Thinking about an experiment

[hashbaz]

At risk of being flamed, I say go for it. I understand it is not the kindest most loving thing to do for your fish- but I don't think it would be that bad.

If fish can go 1 week with nothing, I think fish would be able to go two weeks on a vegetarian diet with little or no problems - if they are individually confirmed to eat the plants present in the aquarium.

It would be an interesting experiment. It might fix the diatom problem (diatoms can be caused by excess nutrients - right?). He also might find that he (or others of us) can go on 2 week vacations without having to worry.

 

[Billsgate]

Sorry hashbaz, I have to dissapoint you.........not going through with it. And I don't have a diatom problem, I am only presuming that there are still diatoms developing because my SAE are very fat (and fast!)(and no, there not fat because of disease!).

Maybe some day, when I am old and retired, I'll have plenty of time to set up something that is sort of self supporting. But for now I've got to be studying. Sheesh, I'm already thinking about retirement whilst I haven't even begun yet
I'll start studying Biology next year and then later on do a specialization in Ichthyology.

 

[Billsgate]

The plant that my fish are eating is Asian Anacharis or Egeria Najas. I haven't found any info on what nutrients it contains, so I can't prove that it would work

Bit off topic, but:
I would actually recommend this plant to everyone. It looks gorgeous when you plant it densely, and you can start with just one potted Egeria Najas, because it grows so rapidly that in a month you will have easily quadrupled this plant. It also seems that it does an excellent job at fighting algae, because of its fast uptake of nutrients from the water. It also releases a natural antibiotic against blue-green algae (so I've read). I have 18W on my 28.5 gal tank, meaning 0.6W/gal, and this plant thrives (as well as my other lowlighters). I will be posting pics of my tank in it's first week and my tank now in about 2 more weeks....then my newest cuttings will be at the top of the tank and you'll see that you can have a pretty heavily planted tank WITHOUT all the fuzz of high lighting and CO2. This could be encouraging to new hobbiests to go with planted instead of fake (and planted brings allot of advantages to your mini-eco-system).

I'm addicted to this hobby 8)

 

[vero]

grimlock3000 - about the ecosphere

grimlock3000,

Hi

I almost bought one of these ecosphere a few years ago. Are you sure they never last long? If so... that whole thing is quite the scam!

I think the idea of a mini world is quite amazing. Isn't it what we sort of try to do for our fish and plants.

Vero

 

[grimlock3000]

I almost bought one of these ecosphere a few years ago. Are you sure they never last long? If so... that whole thing is quite the scam!

I think the idea of a mini world is quite amazing. Isn't it what we sort of try to do for our fish and plants.

They CAN last a long time, so the whole thing is not a scam I did some poking around on these a while back and some people had good experiences, and others had bad and they followed the directions but the shrimp died anyway. I also talked to the salespeople in a store that sell them up here and they had people buying 3 and 4 at a time because they liked them so much, but they also got a lot of return attempts on them. I have not looked into these in a while so they may have improved the reliability of the shrimp. If you find a good price on one, it might be worth a shot

 

[Sara]

I almost bought one over the holidays, but I decided against it. My rationale was that if one of the shrimp died, then I totally wouldn't be able to keep enjoying the sphere (I can barely look at my fish when they die...someone else has to come scoop them out for me). And since I couldn't throw it out of the other shrimp were still alive (wouldn't want to kill them!), I decided it might not be the best idea...

 

[patryuji]

Truly herbivorous creatures do not require a complete set of amino acids from the foods they eat and don't derive nearly as much energy from them.

If you change the water over the two week period you are removing nutrients from the system and therefore causing the plant life to be less nutritious over time.