10 gallon community tank

10 gallon planted community fish tank...

This tank is currently home to the following fish:

several miscellaneous platy Xiphophorus maculatus - 2 very pretty bluish Platies with black speckles, and some other random platies that were given to me by Doug Varney
2 wagtail platies, which look kind of like red platies Xiphophorus maculatus but with black tails
5 absolutely adorable little Otocinclus ("ottos"), who are fat and happy eating the algae in this tank!
numerous wild (not fancy) guppies and one pair of young red/gold fantail guppies
Some sort of "aurora" cichlid, who looks like she comes from South America
a pair of rosy barbs who flirt constantly but haven't spawned so far
a bunch of kuhlie loaches
a strange catfish that I can't identify - about 2" long with a round goby-like body and an underslung pleco-ish mouth.. VERY cute. Beady eyes..

Also, the tank is planted a whole lot of water sprite (or wisteria, anyone who can help me identify this plant is welcome to!) and elodea, some spindly hygrophila sp., a few Java fern plants that I tied to a piece of wood with fishing line, and other unidentified freebies from the pet store that came as little spoutlings attached to other plants, but have grown a lot since then. The tank just has a plain rice-sized gravel substrate right now. I used to inject CO2 using the "do it yourself yeast method". I stuck the outlet for the yeast chamber directly into a conveniently located hole in the inlet for the Aquaclear 150 filter, attached to the tank. Most of the CO2 dissolved somewhere in the filter sponges, and the rest got spurted out into the water - no big deal. It worked well, but I eventually dismantled it because I didn't really care about growing plants quickly. The tank is a jungle almost all of the time anyway, and I regularly have to "weed" it. Here is a picture of the tank taken in early January of 1999. As you can see, it was due for a weeding. :-)

I'm just using one el cheapo 15 watt flourescent light right now, although I've been eyeballing the $20 vitalights I see in local stores, a lot lately.. I'm thinking of building my own little hood for this tank, but I'm not sure if it's worth it (it *is* only a 10 gallon tank, after all, and most respectable plants grow taller than the tank itself, if they are healthy.... we'll see).

For a while, I seriously battled with a bout of beard/hair/EVIL algae in this tank. It was filamentous, and was attached firmly to leaves. Some of it grew in a 1/8" long furry coating on leaves (I refer to this as hair algae), and some of it grew in long tangled looking knots/clumps just at the surface of the water (I call this beard algae). Because algae spreads and grows differently under different tank conditions, and because mosy people don't have microscopes, etc. at their disposal, it's tough to identify for certain the kind of algae I have, except by comparing its reputation with other people's anecdotes. I am convinced though, that this is the "bad" kind, because all of the normal healthy algaes are kept in check nicely by the Otos and Ancistrus sp.

I wiped the leaves off of some crypts that I removed from this tank with a 1:20 bleach:water solution and moved them to another tank. The dead hairs on the leaves turned dark red and fell off. The algae hasn't returned. The crypts were in very good shape before the treatment. We'll see. I'm thinking about treating all the other plants too, when I have time. It's such a small tank, it would be easy to "tear down" and treat all the plants. I'm not real keen on sterilizing and re-establishing the bacterial populationsh though. Priorities... Hmm. I'm also thinking about ordering some Siamese Algae Eaters. I realize though, that they need a bigger tank to thrive. I have a 20 gallon high that I'm thinking of setting up for this purpose. Then I need to build a stand, and... AAHHH!!!

After some reflection, I realized that this flare up of evil furry hairy tenacious algae happened after I added too much iron to the tank. After many water changes and about 6 months of just waiting, this algae has become a rare sight. Duckweed has now become the "algae" of this tank, which I can't complain about, since it's a great treat for the goldfish.

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Last Updated January 12, 9999