# so this el natural thing????? plz help



## aquam4n (May 10, 2011)

hi everyone......

just joined the forumn, becoz i have reasons to believe something ive been really interested in exists!!!!

ive always wanted to know if anyone has or even heard about Self-Sustainable aquariums..???

ive always been interested in that idea and just though what an Amazing project it wil be......

i was doing some research on interent and heard about the walstad method....
please someone explain this to me abit more.....

i love the idea of fish eating shrimp....shrimp eating algae...snails eating algae, algea from plants...plants keep aquarium clean

dont get me wrong.... im not lazy, that i dont want to do cleaning or i dont get enjoyment out of one eating another or am not even trying toto save money.....
i just love the idea of a natural enviroment I Made!.....

i have got a empty 10 gallon tank waiting and money to spend......

Im aware of the difficulty, which is what intrigues me. I might not be able to get to 100% self sufficiency, but as close as possible would be nice.


thanks for your answers


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## redchigh (Jul 10, 2010)

If you wanted to try self sustaining, you'd have to get a fairly large tank with a low fish stocking level...

Then add RCS, blackworms, and snails... 

El naturale does cut down on the water changes, but I'm pretty sure you'll still have to feed them...


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## Michael (Jul 20, 2010)

The idea of a self-sustaining aquarium is a very old one--it used to be called the "balanced aquarium". In practice it is very difficult to achieve in the very small environment of an aquarium; small systems of this sort are unstable. But you can get close.

Get a copy of Diana Walstad's book, _Ecology of the Planted Aquarium_. This will explain the principles you need to understand, and give practical suggestions for setting up your tank. You probably can't keep fish in a self-sustaining 10 gallon tank (too small), but it might work with shrimp.

Right now there is a thread in Aquascaping on design of El Natural tanks. One of the examples shown is an even smaller tank that has no filtration, circulation, fertilization, or CO2--just light, plants, and shrimp. The shrimp are fed, and it is unlikely that they could survive long term without it.

Good luck!


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## bettalover2 (Nov 21, 2009)

There is so much great information here and in the book, I'm sure you'll have no problem figuring it out. I have a 5 gal biorb. Not the best for lighting but I am able to make it work with added light and just a betta and pond snails in it. Due to poor lighting I do have to remove and add fress plants more than I like. But it keeps the water changes to a minimum and the bowl and water parameters are perfect. I'm planning on setting up a 10 gal soon. I'm not a perfectionist, so clean tank, happy fish in a naturally planted with little or no fuss and water changes is working for me. Good luck. Let us know how you're doing with it.


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## redchigh (Jul 10, 2010)

Perhaps instead of shrimp... your best bet might be to keep the tank well stocked with snails and blackworms, and keep a single dwarf puffer?


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## ming shipwreck (Mar 24, 2011)

I like the dwarf puffer idea. I suspect it would be helpful to have some plant-eaters (like crayfish or apple snails or, with the right kind of plants, Florida flagfish) that directly convert plant growth into waste that the worms, snails, and tiny inverts can eat. Otherwise, you're waiting on the plants to decompose on their own before the energy they accumulate becomes available to anything else in the tank.

Also, I would try and get a much larger variety of critters than just snails and blackworms. For my planted tank, I went to a pond and found a place where there were some trees by the shore, and a lot of dead leaves and sticks in the water. I collected invertebrates from there--pond snails, worms (tubifex?), tiny crustaceans (cyclops, daphnia, rotifers, &c.), and scuds (gammarus shrimp) (one easy way to collect these things is to fill a 1 quart or 1/2 gallon container with pond water, take leaves or chunks of bark out of the pond and let them sit in the water in the container of water for a while, then pull them out). The tank also has a couple dozen more scuds I got from Lake Michigan, plus blackworms, and Malaysian trumpet snails (which are mainly just to turn over the gravel--I don't know how much they contribute to the food chain, though I guess they are helpful as decomposers). My tank is 20 gallon long, if the only larger animals I had in there were the 6 white clouds and 6 ghost shrimp (plus however many babies that gravid one had since the eggs hatched), I'm not sure I would have to feed it at all. The clouds are constantly prowling the bottom looking for worms and stuff, and are pretty indifferent to the flake food I put in (the 2 adult + 3 baby guppies seem to eat most of it). The shrimp in this tank seem to be thriving, but they hardly ever bother with the shrimp pellets I throw in, unlike the shrimp in the 5-gallon bowl which devour their shrimp pellets. Of course, whatever all these guys are eating benefits from the food I give the crayfish and guppies.


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## Margit (Feb 11, 2011)

Hi,

here is a good link to a self-sustaining aquarium: http://www.tuncalik.com/2009/09/biotope-in-my-study/

You need a large tank, you will need to be patient for a community of small critters to become established, and you need to keep the fish load very low (that also means keeping tiny fish). And you need to be prepared that everything turns out differently than expected...

On the day I set up my tank (120cm x 80cm x 50cm; nominal volume is about 125 gallon), I added guppies. They were meant to provide a source of live food for 4 Polypterus delhezi... however, I fear I will have a guppy infestation, since the polypterus totally ignore the guppies and only show hunting behaviour when I add tiny dried fish (omena: Lake Vic "sardines"), which are about the same size as the feeder guppies...:frusty:

Of course, the tank was never meant to be self-sustaining. But it shows that even a simple predator/prey relationship may not be readily established...

Greetings from Nairobi

Margit


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## redchigh (Jul 10, 2010)

Hmmm. Scuds eat plants... Not sure you want animals to eat your filtration if you get my drift...


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## Michael (Jul 20, 2010)

The only live plant my scuds eat is Java moss. (They love dead leaves of every species.) If there is a predator in the tank the scud population never becomes large enough to cause noticeable damage.

That said, I'm not sure you need any herbivores (consumers of live plants) in the tank as long as you have plenty of detritivores to eat any dead plant material.


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## redchigh (Jul 10, 2010)

Maybe scuds only eat tender stem plants? I could be wrong, this is only based on something I read on someone's aquabid page.


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## ming shipwreck (Mar 24, 2011)

Margit: that link you posted is really cool.

Michael: I was thinking that having herbivores might help ensure a more steady supply of detritus than plants left to their own devices, even if the herbivores are pulling some energy out of the system. Since most of the things fish eat are detritovores, having a steady supply of detritus might be an important indirect limiting factor on the fishes' food supply.

redchigh: I have had scuds in my tank a while, no sign that they are eating the plants, at least not very much, and there's plenty of soft stem plants.

I am guessing my crayfish each eat the equivalent of 1 quarter-sized slice of zucchini + 1-2 small shrimp pellets per day, or at least that would be enough to sustain one of them (and on that diet, they poop like crazy). I would guess even a 20 gallon tank is capable of producing that much plant growth, not to mention algae that the shrimp and CAE are eating.

I've been wondering about this because I'll have to leave my tank with a stranger living in my apartment for 2-3 months this summer, or else I'll have to move it (which poses its own problems...) so I'm wondering about the consequences of over- and under-feeding... I might do a little experiment in a couple weeks after the crypts and pennywort have grown out a bit more.


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## mudboots (Jun 24, 2009)

Re: the leaving the tank for a while...

I've got a small tank at work, 3 gallons, that is somewhat self-sustaining, but I imagine that when I change the water once a month it gets a fresh boost. It's not generally recommended though from what I hear with this size tank, so maybe mine is just weird. There is no water movement, no filtration, no additives, though I started with rich substrate. Maybe the lights are just weak enough or something. The bad side to it is the extremely SLOW growth rate, but that's no issue since this tank gets neglected when I'm gone on details or vacation.

Here's a pic:


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## davemonkey (Mar 29, 2008)

I"d stay away from the dwarf puffer that was recommended. I don't think any amount of snails would sustain one in the long term unless you had him in a 100 gallon tank with an already established population of snails.

The only aquariums I've seen that were anything close to self-sustaining were either HUGE (ponds) or they were fishless systems.


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## mudboots (Jun 24, 2009)

davemonkey said:


> The only aquariums I've seen that were anything close to self-sustaining were either HUGE (ponds) or they were fishless systems.


Good point. My pico is critter-less except a small population of snails, but they have never gotten out of hand because the system only supports so many. My "pond" in the backyard supports 4 goldfish even though it is only 120 gallons, but it gets leaves and other inputs from nature and plenty of sunlight to grow the food source...plus all of my aquarium and terrarium trimmings.


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## peanuty (Mar 15, 2011)

im pretty new to this forum, but its been helpful too me indeed.

i have a somewhat self sustaining tank, and while i find it beautiful... some of my friends who also keep fish... think it looks like a swamp...

which is kinda what im going for actually... haha

i keep australian natives and find that the balance is just sooooo hard to reach. as so many of the fish i have caught are predatory. I have a good number of snails, 3 different kinds, the general small black pond snail, the australian blonde snail, and some of the trumpet snails. I have 2 species of shrimp, the local ghost shrimp and australian chameleon shrimp, both of which are breeding. 

I have a few different types of water bugs and small crustaceans and black worms living in the soil.

but recently one of my flat head gudgeon out grew everything else in the tank and balance was shaken! haha... he started eat shrimp after shrimp... like 4 per day! until my population is nearly gone...
so the moral is as people have said... keep the predators under check. as before that i was not feeding them much, due to the birth cycle of the shrimp and the water bugs... but yep that changed...
the only other issue i think that makes the natural tanks hard is keeping the supply of water bugs up. as most of the ones i the area where i am (newcastle australia) the bugs are the larval form of some kind of flying bug. 

so good luck, its totally worth the effort and alot of fun, and looks rad to have a pond in your living room!


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