AquaScaping advice

[NoSvOrAx]

Ok, got some plants. Was wondering if anyone had some suggestions on layout for my tank.

Its a 29 Gallon, 30x12 footprint. Tank has a 2x65watt orbit with 1 dual daylight and 1 6700k bulb. Currently using DIY co2 and dosing with excel and greg watson ferts.


Currently it has:
5 Pieces of driftwood
(couple of the smaller flatter pieces will be removed and replaced with the awesome vertical pieces outside in a bucket of water, also I'm planning to near completely cover the driftwood with various types of moss)
2 Amazon Swords with multiple off shoots
1 bunch of Cabomba
1 bunch of Rotala Indica
1 bunch of Red Ludwigia
a couple sprigs of Dwarf Sagittaria
a few very small Crystal Vals
a bunch of Anacharis
1 bunch of Lloydiella
a bunch of dwarf onions
1 Crinum Americana
1 bunch of Wisteria
1 Newly sprouted Red Tiger Lotus
1 Newly sprouted unknown Aponogeton bulb
4 fairly large marimo balls
a little bit of riccia
and lastly a few sprigs of willow moss

The tank will soon also have:
a bunch of mini moss
a bunch of christmas moss
1 bunch of Rotala Macrandra
1 bunch of Hygrophila Rosanervig
1 bunch of Ludwigia Glandulosa
1 bunch of Alternanthera Reineckii
1 bunch of Myriophyllum Tuberculatum
1 bunch of Proserpinaca Palustris

Obviously, this is to many plants for the tank and the extras will find themselves in another tank.

Oh the tank has fish too :P
1 clown pleco
1 banjo cat
3 green fire tetras
2 neon tetras
2 glowlight tetras
2 x-ray tetras
2 von rio tetras
1 buenos aires tetra
1 glass bloodfin tetra
1 rosey high fi tetra
1 minor red serpa tetra
2 otos
1 hillstream loach
1 harlequin rasbora
4 dwarf african frogs
5 Mystery snails
2 bamboo shrimp
a bunch of ghost shrimp
1 pond snail
and sadly the 3 long fin danios the wife had to have....

I know thats alot of life to put in a 29 gallon and some are going with the excess plants into another tank. However, the tank is highly over filtered and is handling the bioload pretty well.

[blazeyreef]

AWESOME! I say add all the plants you can!

[sherry]

It is a lot of bioload. Also the african dwarf frogs would do better in a little 5 gallon tank of their own. They don't compete well with fish for food. The hillstream loach is going to be very sensitive to o2 depletion. I lost 3 one night when the plants stopped making o2 and started using it. You may want to run an airstone at night.

Why do you have all of those single tetras? usually tetras are schooling fish and like some of their own.


as for plants the apon. will likely outgrow your tank, and the stems will all take a ton of pruning. I don't think diy co2 will be enough with 4 watts per gallon, but the diy experts here may need to weigh in. At the least you will need to rotating bottles. Most of the plants you have chosen would do fine with half as much light if you wnat a more controllable tank.

[NoSvOrAx]

Well the frogs are quite fat... Generally they only have to compete with the ghost shrimp and the snails. :P On occasion they even manage to steal a cube of tubifex worms from the tetras.

There is an air-disk there below the spray bar that runs all the time. (Figured I'd leave it running til I was satisfied the plants are producing enough o2, as in pearling regularly. Although I'm sure its causing co2 loss. Maybe I should switch the air pump to the night time side of the timer.)

Prior to the addition of the danios I used to get 3 schools.
The buenos aires, lattern eye, rosey high fin, and the harlequin like to run back and forth along the front of the tank.
The glow lights, neons, x-rays, and von rios all hang out together moving through the plants.
The 3 green fire tetras all hung out at the surface picking at the riccia living in the feeding ring.

Since, the danios, its all alittle messed up. They are pretty aggressive and dominate the open water section in the middle of the tank. I've already decided to try to return them to LFS. Better alive then dead right?

And I'm really hoping the stem plants need lots of prunning, because I'm going to setup a shallow 50+ to grow plants for a couple of the LFS. This is of course assuming I can actually grow plants :P