Aquascaping With Biorock - Video from Aquarium Adventures

Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Nice to see you again. Today we're in what might be familiar as my live streaming situation, but it's my office. This is where I do my normal job from. And we're going to look at this tank here. As you can see, extremely overgrown. And I like it and all, but it's very overgrown. It's a bit of a dumpster fire. Don't like it as my background. I want something a little bit bigger, maybe over here-ish. So we're going to play a little game of musical fish tank. Okay so basically I made a video about moving a load of fish tanks around. I upgraded my daughter's betta fish tank with the tank that was there, stole that tank to make a project, stole the other big tank from her room to make another project, but it was so boring to do it I thought it might be even more boring to make you watch it. So we're going to concentrate on what comes next. Here is her tank by the way, obviously still with the lovely coral ornament. Managed to convince her to get some plants this time, but, you know, she likes it. Shut up. There's Snowflake himself, having a wee kip. But yeah, she's happy with this. We'll deal with the big one later, but this right now is a really cool little tank. It's a 30cm cube, perfect for aquascaping and things like that, so we'll give it a bash. But I have a new product to try out on it, which is this stuff here. So this is called BioRock. Made from the same stuff that you get BioHome made out of, by the same people. Sent to me by PondGuru. Hi there! Yes, so he asked for a few people who make videos to try it out, and he sent me a box of it. So we'll try it out. This is BioRock. I don't know all that much about it, but it feels like BioHome. It's the same stuff, as far as I'm aware. I think it's being marketed more towards the saltwater aquarium but there's some freshwater varieties or that will work in fresh water just the same. Very porous all the same qualities as you would expect from Biohome. Obviously go and check out Pond Guru's channel if you want to have a look at the stuff in more depth and see the details but I'm going to use it basically as an aquascaping medium and I'm wondering if over time because it is so porous if I can get some flow If it won't act as filter media as well and I don't have to filter this aquarium. But for now we're just going to take the various structures, put them together, see what I can create, see what I like. I'm going to use my normal approach of just banging things in and fiddling with it until I get something I'm happy with. In terms of texture, it's very rough, quite brittle and packaged very well. It took me longer to unpack it than it will probably take to make this video. Thank you very much. Quite brittle but apparently once it's in the water it'll be okay. It's a good surface for colonizing lots of bacteria. I'm thinking sticky plants like moss and things like that would work quite well. This is making me think shrimp but we'll see how we get on once we get something started. So I've kind of made a mountain or a cliff against the back wall. Honestly there's a thousand different shapes I could go for and I haven't glued anything together. The nature of it means it sticks together quite well, not sticks but there are so many bumps and ridges that it kind of clings quite well. Loads of Java Fern, Trident and the bigger variety, Anubias and a couple other plants and again I didn't feel the need to glue any of it down. There was so many crevices and holes and everything it's holding quite well and the reason I didn't do that is because I might change it. I think that might be one of the big benefits about this is it's so easy to move around and change. But we'll fill it up now and see how we got on with that. I've also added, I'll hide it better, but there's an airline there. I've put an air stone at the bottom under this. Reflections are brilliant, but my hope is that the air will come up through all the gaps and crevices and get some circulation going there and the rock structure itself will act as my filtration. Obviously it'll take time to build up the beneficial bacteria, but might add a sponge filter in the meantime. There we go, that's it set up running. A couple of things I'm not happy with, I'd like to hide the airline a little bit better, I'd like to get a different light that was maybe a little bit taller, and I might redesign things to get the rock maybe poking out, coming out of the water. I think that would look really good, but for now, and again, like I said earlier, I think that's one of the great things about this is I can just take it apart and put it back together again, it's not... Set in stone, it's very easy to work with, very light, a bit brittle, but seems to be okay. It's got the air pump, bubbles through the stones, dragging the water through the stone into all that porous rock. Hopefully that'll colonise, I'll give it a good squeeze with some old sponge media. But keep an eye on water parameters anyway, like you would with any new tank. For stocking, I've gone with some really nice jade shrimps, I've chucked in about half a dozen of them. I think they're perfect for this style that I've gone for here because I've created lots of nooks and crannies, so if I get a slightly bigger fish, so I was thinking betta fish or shrimp, I fear the betta shrimp may find its way into some of those nooks and crannies and get a bit stuck. The stone is quite sharp, so anything with long fins, I think that might rip or tear that, so bear that in mind. I could create a more simple scape that had lots of open swim-throughs and it'd probably be fine for a betta. I've added a few floating plants at the top. I tried it with some wood, but I couldn't really find a bit that I liked. It's possibly just the wood that I had available was a bit too big, but maybe for some little twiggy bits in there, that might look quite good. As you can see, it's quite dark down at this part. I mean, that's just because that's a rubbish light and it doesn't come out far enough. But as a general overall look, I'm kind of happy with that. But yeah, I'm interested to see how it goes. I'll keep track of things, obviously. I'll share them on the channel. So if you want to find out what goes on with this, click that subscribe button. Friday nights, 9 p.m. UK time, we usually do a live stream, so you can come and ask me any questions. But as a backdrop now for the live streams, I think that's pretty good. This tank's nicked. What would you like to see in it? Any ideas, let me know in the comments. And otherwise, I'll leave you with a cinematic, bring on the black bars, look at the tank. Bye.