NEVER PUT GRAVEL IN YOUR TANK

Believe me when I say there are people out there, fish keepers, who honestly believe that the best way to set up an aquarium is with gravel. They could not be more deluded. The worst way to set up a tank other than having no substrate whatsoever, which is probably an improvement over gravel. The worst way is to use gravel. Now why is that? Because gravel traps dirt. It doesn't break it down. It doesn't help it to get re-assimilated into the system. It does not allow for a balanced aquarium to occur. It does not create a cycle of nutrition. What does it do? It traps dirt like an open sewer and keeps it rotting and fouling the water. That's what gravel does. What's the alternative to that? Sand. A minimum, absolute minimum, of two inches of sand creates an environment where the detritus, the waste, sifts down into it, is broken down and taken up by the roots of plants. Now if you will add one inch of soil, yes soil, dirt, to that tank before you put the sand in, it will give you a substrate that will last and to be productive for a minimum of 10 years, virtually indefinitely. So sand creates an environment that allows waste to recycle. So you don't go in there and stir it up. You don't clean it. You leave it absolutely alone. You never touch it. You never dig it up. You never swirl it around. You never clean it. You never do anything to it other than put plants in it or pull plants out of it. But you do not fundamentally disturb it because it is a pristine and holistic part of your total environment. It balances the water chemistry. It creates microscopic life which feeds your tiniest fish. It creates a balance in your aquarium whereby everything, all of the life forces, all of the life forms in the tank are supported. It allows you to create a natural balanced aquarium. I was fascinated visiting Akwesasne this past weekend to notice how many displays claimed they were natural aquariums when they were simply natural looking. They had driftwood and rocks and a few plants. They looked natural but there was in fact nothing natural about them. They were not in any way a balanced aquarium. Most of them had about an inch of gravel on the bottom. Some had commercial products an inch or so on the bottom. That simply does not allow the biology in the system to create the kind of balance, the kind of cycle of life that allows that aquarium to survive without substantial interference on the part of the fish keeper. So what does that mean? That means you have a choice. You can either play God and go in once a month or once every couple of months and clean out the tank, pull out all the waste and feel good about cleaning your tank. Or you can create a deep, a deep dirt and substrate, a deep dirt and substrate that will allow that aquarium to become a balanced environment in which everything is eating everything else, in which all of the waste is breaking down and becoming nutrition. You can have a natural balanced aquarium and it's really a very, very simple thing to do. But I guarantee you, you cannot do it with gravel. You cannot. One more thing while I'm on the subject. Thirty-five or forty years ago, someone came up with a brilliant idea of putting slotted trays in the bottom of the tank and putting gravel on top and then sticking up a venturian pipe into that plastic, some plastic tray and hooking up an air pump to it. Had the effect of pulling water through the gravel. Under gravel filter. Brilliant! Genius! Except it's totally unnatural. There is no natural system anywhere on the earth where water is sucked through the substrate by any process bringing oxygen into the deepest levels of the substrate. It is, from a natural standpoint, utter foolishness. Foolishness. It is counterintuitive. It does not give you what you're trying to achieve, which is a healthy balanced aquarium. So, you have one set up like that? Great! Tell you exactly what to do. Pull out the tube, put one to two inches of sand on top of the gravel and move forward. That's all you need to do. Put a little sand on that gravel, take out the lip tube and you're good to go. You will have, in a matter of a month or two, a wholly, fully balanced aquarium. Don't clean the gravel, just pour in the sand. The dirt that's in there will comprise the nutrition that the aquarium needs in order to be able to survive. Load it up with plants. You cannot have too many plants and put as many fish in it as you want to have in your tank. Now, when you're setting up your tank to start, don't load it up with fish. Load it up with plants, but put just a few fish in and then give it time, over a period of time. One more issue while I'm on the subject. Food. When you're setting up a new tank, do not feed the fish for at least the first three to four days. No food at all of any kind. None. Nothing. If you have plants in there, the fish will pick at the plants a little bit. They'll find microscopic food on the plants if they're little fish. If they're bigger fish, they will survive. A big fish can go six months with no food and still be perfectly healthy and perfectly happy. Fish do not normally eat every day in the wild, particularly large fish. Little fish usually are grazing all the time. Allow them to graze. Don't keep throwing food in there. Let them graze on what's growing in the tank. There are all sorts of algaes and microscopic life that are developing in that tank. If you let them feed on that, it will complete the cycle and it will produce more food for them. So let them let them live and feed naturally. Part of having a natural aquarium is having its inhabitants function naturally. After three or four days, you may put a little food in. I have a number of tanks here that get fed maybe once a week. If I'm trying to beat the fish up and get it ready to breed, yeah, I'll feed it every day for three or four days until it gets really egged up and is able to spawn. Other than that, the tank will provide the food for your tiny fish. Let it be so. Please comment below and come on over to our Discord channel. You'll find the link at the bottom of this page. There will be an opportunity there for you to ask all sorts of questions, to participate in a fun-loving conversation, to have a truly great time, and make some wonderful new friends. So come on over and visit our Discord channel. It is a 24-7 chat complete with pictures and videos. It's delightful. Put your comments down below. Please be sure to share this video. We are being shadow banned by the algorithm, which means only about 10 percent of our subscribers actually get to see the videos that are posted. So please, please, please share this video. Share it with whoever you can, wherever you can, however you can. Typically, one share equates to a hundred new views, so it is vitally important if we want to be able to reach out to a wider audience and really reach the fish fam with the message of a deep substrate, we need to share the video. Thank you all so much for being a part of this, being a part of the conversation with me, and being good friends. We love you all. Be sure to catch us. We're live streaming Monday mornings, Sunday evenings at 5 30, and probably Friday evening following LRB. We're working on it. We're going to try to do something with Danikin. So bless you all. Take care. Have a wonderful day. Keep your tanks turned in. Bye for now. Danikin signing off.