My fabulous 20 yr old aquarium

Well, good morning. This is Father Fish again, and today we're looking at a 20-year-old aquarium. This tank was set up in 1998. It's a little more than 20 years old. In that amount of time, the substrate on the bottom has never been changed. about 10 years ago I added to it put about an inch of sand in it some of the plants are original but it produces plants at such a prodigious rate that I use it as a mother tank and I pull plants from it to set up my other aquariums. It has no filtration and no aeration. It has a glass top that pretty well controls evaporation, so it gets very little water replacement. It's an old water tank with a two and a half to three inch substrate that's primarily soil, or at least it was. It's been there so long now that it has created its own soil. The fish that are living in it are a combination of several kinds of animals and they change from time to time. Currently I have some Tanganyika shell dwellers, about three pair. I have at least a trio of Praecox, and a pair of buffalo heads. There also are some cherry barbs and a few other tetras swimming around to add color and action. There are a few plecostomus, one or two otocinclus. All in all, there are probably 30 to 35 fish in this 40-gallon long. It could hold many more. I could easily have 100 small fish in it, like 100 tetras, or even more. I feed the tank two to three times a week with this number of fish. And they get exclusively live food. That is, they get worms, black worms, or daphnia. I don't feed much of anything else because they really don't want to put food in there that's going to deteriorate. It will be alive until it's eaten. And then when it's eaten, I'm confident that the nitrification, the nitrate production in this aquarium is sufficiently powerful to be able to deal with whatever waste is created. I also have a number of variety of fish, so the uneaten weight or undigested waste will not go to waste, but will be eaten by some of the other fish in the aquarium. What I want this aquarium to demonstrate, especially to the beginners, is that you really can set up a tank for the first time that will last virtually a lifetime. It can be stable and solid and dependable, something you can work on to beautify, something you can have a variety of different kinds of fish living in that will give you a wholesome healthy happy environment for fish for as long as the tank remains. Now to accomplish this there are a few basic things you need to do. For one thing you need to start with good hard alkaline water. Do Do not use spring water. Do not use reverse osmosis water unless you use the waste from the RO system, and that will generally be perfect. Do not use rainwater. All of those are very soft. They contain virtually no minerals. two important demands for minerals in the aquarium. One is the plants. The plants require minerals and especially iron in order to be able to grow. The The other is the pH. In order to maintain a pH of 7.5 to 8.0, you need carbonates. The biological activity involved in any aquarium will eventually drive down the pH. Now in a well-established tank it doesn't drive it down very much or very quickly because it has enough minerals in it that stay in it to be able to maintain a high enough mineral content in the water to keep the pH stable. This particular aquarium I keep my hands out of. I may go in it if a lot of algae grows on the glass in order to be able to see into it. I'll use a magnet or a scrubby the plastic scrubbies are best to clean it off. And I will put plants in and pull plants out. As I said, I use this tank as a mother tank for many of my other aquariums. It produces such a tremendous amount of plants. I'm going to be focusing on this process for a while I want everyone to get comfortable with it to learn how to do a dirted tank that remains a healthy balanced aquarium for as long as you have it go slow, be gentle above all do not overfeed The best way to kill everything in your tank is to feed your fish until they're not hungry anymore. A hungry fish is a healthy fish. A fish that is not hungry is sick and will likely die. Do not feed so much food to your fish that they become satisfied. They will not be satisfied. They will be sick. A fish takes only two hours to digest its food, so it's always hungry. In the wild or in an aquarium, you want your fish to be hungry, to be looking around for food all the time. So don't overfeed. Keep your aquarium quiet, well-lit, balanced, and safe, and you will be able to maintain healthy, happy fish for years. This is Father Fish. Please remember to hit the subscribe button. It helps to get more people involved in these instructional videos. Hope to see you again soon. Bye for now. Here's a look at this 40 gallon long. You can see the tremendous plant growth in it. It's just full of plants, front to back. And I pull them out probably once a month. There should be some fish along here. I can't imagine they're all hiding. There are a few at the top might be able to see the buffalo head in his cave he's in there I can just barely see his face looking out there are some shells here for the shell dwellers they're either hiding way up inside or are off looking for food there we go look at that a little female just went in so there's a pair of them in there now it looks like they might have something going once the pair start going in it's a pretty good chance they're gonna be some babies in there hope you enjoyed this little video of my 40 gallon long 20 year old aquarium Bye for now.