Let Nature Help You Maintain Your Aquarium

The Convict Cichlid (Kindle Edition Ebook)

New Trick - Keeping Many Aggressive Convict Cichlids Together

aggressive cichlids cannot be kept together as adults as they will literally kill eahother. you can keep them together as babies, but as they begin to grow, you will notice their agresion toward eachother. upon reaching aulthood, they will not even stand the presence of one another. the very sight of another imilar sized adult cichlid will make their blood boil. cishlids are territirial fish and need a lot of pace from eachother. if you keep many adults together, they will establish a pecking order. they will target one at a time and kill eachother. its more like a last man standing game.

but today im going to share with you an amazing trick that has worked for me. i have got dozens of adult convict cichlids together in one tub. the tub isn't even that big. the magic is worked by a thick vegetative mass of hydrilla verticillata, an invasive aquatic plant species. ydrilla provides multiple benifits to the convict cichlids like refuge from eachother, shade from the sun, a safe feeling which i important for fish health and development, water conditioning, removal o ammonia and nitrates etc. the filh will thrive even without waterchanges for a month.

a huge dense mass of this plant prevents these fish from targeting eachother and causing stres tyo eachother. even though in cloe proximity to one another, they are unable to affeciently attack eachother. after uing this trick, i have noticed a drastic improvement in hunger health and growth. they tart to grow to wild sizes like you never see in aquariums. they start to feel more like they are in the wild.

now that i have spoken about this idea and you have got the whole concept of thi, i will explain how to succesfully set this up without failure.

1. Make sure you have a large volume of plants in the aquarium before you introduce the fish. if you have just a tiny amount of hydrilla, you cannot easly get t to establish in a tank full of many fish as it would not be able to handle the bio load and the fish will also damage the plant thu preventing it from growing. you will have to grow the plat separately till it increases to a significant amount with a few fish first. remember that the plant should be the dominating thing in the tank. the plant should roughly cover 80% of the aquarium. the fish will learn to move effeciently amoung the dense forest.
2. Light - Sunlight is one of the best light for all plants, but if your house does not get sunlight, you can use white ddaylight tubelight or cfl. hydrilla is not too fusy about light and will do quite well under a white cfl or tube. nowdays you get submerable lamps which is actually a t4 tube encased in a waterproof glass capsule. you can sim ply throw in a submersable and leave it afloat among some hydrilla and watch the plant utilize as much light as possible from it and growing.
3. Maintainance - Once or twice in a month some water changes will be good. make sure you remove the exces plant mass. you need to leave some place for the fish. you might also need to sometimes wash the plants as a lot of dirt may attach to the leaves if you use airstones. you can simpley remove the plants and spray some water on them and put them bak. there are many ways you can do this.
4. OXYGEN - A very important thing is oxygen. once hydrilla establishes a significant mass in the aquarium, it will drastically deplete oxygen levels at night. during the night the plant utilizes oxygen duing respiration. i would recommend a good bubble wand as long as posible although even a simple air stone will suffice. make sure the oxygen runs all time espeially at night as if it in't running at night, this can be detrimental to the fish.

The Convict Cichlid (Kindle Edition Ebook)

Cheap LED Lighting for Aquariums and Planted Aquariums

After reading and researching about aquarium lighting and lighting for plants, I found that many speak in favor of cfl daylight being a reasonable source of quality light for aquariums and plant growth. Even though you get special grow cfl lights which are very expensive, one can do just fine with the regular daylight cfls which are used in regular house lighting. Daylight cfls emit a fair spectrum of light which is useful for plants. Whenever I visit shops, I notice them using fluorescent tube lights in their aquariums. Today with so much advancement in technology, people are using led lights for aquariums now. There are various led lighting systems available at fish shops, but they are very expensive and might not match the size of your aquarium. I live in India, a place where few cool things are available down the road. You have to go searching a lot for these types of things. So i decided to go DIY and make the most out of the stuff that is highly available.

I started to think about what led lights would be great for aquariums. LED bulbs and tubes which are designed for households emit the brightness and spectrum required for plants to grow in your aquarium. These things could easily fit into a pre-designed aquarium cover. Problem is, i do not have an aquarium cover and was not really inclined in wasting my time and money in creating one. I was wanting something as compact and simple as possible.

Waterproof LED Lights

Waterproof LED Lights

One day while checking out options at the lighting shop, i came across waterproof led lights of various colors to chose from. I went and bought myself a good amount of these and stuck them on a glass cover and placed it over my aquarium. I mixed red, green, blue, white and warm white to try and cover a wide light spectrum needed by plants. A nice option - The light was quite bright, the tank was lit up well, the plants were responding quite well to it. There was a major downside to this as these lights came as a bunch, so in order to evenly mix colors, I had to rewire them all and that took a lot of time and energy. Another downlide was that the sticker which is used to attach it on a surface gives up and the lights fall into the aquarium.

Pros

• Cheap cost
• Bright light output. The more you add to the panel, the more brightnes.
• Many colors to chose from - Red, Green, Blue, White and Warm White when mixed, should be good for plants.
• Waterproof
• Safe even if they fall in the water.

Cons

• Sticker used for attaching led to surface is not reliable and gives up. Once attached, its messy to remove as sticker glue doesn't come out easily.
• If you decide to rewire them to mix light colors, its a lengthy task.
• Ugly wires takes up lots of space on the panel.

Strip Lights

I tried led strip lights too. You get the waterproof version of these which are a bit more expensive. They come in various colors. They are easy to attach.

Now the downside here is the light intensity. The intensity wasnt enough. So i deccided to try something new. I was looking for cheap, yet powerful, highly luminous light sources with good cri (color rendering index). After searching I realized something amazing at the office. I noticed downlight led panel which was really bright. the brightness and quality of light produced by it was great too. So i decided to try it out in my aquarium. So I rushed to the shop and picked up a led downlight of 15 watts, 1000 lumins, daylight. I used pvc pipes to mount it atop my aquarium. I siliconed the light to the pipes to secure it. The light output was amazing and the plants started to release a large amount of oxygen bubbles. The entire aquarium was litup a great deal.
I do not find anyone talking about using these types of lights even though they are quite similar to cfl light, take up less power and give out more light and last longer. Besides the light is all focused in the right place, rather than getting wasted elsewhere. CFLs and tubelights give out a lot of wasted light in opposite directions which is a waste of good energy. downlights on the other hand focus all f the light down into the aquarium.
Here are some pics of what I have done. It is quite neat and compact and doesn't look ugly. If you find this article useful, you could perhaps use it in your setup.

The Convict Cichlid (Kindle Edition Ebook)

Cheap Lights for Growing Aquatic Plants

I have tried a lot of simple low budget light combinations to get good results with growing aquarium plants and have come to a conclusion. Fluorescent lights are just a perfect for the job and are cheap. I would recommend going in for the reddish and bluish ones. I recommend adding a 50/50 of red and blue florescent light in your tank for good results. By doing that, you will get a purple ambiance in your aquarium. You can even add a daylight florescent tube for a brighter look and improved plant growth. The deeper the aquarium the more lights will be needed so that a significant amount of light reaches the plants.

The red light helps the plants develop roots and the blue light helps with stem and leaf growth.

Another thing to keep in mind is the type of fish you got with the plants. Avoid keeping fish that will harm the plants as that will greatly affect growth.

The Convict Cichlid (Kindle Edition Ebook)