balloon_fish

Today after school i saw a flower in my tank and i went to look at it and it turned out to be a flower from my giant bacopa. Anyways, before that i never knew that stem plants had flowers or would flower in my tank so i was a bit suprised. I dont know if this happens to everyone all the time but this is a first time for me so if you wanna see what it looks like heres a pic of it -

balloon_fish

Since I just took some pics of my tank i thought i'd update it and that way you can see how some of the plants are growing in. The growth right now is actually slower then i had expected like the glosso and the moss but i can't say the moss wasn't expected to grow that slow, its just its REALLY slow . The glosso is slow cause i just started off with a little and i need it to fill a third of the tank. Other then that everything is growing so fast my 40g is filling up with plants really quickly. You can notice that the dwarf sag is really filling in quite nicely and the baby tears is growing quite thick but not as fast as i want it to.


Since the last update I moved 3 otos into the tank to clean up the brown algae, but it was only growing on the glass and filter outlet so nothing too bad.

balloon_fish

Today i was looking at my tank and guess what i saw. A baby cherry shrimp ! And that was this morning. This evening i was lucky enough to find one playing around in the dwarf sag leaves so i snapped some pics to share. They are a little blury but they are way better then the first 5 pics i got cause i was having a little problem focusing on such a small thing so far away. The leaf they are on is a dwarf sag leaf so if you have some or seen some then you can imagine how small they are. Anyways heres two pics of it-



Also, its not just the cherrys that are reproducing (thats a ghost shrimp in case you are wondering and the thing near its mouth is some Hikari Crab Cuisine)-

Khamul1of9

I don't know if Cabomba counts as a stem plant, but I once had it flower in my tank. But Cabomba was soo hard to keep.

SnyperP

Shows the potential of screw in CF bulbs. I'm really suprised. I like how you have it hanging as well. Very good job so far!

balloon_fish

got a few more updates until i'm caught up but thanks for the comments I was also really suprised with the CF bulbs because a lot of people have told me that the light won't get into the tank that effeciently but i guess the height of the tank makes up for some of it.

balloon_fish

Heres the picture of what my tank looks like last week Since then i connected the fluval 404 to the tank (a little overkill but it works good) and i am getting ready to make a diy co2 reactor this weekend hopefully but until then the powerhead reactor is going to stay in the tank even though it sticks out really badly.

balloon_fish

This weekend i did a DIY hood and overdrove some T8's and here is what it looks like now , way better then the desk lamps i had before and a better spread. I also made a DIY inline reactor to connect to the canister
without stain-


with stain (a little blurry)-


wiring-


the last two weeks the tank has been covered in GSA but it should start slowing down once i make a new batch of co2 and keep it coming instead of ignoring it for 2 weeks

JerseyScape

very nice tanks

balloon_fish

Ok, its been like 4 or 5 days since i put the new hood in with the new light and wow was there a lot of changes:. First of all it looks like a soda bottle in there and all the plants are constantly pearling and even the HC and glosso. I also changed the light to a Hagen Life Glo 2, the only difference is its a 6700k instead of the 4300k of the Hagen Sun Glo but it cost a little more then the Sun Glo but it is worth it . Heres some pics-

Before changing light-


After changing light-


Glosso pearling-


Giant Bacopa pearling-


Pregnant Cherry Shrimp-


center piece-


Macro shot of an amano-


mini moss-


HC-