Planted Brackish Aquarium

[orcafood]

Hey,
I am an avid saltwater fish keeper. I have been keeping a large 200g reef for some time now and I would like to improve a tank that I have been neglecting. There is a brackish 55g in my living room which houses a small green spot puffer, mono, and one orange chromide. The salinity is at about 1.017. The tank seems to get dirty too quickly and I would like to try my hand at plants. I plan on building a 120 or so gallon aquarium to replace the current 55g. After researching a little, it looks like my best bet would be to start the tank up as a fresh water planted tank and let the plants take off, then add salts slowly over a month. Then transfer fish from the 55g?
I would like to add a small school of monos (2-3) archer fish or two, a few figure eat puffers and a few bumble bee gobies. Should these fish work in (what I assume to be planted tank acceptable) 1.06 or so?
Do I need special soil?
Lighting wise, I have only done reefs so I am unsure of how powerful I should make the lighting for a tank like this. T5s?
Is a canister filter really necessary or can I just have a few power heads hidden in the tank?
Lastly, my saltwater tanks tend to be designed very minimalisticly equipment wise. To really have a thriving planted tank, what are the basic pure necessities? C02 additions? Iron?

I am sorry for all my questions and I hope some of you can take the time to help me out.
Thanks,
Kevin

 

[nmonks]

The one essential thing for a planted aquarium is strong lighting; I'd also argue a decent (iron-rich) substrate like pond soil goes a long way to making planted tanks easier to set up and maintain, though some might argue the point. CO2 is a luxury.

It's best to let plants settle down at a low salinity, say SG 1.002 at 25 C, to start with. Most should handle that fine. For archerfish, gobies, figure-8s and livebearers, SG 1.003 should be fine, and SG 1.005 is ample. That gives you lots of scope for choosing suitable plants. There's a nice pinned topic here, and there are further comments on my FAQ as well as in the Aqualog book to guide you through the choices of species. Slow-growing species like Java fern and Anubias will have zero impact on algae, so don't change things around just to grow them! What you need a fast-growing species that will use up the nitrate and actively suppress the growth of algae. Vallisneria and Hygrophila would be ideal at the low salinity end, while ambitious aquarists with very strong lighting (2-3 watts/gallon) could opt for things like Samolus valerandi, Bacopa monnieri, padded out with some Cryptocoryne ciliata and Crinum calamistratum.

Monos are hit-and-miss at low salinity; they can do well, but it helps if you buy them as juveniles rather than sub-adults.

Archers will eat small fish like BBGs, so be careful; do also be aware that Toxotes microlepis is a freshwater species but will do very well at low salinity, and is small enough to be relatively easily kept alongside a range of fish species.

Cheers, Neale

 

[Kizz]

As far as i'm aware most moss's will grow and found this site which has proved most helpfull to me as i'm getting ready to set up a brackish aquariumHere

 

[AdAndrews]

while i know little about brackish i would like to suggest what i would do. for a brackish aquarium i personally feel that the plants suitable are the so called "easy plants" your anubias', crypts and ferns. considering this i would keep things very low key, no co2, lower light of about 1-1.5 wpg, but still a nice rich substrate as long as you have no fish that like to dig, substrate wise there are many options and it all depends on budget, but one thing i would recommend strongly is the use of fertilisers, you can make an all in one solution(i can give you the recipe if you require) or my personal favourite tpn+ availible from aqua essentials and the green machine, basically tpn+ is an all i one fert that you can dose however frequently you want, it says on the bottle once a week, but for the higher tech planters we do once a day, i dose 2ml on a low tech 54litre planted tank which is heavily planted daily. but even this can be cheap, for instance a 500ml bottle costs just over £15.

thanks

Adam

 

[orcafood]

Thanks for the responses.
Sounds like this tank will be really cool.

If I get very strong lighting, can I basically keep anything salt resistant that I would want, plant wise, or do low light plants need lower lighted tanks? What kind of lighting are planted tanks generally using? My reef has T5s and I used to have metal halides, but I am unsure of what is considered the best for plants. For growing macro algae in saltwater, 100w flood lights at 6500K are often used. What's the best option, price not really being an issue?

So is C02 mostly for adding carbon to the water for plants to more quickly photosynthesize and more efficiently utilize higher lighting?

I have a large piece of wood I found in a lake behind my house. It's not water logged yet but it looks very nice and realistic. Could I possibly use it in this new setup?

So just to double check, canister filters are not really necessary right? I found them to be a real pain in the past.

What are fertilizers? Just nitrate/phosphate or more?

 

[nmonks]

The thing with low-light plants is that they have no impact on algae; indeed, Anubias and Java ferns are amongst the first plants to get clogged up with algae in my experience! So by all means use whatever strong lights you want. Anything around 6500 K should be fine; the higher colour temperatures used in reef tanks not being optimal for plants (though usable, if inefficient, in terms of cost/growth).

If you put a low-light plant like Anubias under strong lights, it will get smothered with algae. So you need to shade it with floating plants or the leaves of tall plants, such as Vallisneria. So it depends what you're after. If you're happy to control algae manually, my all means use low-light plants; if you want allelopathy to work, with the plants stopping algae, you need fairly strong lighting.

There's a difference between those plants that happen to tolerate slightly brackish water, such as Hygrophila species, and those actually adapted to such conditions, like Bacopa monnieri. Choose your plants by what salinity you're going to run the tank at; if you're aiming for fairly high salinity, SG 1.005 for example, then choose true brackish water specialists for best results.

CO2 isn't essential because many of these plants will use bicarbonate from the water if they can't get enough CO2. But that isn't to say you can't use CO2 should you want to.

Many shrimps and most nerites will adapt to brackish water very well (indeed, many nerites prefer such conditions) so you have some good green algae and diatom control options. Killifish and livebearers, such as as Florida flagfish and Limia spp. would be good algae nibblers too.

Big chunks of wood are fine in brackish tanks.

Fertilisers are the minerals plants need to synthesis proteins and other organic chemicals besides sugar. Nitrate and phosphate largely come from the fish wastes, so they're not an issue. Iron is often limited. I like to use plain vanilla pond soil as a cheap but very effective source of iron and other chemicals, but others find different methods work for them; liquid fertilisers and pellet fertilisers can be added to the tank, and they're a convenient, if expensive, approach that works for some people.

I happen to like canister filters! Properly maintained they work very well, and are very good value options for non-marine aquaria.

Cheers, Neale

 

[AdAndrews]

The thing with low-light plants is that they have no impact on algae; indeed, Anubias and Java ferns are amongst the first plants to get clogged up with algae in my experience!

Cheers, Neale

thats becuase of too high lighting with too little fertiliser dosing, also you only need to have lights on 8 hours for a planted tank, people presume more, but its only algae who use the light after around 8 hours.

 

[nmonks]

Whilst the day length issue may or may not be true*, I don't see how *not* adding fertiliser would mean algae would grow faster on Anubias? It doesn't matter how happy Anubias is, it grows slowly. A leaf a month maybe? Surely there's no way they're going to out-compete with algae, and if you *add* fertiliser, isn't that simply going to speed up the growth of algae?

Cheers, Neale

*I've read arguments saying it's 10 hours, or even 12 hours, given the day length in the tropics.

thats becuase of too high lighting with too little fertiliser dosing, also you only need to have lights on 8 hours for a planted tank, people presume more, but its only algae who use the light after around 8 hours.

 

[orcafood]

So would 6500K 100w flood lights work for a 30in deep aquarium?

Soil I guess I am just not understanding fully. Do you take the pond soil (with iron) then put a little quartz sand atop of it?

 

[nmonks]

So would 6500K 100w flood lights work for a 30in deep aquarium?

I'd expect so, but I haven't used flood lights for plants, so can't be categoric on this.

Soil I guess I am just not understanding fully. Do you take the pond soil (with iron) then put a little quartz sand atop of it?

This is not the only way to do this, or even the best way to grow plants, but it certainly works very well for me and costs very little money! I take a mix of 50% pond soil* and 50% sand/gravel mixture**. I make about an inch or two depth of that. I then use some fine plastic mesh*** bought loose from a garden centre (a gravel tidy, in other words, but cheaper) to form a separating sheet. I then add the biggest rocks or bogwood bits to hold down the mesh. I then add an inch or two of the sand or gravel on top of that. The rocks and wood poke through, and are in turn secured by the sand/gravel, while holding down the muddy layer at the bottom and keeping it all from mixing up.

It's really a "make it up as you go along" process based loosely on the scheme in Peter Hiscock's excellent little "Aquarium Plants Mini Encyclopaedia" book. The pond soil provides enough iron for lots and lots of plant growth, but eventually you will need to add some fertiliser pellets or drops once you start seeing yellow leaves; in my experience, this is a good couple of years after setting up, but will surely vary depending on the plants you're keeping.

Cheers, Neale

*Under £5 for a 25 kilo bag
**A couple of quid per 25 kilo bag
***A pound or so per square meter; use the stuff safe for fish ponds, typically stiff, bright green plastic

 

[orcafood]

Ok, I think I get that then.

What purpose does a canister filter serve in a planted aquarium? Activated carbon?

 

[nmonks]

Gosh no! Activated carbon is fairly useless stuff in the average freshwater aquarium. I use canisters simply for biological and mechanical filtration, and like the fact they're outside the tank (so not unsightly) and provide the high levels of water turnover my fish like (in the case of the 180-litre system, 8 times the volume of the tank in turnover per hour).

Cheers, Neale

What purpose does a canister filter serve in a planted aquarium? Activated carbon?

 

[AdAndrews]

and if you *add* fertiliser, isn't that simply going to speed up the growth of algae?

this as i was aware is the "old" thoughts on fertilisers, when years ago people used to starve the plants of NPK, however as EI dosing simply illustrates by making sure that the plants dont go spare of any nutrients they will grow much better, high lighting isnt as essential as people belive, a good fertiliser, substrate, cicrulation flow and decent lights will work out very well. using EI you have to do 50% water changed weekly to make sure nutrients dont " build up" as long as there is excellent water quality and enough nutrients to go around the plants algae wont be able to take place as the water column will be constantly feeding the plants and the clay based substrate will be capturing the nutrients so as to make them availible to heavy root feeders such as crypts.

good luck

 

[orcafood]

Can a large 100-120g brackish aquarium be heavily planted and still not need C02? After reading about C02 it sounds very necessary?

 

[nmonks]

CO2 is not necessary, but it can help. CO2 will make a good planted aquarium better; it doesn't by itself turn around a planted aquarium that isn't working. I've had lots of tanks filled with fast-growing plants and never used CO2; but equally, I've seen some stunning tanks where CO2 was an integral part of the system. It's really your choice.

Cheers, Neale

Can a large 100-120g brackish aquarium be heavily planted and still not need C02? After reading about C02 it sounds very necessary?