hi guy's and gal's...............
right....... i know i'm new to the forum but not completly new to the fish side of things.............
now as i mentiond in my first post (newbie section) i used to own a tank which held about 120 gallons of water a large 5 footer and i also mentioned there was something a bit special about my mbuna set-up..............
Well here goes to cut a long story short.......... at the time I had been doing a lot of reading about the Berlin sytem of fishkeeping (marine system) and that the use of live rock and live gravel/sand should be used and that the movement in them both would help with the filteration of the tank and stop dedbris hanging around in all the crevecies and amongst the gravel as the all the movment and also these litlle creatures would eat a lot of the rubbish (well that was just a small element of what the berlin system was about)..........
So at the time i thought to my self wouldn't it be great if you could create something like this in a tropical tank..................
Well i did just that..............
I introduced for a short period lots of plants in to the tank (plants and Mbuna's they don't go.... is what youre probs thinking.) but knowing that the fish would eat the plants (they were getting a treat) and i was getting allsorts or little animals snails and mircro-whatsit-names whith in the tank i collected all the snail i could from where ever i could then i found one of my local retailers specialised in puffer fish and bred tiny snail i forget there name know as part of there staple diet so bought some of these little chappies of him.........then i let nature take its cause and let them breed like wild fire as snails do........
as i whatched the tank some weeks later seeing all the coral sand i had as substrate at the time moving aroud left right and centre was almost as entertaing as watching the Mbuna's...........
then i came to water testing all my test's were spot on for the first month or so i had a little bit of a bloom when i dicovered quite a lot of the snails had died didn't make lot of difference to the numbers though as they were in there thousands.......... after all this cleared up i had tank that was crystal clear all the time all my testing kits were telling me everything was fine with my tank and this went on for the 18 months or so untill we moved house and had to sell the tank.........in fact everything was so good in there i was a proud father (so to speak) many hundreds of times so much so....... now this may seem an awfull thing to do i bought a domidiochromis commprcciceps ( the malawi eye biter) AKA arni as we called him now we got him to cull the babies and what a grand jod he did this added a new dimension to the tank ( i don't meen in a sadistic way ) it was like watching a nature program without the narrator...........
and to top all that since the bloom cleared up during that 18 month or so period i was able to keep the tank i never did a water change just topped up when it evaporated
when i look back at these memories i keep thinking the next tank i'll do the same (just to make sure it was no fluke)
anyone any thought on this system...........
Regard Garry
right....... i know i'm new to the forum but not completly new to the fish side of things.............
now as i mentiond in my first post (newbie section) i used to own a tank which held about 120 gallons of water a large 5 footer and i also mentioned there was something a bit special about my mbuna set-up..............
Well here goes to cut a long story short.......... at the time I had been doing a lot of reading about the Berlin sytem of fishkeeping (marine system) and that the use of live rock and live gravel/sand should be used and that the movement in them both would help with the filteration of the tank and stop dedbris hanging around in all the crevecies and amongst the gravel as the all the movment and also these litlle creatures would eat a lot of the rubbish (well that was just a small element of what the berlin system was about)..........
So at the time i thought to my self wouldn't it be great if you could create something like this in a tropical tank..................
Well i did just that..............
I introduced for a short period lots of plants in to the tank (plants and Mbuna's they don't go.... is what youre probs thinking.) but knowing that the fish would eat the plants (they were getting a treat) and i was getting allsorts or little animals snails and mircro-whatsit-names whith in the tank i collected all the snail i could from where ever i could then i found one of my local retailers specialised in puffer fish and bred tiny snail i forget there name know as part of there staple diet so bought some of these little chappies of him.........then i let nature take its cause and let them breed like wild fire as snails do........
as i whatched the tank some weeks later seeing all the coral sand i had as substrate at the time moving aroud left right and centre was almost as entertaing as watching the Mbuna's...........
then i came to water testing all my test's were spot on for the first month or so i had a little bit of a bloom when i dicovered quite a lot of the snails had died didn't make lot of difference to the numbers though as they were in there thousands.......... after all this cleared up i had tank that was crystal clear all the time all my testing kits were telling me everything was fine with my tank and this went on for the 18 months or so untill we moved house and had to sell the tank.........in fact everything was so good in there i was a proud father (so to speak) many hundreds of times so much so....... now this may seem an awfull thing to do i bought a domidiochromis commprcciceps ( the malawi eye biter) AKA arni as we called him now we got him to cull the babies and what a grand jod he did this added a new dimension to the tank ( i don't meen in a sadistic way ) it was like watching a nature program without the narrator...........
and to top all that since the bloom cleared up during that 18 month or so period i was able to keep the tank i never did a water change just topped up when it evaporated
when i look back at these memories i keep thinking the next tank i'll do the same (just to make sure it was no fluke)
anyone any thought on this system...........
Regard Garry
