I bred a number of the Hypancistrus plecos. In the end I did not light their tanks and algae stopped being a problem of even present is any visible way. The only light the tanks got regularly was whatever ambient light mught gave come into the room. Most of this was minimal. The other time there would be light in the tank was when I had to work in it/ I needed to be able to see what I was doing.
I have believed that the fry grew faster when left in the breeding tank rather than being move into a grow tank. I felt this might be due to the fact that the fry needed to eat so,e poop from the more mature fish to get some of the got bacteria they needed to develop. Because I got a decent number of fry, I needed to use grow tanks.
I did two things in respect to my poop theory. The first was when I set up a groe yank I would siphon poop from the breeder tank and put it into the grow tank. Then, I would never sell 100% of the fish from a grow tank, I would allow some of them to remain as to be a fytitre source of the bacteria laden poop for the new fry that would be added.
As a result of having to insure fry got [plenty of food I tended to have snails in both the breeding and grow tanks. One think I noticed early on was that some species seemed to eat snails and the number of snails in these tanks tended to be minimal. But not all of the species were snail eaters. On the other hand the grow tanks were always filled with pond snails. Fortunately, I have assassin snails which were mostly in my planted communities.
So, with every weekly round of tank maint. and water changes, I would siphon out the snails and drop them into the community tanks to feed the assassins which had wiped out the snail population for which I originally added assassins. This is why I began selling the assassins.
However, there is a big difference between that and the presence of the smaller critters which help with the breaking downs of organic waste. Regarding that here is some of what is contained in Dr. Tanner's article on biofiltration in nature and in aquariums.
Water biofiltration in nature
Most water in nature is biofiltered by soils it infiltrates or by small filter organisms that live a planktonic lifestyle. Infiltration is the process by which water enters the soil by gravity or capillary forces after it rains or from creeks, rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. Various soils can have quite different components but always contain a solid phase (minerals and organic materials), while the rest is called pore space that is filled with liquids and gases.
This means that there are two basic places these critters live. The soil and the water. But the bigger ones are in the soil and in the water are much smaller lifeforms. It also would indicate that the bigger critters live in the substrate. And then there is this,
Moreover, in nature water filtration is also performed by free swimming and planktonic organisms such as phyto- and bacterioplankton, both in fresh- and saltwater habitats. However, the planktonic component of water filtration is undesirable in our aquariums because it would make the water cloudy.
This suggests than the free swimming critters are not common in our tanks. So, it would seem that we would be hard pressed to develop the same multtiple types of critters which do biofiltration in nature would likely not thrive in our tanks.
The closest I have come to something close to what Dr. Tanner describes as the living components of biofiltration as part of my filtration need something like "soil" to thrive. and that would be my thicker Matten filters. However, I do not see the potential for the larger critters involved to live there.
Eukaryota: the pore space in soils is full of organisms, some are sizeable such as earthworms and various insects, others are very small such as mites. Fungi are somewhere in the middle, since individual hyphae are tiny (in the micron range), while the whole colony can cover several square miles. Many of these organisms are summarized as detritivores, detritus feeders, or saprophages. They start the decomposition of organics by eating leaves, dead animals, excrements, etc. Their waste in turn is eaten by ever smaller organisms until we reach the true saprotrophs, which digest waste and organic matter by extracellular digestion (fungi but also bacteria and archaea). Saprotrophs release enzymes that break down matter and then absorb its components such as amino- and fatty acids, sugars, etc.
So, getting all of these critters into a tank is not so easy. We may get some but nor others. What I do see in my tanks with mattenfilters is a silt-like residue which accumulatsd behind the matten. I spend about a minute or less sucking this out every week. I also spend about 60 t0 90 second with a larger size siphon hose running it across the front side of the matten. I am trying to minimize the volume of larger particles which may start to build up there. But I only do this one a week.
Here is what I do know. Some of the clearest water I have is in the tanks with a matten or else with several of the Poret air driven cubefilters. The foam is thick enough to allow for a lot of things to be inside of it.
I have nver believed that we can duplicate nature in he confined space of an aquarium/ There is just no the proper environment for everything at work in nature to fie and/or to thrive in out tanks. One reason of how Dr. Tanner concluded his article.
What does that mean for aquarium biofiltration?
Water filtration is teamwork by the members of the substrate microbial community from all domains of life. This is an important conclusion, both for freshwater and marine habitats. The different players form a food web, where most organisms cannot exist alone but are interdependent. The microbial community varies greatly depending on the availability of foods, pore sizes, and substrates. Soil biofiltration is therefore very plastic, meaning it can cope with a variety of conditions. However, one feature is common. Natural layers of biofiltration are usually undisturbed for longer periods of time (many weeks and months). In nature, no one squeezes out the debris or rinses the media on a weekly schedule.
And this is the final conclusion,
For aquarium biofiltration to be most effective, filters should be running undisturbed for as long as possible. Filter media that remain passable and have a variety of pore sizes are best.
You can read the entire article for which the above quotes were taken, here:
https://www.swisstropicals.com/library/aquarium-biofiltration/
