Low Tech Angelfish Tank with Easy Plants

This is my angelfish tank, low-tech. How big should the angelfish get before I transport them into the Highline 400? What do you think? It's an interesting topic, isn't it? How big do you let the fish get for any given size of aquarium? I guess it depends on a lot of variables, such as the fish species, its eventual size, of course, and how much space it needs to swim. So something like a pleco doesn't need as much swimming space because generally they stay in the same location. Angelfish are kind of in between. I think they live amongst the same kind of territorial area, so they wouldn't need a huge aquarium, but they do get very tall, so the aquarium probably, ideally, and especially from a visual perspective, needs to have an aspect ratio relatively high. One of the Practical Fishkeeping magazine's articles, I remember, was talking about tank-busting fish, and I think they came up with a guideline of the tank should be at least six times as long as the length of the fish. So I think that means the total length of the fish because you have kind of standard length, which is, I believe, the length from the nose to the beginning of the tail, and then there's a total length. So I think they can grow a little bit more. If we use that six times guideline regarding their height, then they're probably on the limit, I would say. But I don't think that's a thing, is it? Six times the height of the fish. We'll probably change them over soon into the Highline 400. Let me know what you think in the comments. Always interested to hear what you've got to say. Always read your comments. There are ember tetras in here, and they are hiding at the moment. They do come out for food. I guess the angelfish kind of scare them a little bit. They're certainly too big to be eaten, I would suggest. There's still the angelfish exhibiting some sort of predatory behavior. I really like the blue and the orange contrast of the fish. Got the orange, kind of orangey-green background, which I think looks really good. This is from the light ground. It's just a beautiful tank. It's really easy to look after. One water change a week. Doesn't even have a nutrient-rich substrate. It's just plain sand. I'm just using easy plants. No CO2 injection, but I do dose a liquid fertilizer every day. That's because the lighting is relatively powerful. It's a Weo Slim 60-centimeter. This model is no longer in production. I did have a lot more floating plants in here, but I was just getting fed up with the kind of aesthetic, actually, and there is some in there, so they will grow. It's the Amazon frogbit, the limnidae and lavergarten. What's going to happen is that that will eventually propagate and spread across the surface, and I can thin it out. But as a consequence of thinning out the frogbit, it is the light has actually extra light hitting the plants below, I think, has caused some algae on the leaves. But you know what? I don't mind. I think actually it's quite attractive. It's supposed to be a natural-style aquarium. Not a strict biotype, of course. These aren't real. This isn't a wild caught fish or a wild available fish. But other than that, the plants are quite realistic. You know, they're all found together. They've got some Helanthium cordrigostatus, some Heteranthera zostifolia, a little bit of Ludwigia, and some Myriophyllum guiana, some Sagittaria as well, I believe. There's an inferior as well here. Really simple layout. Triangular position, two or three pieces of driftwood in there. Tried to kind of create some depth by having the wood kind of towards the front here, going towards the back right, and then another piece coming kind of the other way. And I think I will cut off, you can see this end of the wood here. It's been kind of sheared off. It doesn't look very natural. So I'll probably get some Saccatares or some sort of bonsai trimming, pruning shears to round off that flat end to make it look more natural. But yeah, very, very simple to look after. One squirt of fertilizer a day. Big water change once a week. Clean the pre-filter every week. The Helanthium tannulum is an absolute weed. It just grows so quickly, even without CO2 injection. It sends out runners all the time. I do thin that out every couple of weeks. But what I'm going to do in the near future, when I do migrate the angelfish over to the big tank, I will be creating a new scape. So open to ideas. What would you create in this scaper line 60? Probably do another natural style aquarium, really inspired by Ty Streetman's work. Excited for his book coming out later this year. It's available for pre-order. Check out the link in the description. I haven't tested the water. Should we test the water? I think I'd do a separate video on testing all of my aquariums, all the parameters that I've got the test kits for. I've never tested them since I've been in this house, which has been 10 years. So rather than testing the water, I've just known that the water's very hard. Know roughly how much CO2 I need to get in there in terms of bubbles per second. And just observing the fish and the plants. So yeah, rather than using test kits, I kind of use observation, which isn't accurate, of course. But in my view, I guess the more you can rely on your own observation and intuition, the more kind of the language of the plants and the language of the fish you can speak. I guess if you're 100% relying on test kits, rather than observation, maybe your observation skills don't kind of mature so quickly. A good example is testing for CO2. It's important to test at the beginning when you're setting up an aquarium to make sure the CO2 isn't too high or too low. But once you've got it dialed in, you can probably remove any kind of test, like drop checker or not need to test your CO2 so regularly. We talk about CO2 and testing and all the water parameters. It's quite a deep topic, actually. But good news is that I am going to be able to create more content. Now, as soon as it's finished, that pretty much took over my life for the last three months. I was traveling to Denmark every two weeks to maintain the tanks. And didn't really have energy to create much content during that period. But yes, I am at home a little bit more now over the summer. All my aquariums are looking great, I'd say. We've got the Highline 400, the Iwagumi, which is a really fun tank. I'm going to do a deep dive on that, actually. It's progressed really lovely. And the Cichlid tank, the fish are actually getting a bit too big and a bit too many of them because they're breeding. So not sure what I'm going to do with that in the long term and the Highline 300. And I did sell the last Nano tank, which went up for sale and was sold on the same day. So thank you for the buyer of that. And I will be setting up another three Nano cubes soon. So they'll be available to buy in a couple of months or so from Aquarium Gardens. That's exciting. I'll create content around those tanks as well. So yes, the angelfish, blue angelfish. I'm not sure if it's a pair or they're the same sex. I'll try and get some close-ups. Maybe some of you may be able to identify the sex for me. And Amber Tetra is a really simple layout and I hope you like it. If you do and you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe for more content. Give the video a like. Take care. See you in the next one. Cheerio.