Anyone Thought Of This Yet?

[penguinpimp1990]

First off, yes i am sorry for posting so many times in the planted section as of late but this question doesnt regard equiptment. I was playing basketball today and I had noticed a little section of clovers and rocks surrounding a large piece of wood. I thought it would be awesome to try to replicate this scene in an aquarium. Has anyone tried to take a small piece of nature (wheter its in your backyard, the forest, whatever) and try to recreate that small little section in an aquarium? (with live plants, no artificial crap) Ill be willing to give it a try in my 29 gallon tank and possibly 55 gallon brackish tank.

 

[Jen]

Well, the concept is a cool one, but taking items from your garden or the woods is a bad idea. You have no idea what kind of chemicals ore in there. You would have pesticides or insecticides in the garden that would kill your fish. Also, there might be some bugs burrowed in the wood that could do some harm.

 

[penguinpimp1990]

lol i like the golf course idea! but what aquatic plant looks like a tree?

Well, the concept is a cool one, but taking items from your garden or the woods is a bad idea. You have no idea what kind of chemicals ore in there. You would have pesticides or insecticides in the garden that would kill your fish. Also, there might be some bugs burrowed in the wood that could do some harm.

i didnt mean actually take them from nature, but i guess you could as long as you give them a good boiling and washing.

 

[demonmagus]

I haven't personally tried it, but look at some of Amano's tanks, they look like grassy hills e.t.c.

 

[oldwhitewood]

Well you are hitting on one of the defining principles of nature aquariums right there. The idea of taking from nature to create your own aquascape. It's important to study nature and apply this to the aquascape, look how ivy grows on tree trunks for example, you can correlate this with tying fern and moss onto driftwood. The challenge however is this, most things you see in nature are very difficult to replicate convincingly in a tank. As you are dealing with something straight from nature, you are never going to be able to get a tank to look as wild and as overgrown. If you look at the amazon for example and tried to create an aquascape based on that you would just have brown water, leaves, and overhanging branches. The look we try to aim for in our tanks is actually very far away from the reality, it's more akin to imitating a well kept garden.