CRAZY River Bank Aquarium Aquascape!

Hey what's going on guys well we're back for another video today and today well we're gonna be focusing on this 65 gallon tank and if you don't remember I used to have an Atabapo Pike in this tank and unfortunately she passed away due to a heater malfunction. We had put a baby Arowana in there and when she had passed away I needed a place for that baby Arowana. I ended up returning the baby Arowana to the store and during that whole process Brenton actually gave me his huge Arowana from his tank which is actually right here behind me in this indoor pond. So I never went back and got that baby Arowana. So this tank has been sitting empty for some time now and I've just been trying to figure out what I was gonna do with it. Well this 65 gallon really needed to be rescaped and made into a proper home for some sort of a fish. So what we're focusing on today is how we actually scaped this tank, the materials that we used, why we kind of scaped it the way that we did and you know those kinds of things. So hopefully you guys learned something today. You know hopefully you enjoy the content. I'm actually gonna go ahead and ask you right now can you go ahead and drop a like on this video? If you can I am truly grateful for the support. So let's get into this and take a look at some of the supplies that we're gonna be using today. Alright guys well we're gonna start here with our different types of substrates and materials that we're gonna be using. We're gonna start with this coarse sand. This is an all-purpose sand that you can actually buy at Home Depot for about $6 a bag for a 50 pound bag. This has some gravel pieces in it. Then we're gonna move and kind of grade it out to a more fine sand which is this sand right here. This is just your standard silica based pool sand. The great thing about this stuff and I have to thank my buddy MD over at MD fish tanks for turning me on to this stuff but this is a silica based sand that looks very natural. It's brown. It does not release a lot of dust in your water and things of that nature. So if you were to run out and get this color of sand right here silica based aquarium sand at a pet store you're gonna pay somewhere around $20 for 10 pounds right? Well this sand right here you get a 50 pound bag for $8. That is a crazy good deal. So and it's a much finer sand and like I said it doesn't leave a whole lot of dust and stuff and debris in your tank so it doesn't have to be washed a whole lot those kinds of things. Great substrate and you'll see that in this tank today. Then we're gonna move to this more rocky kind of gravel here and then we'll finish it off with some of these little finer details. Now our hardscape is gonna consist of a stone that is like this right here and a lot of stone and then we're gonna be using some wood. Now I don't know that we'll be using this kind of wood right here but there will be wood pieces such as this. Then we're also going to be using some cushion moss which this cushion moss is actually dried out right now but a simple little splash of water and this stuff will revive right back up. So these are our basic fundamental hardscape elements that we're going to be using today. One of the other things is is we're gonna be asking you to participate in giving us feedback on the types of fish you want to see going into this tank. I really want to do some schooling type fish, maybe some neon tetras, some rasboras, something like that. So what I want you to do is go ahead and start thinking about fish ideas that can go on a 65 gallon tank in a large number. Not community fish, I want all the same type of fish. Now we may have like three different types of fish but it will be multiple of different types of fish if that makes sense right? So it may be like 40 neon tetras and some coolie loaches and something like that. Anyway start thinking about the types of fish you think we can put in a 65 gallon based on the hardscape items that you've seen so far and get ready to comment that below later on when you see this tank. Now a couple of other elements that we're gonna be using in this hardscape today are actually going to be some cypress mulch as well as some jungle mix. Jungle mix is a type of potting soil that can stay extremely saturated and wet that you would plant tropical type plants in. So we're gonna be using some of that as well. So you're not gonna want to miss this but we're gonna go ahead and get into this build today. Alright guys so what we're gonna do on this 65 gallon so we're gonna start on this side with our hardscape and we're going to actually kind of grade this from this side of the tank to this side of the tank with different size substrate. We want to make it appear as if there is a riverbank on this side and it's kind of flowing down into a flat riverbed here. What we're gonna start with on this side is we're actually gonna lay a grittier base of sand using all-purpose sand where we're actually going to hardscape. So let's get that in there now. We'll go ahead and take our crusty paintbrush and get this pushed all the way down in here. You just want a flat kind of layer and this isn't for anything else other than just building up the base having a soft surface for this hardscape to sit on. So I want to kind of build a base for this hardscape. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start with this longer stone just right here in the bottom and that's really just to have something to build up on. You won't see a lot of this just simply because it will be covered in a lot of substrate and we'll have a gradual slope down from this riverbed. I'm actually gonna move this out just a little bit. We'll need some more sand underneath it but for right now it will be fine. With that there we want to start building the other sides up to allow for these rocks to actually have a platform. Alright guys so basically what I'm doing here is I'm literally just building up what would look or at least what my interpretation of what an underwater riverbank would kind of look like. I probably redid this 10 or 15 times before I got it to look the way I kind of wanted it to look. Alright guys so since the initial kind of hardscape is done and I'm not really sure how this is gonna turn out but we're gonna try it. I mean full send right? I am NOT a master aquascaper but we're gonna try. But I like the way this kind of looks. This is the kind of look I was going for. I wanted it to kind of look like this falling kind of structure where there will be a kind of a land portion on top. But it looks like rocks have fallen and there's tree branches all kind of growing through it. What we're gonna do now we're gonna actually take and fill in these cracks and crevices where we need glue points with some cotton balls and cyanoacrylate glue. And the reason is I take a piece of this cotton and I stick it in where I need it to stay like right here as an example. Now this tree branch is kind of stuck to it right there. I'm gonna take the glue and I'm gonna completely get this covered and what happens is is that cotton starts to dissolve kind of like cotton candy. And what that allows is for a bond to be made right there. Now what I can do is come back with some substrate, some smaller pieces of substrate, and I can actually stick that down just like that and now it looks natural. Now we have a little bit of glue up here as well and what we'll do is we'll dust that with a little bit of sand and let that sit and dry. So you really can't see completely what I'm talking about until we get into this a little more. I'll show you as we move forward. So I'm gonna continue doing this process from this point here and I'll kind of show you. Now for this big piece up here what we're gonna do is take one of these cotton balls and start gluing this down. So I've used the cotton ball with glue to glue the stick down. Now what I'm doing is covering the cotton ball in the glue with small pieces of gravel. Once I'm done with that I'm gonna go ahead and dust it with sand just to fill in any cracks and crevices. Give it a more naturalistic look so you don't see the cotton, you don't see the glue, it's just sand and rock that looks like it's been caught up on the piece of wood. So now what I'm doing is just putting some water on the substrate or this sand because I need to be able to first off have natural erosion occur because that's going to occur. That way we can then correct where we need to. Alright guys, rookie mistake. So I decided to build this whole wall section here out of sand and that is not what you should do. You really should use some harder substrate because the problem is is I have no stop for the sand. So when the water starts hitting it here it started pouring out and pouring across the bottom of the tank which is fine because it actually gave it a natural kind of look but I had to add some pea gravel and things like that up underneath in the sand and that's what I've been doing. I didn't do that on camera but essentially just washing the sand down, backfilling it with pea gravel and then putting the sand back on top. I've now got to the point where the tank has been filled up completely and the sand stays where it needs to stay but we have a couple more things that we need to do. So number one is we need to finish the whole bottom half of this riverbed right here. What we're going to do is we're actually going to start mixing the sand and we're going to move to a finer grain sand for the bottom half. We're also going to be putting some details into it as well as up here on the top we're actually going to have a little bit of a landmass up here which will allow us to actually plant something back here as well as do some other cool things. So right now let's go ahead and get some of this finer grain sand in the bottom of this tank. Now for this I'm going to be using some pool filter sand but it has a little more of a beachy kind of look to it and that's what we're really looking for is we kind of want it to gradually take off down here where you know it kind of looks like a riverbank underwater. Not sure that that's what it looks like in nature but it looks cool to me and I like it. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna add a little detail. Before we do that though we actually need to use the paintbrush and just kind of get this sand looking a little more natural around these rocks and really you can do that just by brushing it down. The water will actually kind of flatten the sand out a little bit as well just simply because of the fact that it's currently dry. What we're gonna do now take some little detail rocks and just throw these larger detail rocks out into this riverbed and now what we'll do is add some more of these smaller rocks giving it a very natural appearance as if the water has washed away this creek bed and has exposed the natural rock and you kind of want it to flow this way because this is the flow of the river so it's gonna be more dense as far as the details here and less as you get down here. I think it looks pretty good. Looking up here now I have this black planted substrate that's kind of up in here just backfilling this area right here so what I'm gonna do is actually now cover that with sand just to make sure that it has a static continuity. So looking at this tank from this direction you have the end of it and as we start looking up back towards the riverbank you kind of have these trees coming out of this rock embankment and then right up here we're gonna have some stuff planted I think if it works out. What we first have to do is we need to fill this thing up with water and see what happens to this whole structure here. Hopefully it works so let's do that now. Alright guys well what we're gonna do right up here is we're actually going to plant a rabbit's foot fern. I actually put a little cup back here to hold the plant and that cup has holes in the bottom to be able to saturate the soil of this fern because that is actually what this particular fern likes is a very very moist soil. So we're gonna put that right there and then we're actually gonna add a couple more details here just to kind of fill this in to make it more naturalistic looking. First thing we're gonna add is something called jungle mix and jungle mix is a soil it's a really good soil for planting and things of that nature and then we're gonna fill in some of these bigger spot that needs some fill with some cypress mulch. This cypress mulch has actually been soaking in some water that way it will sink if it falls into the water this will give us the ability to kind of hide some of these imperfections from the sand struggling to you know keep its base well which is my fault completely because I am a doofus and should have never used sand as the base but that's okay it is what it is. We are going to drop some of these small kind of pieces here just like that. We have a couple more things we want to do here we're gonna actually spread some of this finer detail rock up here in this land mass a little bit just to give it some continuity for the aesthetics and then what we have we have some pillow moss that we're gonna put in here like up on this rock and what I'm gonna do just very much press this into the rock this will actually grow onto the rock and stay put there will not be any movement of that so we're gonna continue to add some of this pillow moss just around this rock a little bit now this will get the water dirty when you initially put it in here but it will stick so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a cup of water and I'm just going to pour it over top of this moss which will help it stick I won't ever have to water this moss again because this little portion right here that is in the water will actually suck up enough water to completely wet this entire area so I'm gonna go ahead and get the filtration set up in this thing and get the water cleared up and then we're gonna take a look at this thing all right guys well let's take a look at this tank so it's actually been a couple of days since I scaped this and I kind of wanted to show you what it looked like after a few days so the moss is growing in really nice everything is good there I put this internal canister filter in here with a heater to go ahead and get this water heated up and get it ready for some fish if the water has been treated beneficial bacteria has been added I've been ghost feeding it which is good we're keeping the cycle going this filter has actually started agitating the water enough where it's actually started to turn the river bed into a more naturalistic kind of look also with the agitation on the top of the water you kind of get this shadowy look on the bottom of the river bed now my favorite view of this tank is actually from the end here which it's right next to my couch so when I am sitting here at the couch and I look down this is the view I get which really does look like a riverbank which is actually kind of cool and the riverbed which looks really good but overall I'm really satisfied with the way this tank turned out now here's the question what do you guys think that we should put in here I really truly believe that maybe we should do some sort of a schooling fish or something like that I asked you in the beginning of the video to go ahead and start thinking of fish that you'd like to see in this tank and here's your opportunity go ahead and comment below and let me know we did a merch giveaway in the last video in the comments and I'm gonna go ahead and do another one here I'm gonna go ahead and wait until the 1st of March make sure you go ahead and start commenting now comment as many fishes you would like also do you like this scape if you do and we can get let's go big if we get a thousand likes on this video not a lot a thousand likes we've done it many many times but if we get a thousand likes on this video I will go ahead and do another merchandise giveaway in my next video so go ahead and start liking the video as well but this tank looks really really good so hopefully you guys enjoyed it and you really do like it and if you want to see more scapes like this just make sure you hit that like button but with all that being said if you have not subscribed but you have not followed me on Instagram please do that now also I have a Facebook please go to the Facebook and like the Facebook page if you are on Facebook links in the description of every video as well as visit the fanatic brand calm and go ahead and pick up your angelfish or your arowana merch there will be a merchandise drop that's coming very soon with some new logos and things of that nature so make sure you go get the angelfish and arowana before it's gone forever so with all that being said I really appreciate it guys and hey we will see you next time