquatic species. That would be a hard job.

So much for going to bed early tonight. I think I'm about to end up bouncing from one video to another for hours. lol

pam916

Very cool.

Michael

Very cool videos, and much better if you turn off the sound, LOL.

I've watched a few--those are the most elaborately layered substrates I've ever seen. Niko, do you have any clue what the purpose of all those materials is?

niko

The filters:

I have no clue why Hohoho made such a complicated tube-like structure under the gravel. I believe it is a biofilter - that way he ended up with 3x or more the volume of water actually being the filter. And no visible pipes. Pretty clever considering that from what I understand that is how things are in Nature too - huge filtering areas. Unlike most of our aquariums.

As far as the layered substrates are concerned what you see is truly Old School filtration setup. I saw such filters in 1979 in Bulgaria and they were old and proven design even back then.

First: Note that he uses different kinds of biomedia. I suspect that that allows for the development of a greater variety of microorganisms - some that will thrive on the bioballs (more flow through the wide open channels) and some that will thrive on the finer porous media (the white balls, slower flow through their fine channels). He actually uses 3 different kinds of biomedia (the top one looks like irregular shaped gravel and it is under the actual top level substrate). But note the same gradation - big size on the bottom, smaller in the middle, smallest on top.
Second: Since these are undergravel filters let's guess how often he rinses them to clean them. My guess is - never. Which means that such biofilters naturally stay clean. The design of such filtration is at least 50 years old and apparently it works.
Third: Note the ratio of these undergravel filters to the size of the tanks.

Draw your own common sense conclusions from those 3 notes.


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Finding interesting videos on YouTube:

The way you find such exotic videos is pretty simple. YouTube is dumb and does not understand foreign languages. So if you search for "aquarium" in English it will not show you the miriad of aquarium videos in all kinds of languages that are not English.

So you copy a Japanese text (that you have no idea what means) but it is for a video that has to do with aquariums. The useless ADA videos that are re-posted every day nowadays are good for that. You paste the copied Japanese text in the search box and YouTube will return all kinds of Japanese videos that have to do with aquariums. Then you go further and look at the suggestions to the side of each individual video and find even more. Copy/Paste text from the new videos and you find more and more videos. A lot of the Japanese vidoes are kind of like Hohoho's - very homemade and primitive looking but with a special kind of joy from the hobby. Wonderful to see.

I foresee a version of YouTube that actually asks you if you want to include foreign language videos in your search. And hopefully working well.

Michael

Niko, that makes sense, I suspected that it had something to do with the undergravel filters, but I've never seen such a set-up before. Could one of the layers be zeolite?

On the goby tank, I wonder if one reason for the tall mesh cylinders is simply that he/she wanted the display to be very close to the top of the tank so that plants could spill over the edges and the shallow water would be very visible from the top. Of course, the much greater volume of water makes it easier to maintain good water quality.

walterk

Really cool set up! I used Google Translator to follow the textual comments.

niko

Don't know about the zeolite.

You make more sense than me on the idea of a "stilts" setup. His main filtration area comes from the gravel. Guy either dind't want to buy a shallower tank or it's just used to have part of his tanks be "unused".

By the way, last year I kept a 75 gallon aquarium outside with about 8 inches of water in it. I know that talking about this in front of Michael is a little stupid but here it is: I placed a bunch of potted plants in the aquarium - flowers and herbs. Water was up to the pots tops. No circulation, just refill the water when it evaporates half way. Talk about the plants loving the situation! The happiest plant was Basil which is notorious for having to be watered heavily. I started to wonder if I can have a flower bed with an underground PVC pipe full of water (with drain and fill) and the flowers soaking their roots in it. I bet this will work well + it will save a lot of water which normally drains down through the soil.

And for the new people - here it is why you got to be careful when you talk to Michael about outside plants, ponds, etc:
https://picasaweb.google.com/ddasega...gPart2Outside#

Tex Guy

And here are some of my recent pics of Michael's Garden of Earthly Delights... http://flic.kr/s/aHsjAu8oLd

Michael

I blush. . .you guys are going to make me impossible to live with!