DelawareJim

Bryce;

Been a while since I've visited your thread. The scape still looks great.

In one repsect I'd hate to see a total redo, it'll be like loosing an old friend as we've seen it evolve. On the other hand, I know what you mean about needing something fresh and new. I'm partial to a Dutch style myself, but having done that in a 110, I burned out on the trimming and constant tweaking and now have a mostly Crypt, Anubias, rosette tank. I do miss the fine textures and subtle colour variations you get with stems though. I'm sure it will look great either way.

BTW, I when I was re-reading some of your earliest posts I got curious about your RO storage tank. Did you get that from a farm supply or somewhere like HD or Lowes?

Cheers.
Jim

BryceM

I got the 105g storage tank from a local ag. distributor. Out here in the sticks they're pretty common for livestock, storing fertilizers and such.

About the scape.... I made a pretty big change yesterday to the left 1/2. I haulled out the enormous Anubias barteri and thinned out the crypts around it. A new "centerpiece" plant and a few different crypts took its place. It will take a while to grow in (fingers crossed) but the flow and open space on the left is much improved. That anubais just overgrew its location.

marrow

I just read this thread from start to finish and am gobsmacked by the tank but more so by the planning and process that went into it. It was a joy to watch the decisions made along the way and the input sought etc. I set up a 125 for my brother next month and have been accumulating supplies and growing out plants in preparation. I am going to force my brother to read this thread closely before I start. Thanks Bryce for making your efforts public.

henriea

Hey Bro,

Ben must have read your message that gave me this link last year when I was still in the hospital with lil Dill. Thank you for the information about tanks etc. When we move to a house I plan on starting the kids on a good tank where the fish hopefully won't die within the month. I can't handle Kylee's sad fish funerals, she cries for days. Wasn't your first fish a a goldfish in a canning jar from a birthday party? I remember the turtle and then the breeding angel fish and the pirahnah... Your tank is beautiful, when we were there last summer you were down a little on fish numbers so I don't think I got the full effect of the schools. I'm glad I got to see it in person. When I miss you I can see it all in my head and I feel a little closer. I hope all is well with you, I will keep looking for more pictures of your tank and I'll send you a few pictures of our beautiful new beta tanks when they get set up. Maybe they will lead my children to future fish and plant obsessions just like uncle Bryce.

-eea

Bk828

guaiac you have great talent. The tank looks amazing, all the different textures/colors just makes my head explode lol.

BryceM

An update. About three weeks ago I noticed the onset of just a bit of soft thread algae in the upper regions of the tank. This has happened once or twice before and usually meant I was neglecting ferts and the regular WC's.

Like a dummy I didn't look into this any further, made a mental note to do things on time, and over a week or so things got tons worse. Thread algae started showing up in the middle and even lower regions of the tank. Up high it was THICK.

About this same time 2 of my 3 SAE's apparently went over the wall. Again, like a dummy, I assumed they must have been eating the stuff, helping to keep it in check. Of course, in reality 3 SAE's in a 180g tank probably don't have that big of an effect.

The plants started looking less healthy and I decided to check the pH probe. Voila. It had been in service for over a year and was clearly not working correctly. As a result, the pH controller had been keeping the pH about 0.4 units higher than it should have.

I did a huge trim to eliminate most of the gunked-up plant mass in the upper regions of the tank and manually removed as much as possible. This AM before the lights came on I could see many amanos up high eating the stuff. Hopefully things will come around fairly quickly. It looks like L. 'Cuba', R. 'Vietnam', and Tonina fluviatilis were affected the worst. Guess we'll see.

On a positive note, Lagenandra meeboldii 'pink' is growing in nicely on the left side and the Crinum calamistratum is flowering again.

BryceM

I spent about 6 hours working on the tank today. This has been the most drastic change since it was first set up. I removed three enormous quartzite rocks that weren't visible anyway. The entire right 1/2 got a total re-scape and it centers around a most unusual manzanita root burl.

The impetus for all of this was the thread algae that popped up during my week or so of little to no CO2. The tank was accumulating a fair bit of mulm and grunge. I wanted to do a good gravel vac and clean out the spraybar line. The tank was so overgrown that circulation was poor and I'm sure that was making it harder to get the thread algae knocked back.

The enormous Crinum clamistratum was even bigger than I thought it was. The large mother plant had produced at least ten smaller daughter plants that I was able to divide away. I guess they'll go up for sale but I sort of hate to see the little ones go. It's easily my favorite plant.

60 additional amano shrimp went in about 3 days ago too. One interesting thing about the redo is that I was able to see all 6 sidthimunki loaches together. That hasn't happened since the moment I put them in over six months ago. There is also one more Corrydoras loxozonus than I thought.

I've focused on making the foreground much larger and moving the midground to the rear. I've also tried to improve the sight lines from front-to-back to give it a better sense of depth.

I'll do a much less aggressive touch-up to the left side in the next week and then post some photos. The algae seems to be in full retreat and hopefully it will look halfway reasonable again by then.

Tex Gal

Looking forward to the pxs.

Shurik

Me too!

jackh

tank looks amazing imo