The Success Of The Dirted Aquarium: How Two Scientists Made It Happen

These two women are the fundamental key to maintaining not just fish and an aquarium, but the entire farming industry worldwide. Hello, come right on in. You're at Father Fish. Elaine Ingham is bringing about a fundamental revolution in farming through the development, implementation, and training of her food web soil. Similarly, Diana Wohlstedt is teaching the fundamentals of maintaining an aquarium as a living environment. These two women, more than any other people, offer us the opportunity to bring about fundamental change in the way we as tropical fish hobbyists are maintaining our systems. Diana Wohlstedt, who all of us are aware of, brought to us something languishing in history and brought it into our century, the dirtied aquarium. By bringing soil into an aquarium, she brought life into our aquarium. Elaine Ingham, similarly, in the farming industry, has brought life into the fields growing our crops through the development of a food web soil. My struggle has been to find ways to implement both of these technologies in an aquarium environment, and we are well on our way to making it happen. You can catch up with some of the recent developments by visiting our Discord server. Link is listed below. We have several channels on the server that are discussing and teaching the techniques of developing not just a soil-based aquarium, but a food web as a function of that soil-based aquarium. So let me go through a little bit of the fundamentals of this to give you a sense of what we're about. We have known now for some time that soil is a critical component in maintaining the life and health of plants in an aquarium. There have been a series of difficulties being able to manage this effectively. One, of course, is the fact that when you have dirt in an aquarium, the water dissolves out of the dirt, all of the minerals and organics. And so the water becomes very heavily mineralized and highly organic. It's one of the major drawbacks of doing a dirted aquarium. We believe we have solved this problem by adding a sand cap to the soil. For a while, the attempt was made to use gravel. The difficulty with gravel is that water flows through it far too easily, and as a result, it didn't really stop the solution of soil and water from occurring. Sand at a two-inch level does a better job. It's not perfect, but it's really pretty good. The other problem that we ran into with the soil is that it becomes depleted very quickly. In a matter of a year or so, the plants have completely depleted the soil of its nutritional content, and it no longer is an effective means of providing support for plants. We believe we have overcome that objection as well by adding supplements to the soil before it is put down in the aquarium. These supplements provide long-range support for the soil, long-range elements such as iron, magnesium, and the like. In order to be able to maintain that soil long enough so that the natural process that occurs as a tank goes through its life cycle, with plants living and dying, with waste breaking down, all of that precipitating into the soil and breaking down, chelating into its nutritional fundamental supplements, such as to be able to provide nutrition for plants. So those two steps have helped with the soil-based aquarium. What this did not achieve, however, was a genuinely living environment. Recent research over the past few years on the nature of food in freshwater systems demonstrated that humus and humic substances, primarily comprised of the leaves of trees and other plants, is the fundamental component of food, of nutrition in aquatic environments. Coupling this with Elaine Ingham's work in the farming industry by creating a food web using humic substance, we discovered the science for bringing about the very thing we were looking for. We've known for a long time that leaves are beneficial in aquariums. We haven't really understood what the nature of that benefit is. Elaine Ingham's research demonstrates precisely what it is. It is the creation of microfauna in the surface soil, in the humic material that is laid down on top of the dirted aquarium, on top of the sand, and even mixed into the sand, that creates an avenue for microscopic life to begin to thrive. It feeds on leaves. There are chompers that break down the leaves, things like shrimp, snails, little fish, even large arthropods, break the leaves down. Fungus and bacteria attack these leaves, creating of them nutrition for smaller microfauna and microflora, tiny microscopic plants and animals that break down these leaves, providing nutrition for them and ultimately nutrition for the soil. So there's the process. The entire food web going from broken down leaves, broken down by bacteria and fungus consumed by microfauna, which then of course becomes food for fish. The fish feed on the microfauna. They feed on those arthropods and other microscopic animals that little fish find as their primary food source. The work that that microfauna does in breaking down the leaves into its components, precipitating it through the sand, into the soil, enriching that soil, causing a collation process that breaks it down further into the components that are required for plants to be able to assimilate that material and grow. There's the web. There's the life cycle occurring in your aquarium. And we have these two magnificent women to thank for bringing about, giving us the science that has allowed us to understand what we need to achieve in order to have a genuinely balanced living aquarium. Get to know these scientists. They are both trained in their respective fields and they are both women who have created a genuine revolution in their fields. They're both available easily on the web. You can participate in Elaine Ingham's conferences that she holds regularly. Dinah Wallstead is frequently found participating in various aquarium sites on the web. So get to know them, learn about them, learn what they're doing. And follow us here on Father Fish as we seek to bring about this revolution in our hobby. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for caring. Thank you for being a part of our channel as we seek to do precisely what we as NOAA, each of us as NOAA are trying to do, create environments that these little animals can thrive in and multiply in and be able to maintain themselves in until such time as their natural environment is restored to them. Bless you all. Thank you for being with me. Bye for now.