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Among the best artistic displays made by any man

vraev

Carnivorous plant enthusiast
Admin
Hi guys,

I am not sure how familiar people here are with Takashi Amano. The man is a genius and a simple glance at some of his work is enough to mesmorize anyone.

a144_art.jpg


He has a gallery in japan. Check this video out. ENough said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jNTMAf8KTI

This video and very appropriate music just leaves me stunned. I really want a tank like that one day.

cheers,

V
 
I liked his work with Riccia fluitans and Caridina multidentata, Amano has really outdone himself with some of his tanks. :)
 
I always see his tanks in the aquarium magazines I pick up. They're just amazing.
 
That's the guy who's work got me into planted aquariums in the mid-late 1990s. Basing the tank design on emulating a scene from nature (like a living landscape painting) more than a simple aquatic plant display, using the fish as mere accents to the overall scene. I had all the Nature Aquarium World books and accompanying publications whether I could read all of 'em or not! lol

IIRC Nature Aquarium World book 2 was my fave.
 
I have honestly tried to make one of those tanks in the past few weeks. But man does it require some effort??? That sort of beauty only comes with a huuuge wallet, lots of time, lots of patience and just lots of resourcefulness. That vegetation is only sustainable by a C02 system. Then on top of that...there is regular need of pH checking. Early on the tanks need to be refreshed nearly everyday with the water change till all the silt is gone from the substrate. It requires exquisite eye for detail and man!!! most of those plants aren't even available here. Plus for that moss they use a mat sort of thing to make it grow like that. imagine sowing bits of moss onto mats. Either way...lol....I gave up for now. But damn...I sure want to make one of these when I have some time.
 
Nah man, I did all mine DIY! I had about 10 tanks at the height of my frenzy and did it all cheap (minus the plants and electricity of course).

gear for my 75 gallon tank:

Six 40 watt Sunshine bulbs (GE Chroma 50)
Empty 300 GPH power filter
DIY CO2
3 pairs of Aphyosiemon australe killifish


DIY Co2:
1 gallon Hawiian Punch jug (this is a hard square plastic jug that can't collapse or explode. DO NOT use a 2 liter bottle or a glass bottle)
2 liters of 80*F water
1 or 2 cups of sugar
1 teaspoon of yeast


Run an airline from the jug to your filters input. The airline should not reach to the CO2 mixture. You only want to capture the gas at the top of the jug that is created from the mixture. You must use GOOP brand glue to glue the airline to the bottle cap. Aquarium silicone will not stick permanently on whatever type of plastic bottle caps are made from. Fill CO2 Jug with fixings once a month and shake vigorously. The filter pulls in the Co2 bubble and blasts it apart into the water supply. You can tell when it's working because the plants begin to visibly photosynthesize! They emit bubbles of pure oxygen after the lights have run all day with the Co2 the tank looks like some sort of Christmas extravaganza with all sorts of bubbles all over the plants and streaming to the waters surface. It's really something to see and so easy to do. I nearly wet myself when I saw it the first time! lol

As far as soil goes I used Shultz Aquatic Plant soil from Home Depot, Flourite by Seachem (big $ but I used it just to try it in my 40 Gallon) or Quartzite Turkey Grit and add heavy feeders their nutrients with Jobe's Fern and Palm plant sticks. If you have a ton of plants that are growing they will absorb the fish waste (within reason) and keep the water too clean and deplete the plants of nutrients leading to deficiencies. The reason for water changes on a well run plant tank is because you need to add minerals not remove them. I used a plant fertilizer called Yamato Green which was formulated by one of the forum members of the Aquarium Fish Magazine online forum I belonged to at the time but nowadays they have good plant fertilizers on most LFS shelves made by Seachem. Iron is the #1 thing my plants needed almost daily. Seachem sells an Iron only supplement. I quit bothering to test for Iron every day and simply just added a teaspoon every day when I fed the fish. I never bothered with Ph tests once the tank was up and humming. If you use an automated Co2 tank too much can go awry and daily testing is likely a necessity. DIY you can't over do it, or you are hard pressed to unless you put a bunch of jugs on one tank.


Use Ebay for the exotic aquatics you can get almost anything when it's plant shipping weather. Also a good LFS will have the neat aquatics, We have World of Fish here which has a great selection of Amano books, tools and plants. Once you get a tank of plants growing well they grow extremely fast. Every two weeks I was pruning and replanting the fast growers like Hygrophila polysperma (actually illegal now IIRC) and if you want to do more tanks you have plenty of self-renewing material. Though diminutive, Glossostigma elatinoides was my fave all around plant.
 
I guess what you describe is "resourcefulness". lol! Something which I am very bad at is the DIY projects like that. I have always shelled out extra wads of cash just to get ready-made things which I can fit together with a little bit of effort. But what I am also saying is to end up with that aesthetic quality. Sure... the DIY works...I guess you can keep it inside the aquarium stand shelf or something. But did you notice the ADA tanks have no silicone seams, their C02 equipment is all glass etc etc. I guess its just a matter of taste...but imagine one of these babies as the center piece in your house with absolutely minimal wires or eyesores in view.

BTW..have u used those bacterial culture things that they spread out as the base of their tanks?? Then they have different kinds of soils for the plants they use...like amazonia soil and something like that.

I have had an aquarium years ago and I remember that no matter how many times I tried...the plants always die. I never used any C02...never bothered pH checking... etc etc. I sometimes wonder how much of all this that ADA sells is actually required for basic aquatic moss and plant growth.
 
Like anything, if they can sell you the merchandising rap they've done their job to stay in business. If you must have it say ADA on it then I can't help you there! lol

I think most of their accessory stuff is nonsense geared towards geeks who must have all the latest ADA gadgetry and paraphernalia. Give the plants half a chance and they'll grow. It's not rocket science as they seem to imply. Aquatics are quite easy if their requirements are met. Keeping them full of nutrients is the #1 difficulty! 1/4 of a Jobes fern & palm stick are great though to amend a decent soil. I liked Shultz APS best because it was readily available in the pond dept at Home Depot. It's very light so I added pea gravel to it to help hold down some of the more buoyant plants and also mix up the look of the gravel bed. Almost every type of plant (terrestrial or aquatic) loves APS which is a baked clay that does not break down underwater or cloud the water upon uprooting and replanting the rapid growers.

Too avoid plant melt downs and vicious algae blooms when using high amounts of light you have to do everything correct from the start not add to your project piecemeal. At day one you must use good R/O water, a lot of light (240 watts over a 75 gallon or around 3+ watts per gallon) and a lot of plants right from the start. The plants are the buffer that stabilizes the new ecosystem. You add the Co2 after the plants have settled in for a week or two. After another week of the Co2 on you can test for Iron and other water params to see what you need to add. I used 1 teaspoon of Iron (Fe) daily and 1 teaspoon of all purpose Yamato Green weekly which had all sorts of trace elements in it. These tanks feature very few fish, added later after seeding with fish food or something to get the nitrogen cycle going. The aesthetics is all personal, set it up however you like. Amanos designs are intended to be like a recreation of wilderness landscape with aquatic plants, rocks and driftwood. Take a photo of the woods, mountain range or something and try to replicate it using aquatic plants and you are on the right track to your own "pseudo-Amano". However, like a bonsai they are never "done" as the tanks evolve and the plants grow in they continue create new and unexpected scenes.

But if wires are your worry you can simply hide the filter stem behind driftwood or other tank elements. I had only a power filter intake and airline glued to it (a total tank intrusion of 1" x 12" maybe?) very simple to hide. The jug for CO2 goes under the tank stand. I never used heaters after I had one malfunction and boiled my tank of Bolivian Ram Cichlids and Banjo catfish. Besides using enough lamps to grow plants well heats up the water plenty.

Since the power filter is empty perhaps the heater could go in there if you really needed one. A proper nature aquarium uses no filtration other than natural processes, the power filter is there simply to gently circulate the water and dissolve the Co2.

I just thought of it, you can likely get a glass tube for a power filter intake and the underwater section of the Co2 stem from a science supply warehouse if you know the diameters you need. ;)
 
Been a while since I listened to Metallica. I gotta admit it sounded cool with a violin doing the lyrics.
 
  • #10
I have had an aquarium years ago and I remember that no matter how many times I tried...the plants always die.
Ditto. However, now with the internet and the sharing of info, there is a large amount of knowledge out there to almost ensure success. Algae proliferation (especially one or 2 types) can be really tough but successfully growing the plants is now possible. The Tom Barr methodology for CO2 & non-CO2 tanks is very robust & fairly foolproof - basically provide all nutrients on a weekly / daily basis (depending on specific nutrient) coupled with large weekly water changes to keep nutrients from adding up & wrecking chemistry.

Amano is a genius. I have his 1st book and fully intend to create one or more of his tanks. For me, the issue isn't as much the setup as the regular, required pruning. Once you give the plants everything they need to grow well, they do - they explode with growth. It only takes a little bit of laziness to kill all your efforts - whether its doing fewer water changes or fewer chemicals or neglecting the trimming - if you get lazy, you lose control ...

I really love the low 'lawns' in front of other plant / non-plant aquascaping. It probably makes sense for me to get one or 2 plugs of a 'lawn' species and let them spread in a small tank and use that material as seed material for the larger one. Then there's always U. graminifolia ...
 
  • #11
Siamese algae eaters, malaysian trumpet snails and ghost shrimps are all good friends to the aquatic plant tank. Reef tanks had their soil stirrers and clean up crews and these were the ones used when I was into planted tanks. The shrimps were nearly impossible for me to keep alive more than a week though.

Utricularia gibba is a evil pest but it's the only Utric I ever had in a planted tank. I got a strand of it in a bundle of aquatic plants long before I was into carnivores and wondered what sort of plant it could be? I tied it to a stick and put it in the tank and forgot all about it. It grew and curled around my other plants knotting up and I would pull out handfuls of the stuff and from each bit that broke off in the tank more would grow. It was getting not only light and Co2 but probably enjoying plenty of the live foods I was feeding to the killies and their fry as well! Though i had no idea it was carnivorous at the time. I posted to the AFM fish forum asking if anyone knew what this stuff was and nobody had a clue. Finally I tore the tank down and made it into my first terrarium. Then I found the Savage Garden book in 2000 or so and saw the picture of U. gibba which looked almost exactly like the photo I posted online of my "weird string algae with little balls all over it" a year or so earlier...
life's little cycles.
 
  • #12
These guys are good for algae too:
DadwithEggs.jpg


(yes this guy is in the filter, he thought it would be a good place to hatch his brood)

Albino long finned bristle-nosed plecos. I used to breed them some years ago. Some of the other varieties of plecs are known to eat plants or badly damage them. These guys don't. They also max out at about 6". I had them in all of my planted tanks, though they never looked anywhere as good as Amano's creations. I was always too chicken to try DIY CO2. My water is extremely hard here and I always worried about the pH crashing and killing my fish. Oh well, maybe I'll set up a plant only tank one day.
 
  • #13
Wow Crystal he's very pretty! I like the yellowish color with the red eyes.

How did it get in the filter? :scratch:

Did anyone here who has ever kept aquariums ever develop an allergy of sorts from dipping your arms in fish tanks all the time? I did after a couple years of having my hands in the water all the time doing water changes and playing with the plants. Sort of red bumps would develop after messing with the tanks and last until the next day. I tried to do all the water changes and pruning on the same day near the end of my fish tank days so I wouldn't have to get the rash more than once a week. I asked the cricket counting girl at the pet shop about this and she said she developed that too after a while of messing with the fish tanks. I wonder if a pure plant tank (no fish at all) would give me the same rash...?
 
  • #14
wow crystal...that guy is really very cute. lol!! yeah!! I don't think I have seen one in such a beautiful pure color.

Yeah!! I do remember that when i did have the 2x T12 flouroscent light on the tank, there was tons of algae growth in the tank. i guess probably the other mistake was the substrte whcih I used. My dad didn't want to try using the sand based substrate as its harder to clean. We had hence chosen the gravely type of aquarium substrate.

but yeah.... I do understand your point though....a lot of it is just marketing and all. but man..... do they do their job well??? Those tanks are just gorgeous.
 
  • #15
What size tank was it? If a 55 gallon then two bulbs is not enough light to get the plants growing and absorbing nutrients from the water column but more than enough to make the algae think it's a time for some fun in the sun. You'll need at least 4x 40 watt T12s over a 55 gallon tank to activate the aquatic plant's rapid growth and nutrient absorbing qualities. In this way you don't allow the algae to even get a chance to start up. Just like growing CPs or corals you want to use as much light as you can possibly get over the plants without straying into unsafe temperatures.

Standard hardware store sand is not a good choice for aquatic plant soil at all. You want something granular about 2mm-4mm in size like APS, Flourite or size 2 quartzite turkey grit. The Malaysian Trumpet Snails can easily burrow through these substrates and keep the soil aerated for the plant roots. Think "living perlite"! Also when it's time to uproot the plants these products will not cloud the water or compact the plants roots making your work more difficult.

If you start a 55 gallon tank with at least 75-100 stems, pieces or clumps of plants they should be able to keep well ahead of algae blooms. Start up is when you MUST spend the most on plants. You can swap some out later for cooler specimen plants but you have to have a lot of them there from the git go to maintain the tanks ecological stability. The tanks success hinges on this, and that's why adding a plant here and there doesn't work as a standard practice. As people generally find out. You have to make a fully dedicated leap or simply not bother. Some aquatic plant sellers in the fish magazines recently have actually been selling whole planted tank starter kits based on what size tank you've got. Kits like: 100 bunch plant stems for use in a 55-75 gallon tank for $45.99 and so on which is cheap but you do get whatever their choices are. But this will get someone new started with all rapid growers who will deplete the water of excess phosphorus which is the main algae nutrient. The plants will suck up all the nutrients, only if you have lots of light, otherwise they will simply sit in the tank and add more phosphorous and then it's algae party time!

You really CAN do it and make yours just as beautiful as any Amano, if you just follow a few simple guidelines pertaining to aquatic plants. Also don't forget that the tanks ADA show and Amano creates/photographs are not lit the same all the time as they are in the books and such. They use mood lighting to make the tanks have deep shadows and so forth so they actually look better in the publications than in person as the light will be much more even and intense to keep plant growth and water quality properly aligned.
 
  • #16
Thanks guys! :)

Swords, I was using a pretty big hang on the back filter. It was rated for a 30 gallon, the size tank he was in was a 10g. They love the current. I kept the water level up pretty high too. When I started hearing the splashing and figured out it was him jumping around to get in the filter, I did lower the level. It didn't help. Somehow neither him nor the two female ever jumped out of the tank.

I never developed any kind of allergy. I was as careful as one can be with playing in water though. It's possible to contract Fish Tuberculosis from fish. It's rare, but it is possible.
 
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