Aquascape Tutorial: RARE Betta Fish Iwagumi (Nano Aquarium)

[Music] [Music] welcome back guys to another aquascape tutorial with me md so today we're going to be doing a little nano tank again but this time i'm going to be doing an iwagum iwagum irrigate iwagumi i think it's how it's pronounced anyway basically what that means is just a few stones like you don't use any wood in the hardscape you just use stones this is really not starting great is it i'm not deleting it then you basically put a lot of plants around the rocks and it looks like really cool and sort of small scale and it works really good it's normally easier on a bigger tank but i'm going to try on this nano hopefully it will work so this is my whole racking system and at the moment this here is the only tank that hasn't got anything sort of planted it's just got some plants chucked in it that i just store in really so take those out and prepare the tank and i want to do something really different to the other two this piece here is more of a sort of showpiece for the fish it's a really nice escape actually it's one of my favorites this one here is for my endless and it was more like a wild sort of deep looking aquarium i want to do something completely different on this one which you've seen from the thumbnail by now is an irig escape i don't do many of those i've got one over here already this one here is an irigumi and as you can see the pearl has gone crazy going to give that trim back soon it's growing really nice i really like the look of it though but yeah i want to do something completely different no pearl weed on this one shock horror but i do want to be using lots of different textures for the for the lawn the grass yeah the front [Music] whatever [Music] there we go looking clean now when i was taking out all the plants i found a ton of shrimp shrimp blitz you know baby shrimp and adults so i moved them over here into my plant storage area there's quite a few different shrimp in this whole setup now there's one that's one of them i just caught actually really nice shrimp so here is the tank he's taking up the left spot next to hellboy here look at him he's so so cool and a beautiful fish [Music] and as i said before one of my favorite aquariums actually even though it's so so simple but yeah anyway i think next to him let's go for something really simple like i said the irigumi completely different style and actually really difficult to do well but we are going to give it a go now i was about to say it was a decent sized tank but it's really not as it's tiny but that's okay as long as you're using small fish or shrimp or whatever after all it's working out very well for captain america and his buddies and his buddies as well we've got auto sync listen with him and we also got a mono shrimp probably the same that we'll be going in this tank as well but our first job of course is to get in the substrate system and for this one we're going to be obviously using carpeting plants and i'm just going to go for aqua soil quite a few of you know on my channel that i'm a big fan of the gravel and the sands it works well for certain setups but you know when you're trying to carpet you can't really go wrong with an aquasaur can you [Music] so something you might notice there guys is the amount of height we've got that's because we can only use the rocks and if you create a higher base to start with it means you don't have to stack things and like you don't have to go crazy with the actual amount of rocks and it can still look really impactful because obviously when you've got things like you know wood you can bring height to the aquarium very easily and then you can add plants to that wall that's not the same with an irigumi unless you have huge rocks and then in a nano skate that could kind of like ruin it couldn't it could take up way too much area so build this amount of height i'm almost up to halfway halfway is probably there isn't it maybe i'll go higher i think it will raise once i start putting rocks into it as well basically i've made it that deep so that you can just play around with the rocks and push them in so that'll just you know transfer to further back or whatever it's going to give us lots of room to play with and we might even need to top up some saw later on so over here in this hardscape store i have got some really nice pieces of elderly stone i'm going to use those i've been saving for a while for something like this we've got one big big piece at the back medium and then lots of small so hopefully that'll work well oh yeah there's one big huge piece there but i think that's too big [Music] yeah just put it in to have a look way too big i mean if you could do like two pieces something like that for i don't know you could probably do it and do something cool i'm i don't want to do that for this one though let's take it out and put some smaller pieces in click subscribe [Music] here's an example of how easy it is to sort of do it wrong so everything looks flat and kind of randomly placed there's no sort of flow to the escape at all it just looks literally like you just dropped in five stones so let's change it around now on a time lapse because you gotta fiddle around with this kind of stuff and just it can take a while sometimes to get it right sometimes you can do it straight away but on this instance that looks awful [Music] okay there we go so hopefully you guys can see how that looks a lot better now i'm by no means an expert at this but i've tried to do big one in the middle some stuff either side maybe this one can come up or go down or so i don't know i think it'll look fine once we've got some plants in there and then we've got a negative space on this side just to open it up a little bit and there's going to be plants all around this so that's that's why we don't need to add any sort of more smaller pieces because you won't see them anyway now planting wise i'm going to go with hair grass and glossostigma i've got glossary stigma done in this one it's already starting to carpet nicely and looking really good so it's one of my favorite carpeting plants actually it's been ages since i've been able to get any but i finally got a couple of pots enough to sort of spread about this with the dwarf hair gloss as well and that should look really good but i tend to find it's really good to start at the back if you're planting and work your way forward so i'm going to get some stems in the back let's have some nice color up in that top left section and then we'll just get more and more sort of green as we come to this side it should look pretty cool as i'm trying to work just backwards and forwards look at me look at me look at me yes we're looking at you fella so nice [Music] it's got a couple of varieties of ludwigia so hard to say a couple of varieties of the ludwigia in there and then down here i've got a few more different plants as well we've got rotalas there's the rotunda foliar there in the middle then there's the hr you know you can see how different they are so you've got more pinkiness to rotate on the folia and much more red with the hr we've got other ludwigia's as well i just feel like we want a little bit more variety and texture maybe height differences as well needs one big piece i think in the back corner they're just sort of in the middle like sort of bigger than all the rest up there i think anyway so we're gonna add that in and then we get started on some of the greens as we fade this way everything's now sprayed down and nice and moist means we can get started with the foreground plants i will come back to this later on though all the ludwigia and the rotala's in there and we will add some injections to green in amongst it because otherwise it's just it looks a little bit unnatural i'm gonna go for a really natural look and you know you're gonna get sort of i suppose borders of color just sort of merging into each other i wanna i wanna create that wild sort of look i think i look really good not too much but it's just enough so yeah next up let's just start getting our hair grass all over the whole area and the gloss of stigma as well i'm fortunate enough to have plenty to choose from in my storage tanks so out here as many of you know storage tanks already there's the glosso stigma there and that's my finger here there we've got some more there and we've got hair grass at the back there but also in my studio i just took apart a bowl aquarium i haven't fixed the light up to this section yet but uh down here i've got all of the hair grass i took out from that's all really healthy and i'm going to use that because you should always reuse stuff if you can remember this has been underwater and grown for a long time so it's really well suited to what we need it for [Music] [Music] oh yes there we go that's looking really really good see that's the benefit of having plants ready to go they sort of look natural and you know how they should look straight away because they've been underwater for so long so many people say to me how do you get your scapes to look so sort of you know real if you like straight away so as soon as you've done them well that's why because all of my plants i buy beforehand and just keep them in a tank underwater for a good couple of weeks and yeah it just works strongly recommend guys if you've got any space maybe somewhere in the shoe cupboard under the stairs or something stick a tank in there and just get your plants in if you don't want to put them in your display tank that is i understand everyone can't have as many tanks as me but you know that is the best way to do it if you can get another tank it don't have to cost a lot remember so it could just be a cheap tank with a cheap light really because that's still going to give you better results than just um straight off the shelf you know so we now need some plants to transition from the red at the back into the nice green foreground in this gap here where it's gone really bright there we go so for that i'm going to use some rotala green i think that'll look really good coming down this way i'll also add some more sort of taller red stems to this back corner and i think that'll be just absolutely perfect then to put in our fish [Music] all right so the tank is looking spectacular i think i think i've really done a good job like i'm really happy with that i hope i don't sound like an idiot but i don't know sometimes you do a tank and you're like yeah love that and this is one of them so it's time to add the filter and keeping with you know this tank and this tank i bought another one of the same they're nice and cheap and they clearly do a really good job so why not do it again i'm gonna hang it on this side though so it's not like distracting the view or anything it might be actually no let's just put it there it'd be fine there and yeah let's just get it running i mean it's already perfectly clear isn't it so it's not going to be making the water any clearer but it will just be good moving forward obviously to have a small filter if you can you could go filterless with this setup especially with the fish that's going in but i i think it would be better just to put one in like i said it didn't cost a lot and and it just keeps like so long term it'll look just really good [Music] there we go filter sorted tank sorted doesn't it look good next to hellboy's tank as well oh stunning completely different um but i do need to drop the water level so maybe that gives you a hint as the fish that you know the fish obviously i put it in the title and the thumbnail so yeah i need to drop the water level a little bit because this seems to be a really good level there's no problems with jumping and i want to make sure the fish doesn't come out so yeah drop down a little bit plus it also creates a little bit of a gap between the filter and the water surface which means that you don't get any surface film because there's enough agitation see like there's nothing on this one at all perfectly clean so we'll do that on this tank as well and then we can put our fish in [Music] oh yes looking good right so the flow seems to be quite high here because obviously there's the gap and it's just shooting down and causing quite a lot of sort of movement and i did notice just a minute ago the better fish went into it and didn't like it at all it doesn't seem to be a problem on this tank because it all goes down the back and just hits the plant straight away so what i'm going to do to this one here is just add in this little piece of plastic here that i've made that won't focus there we go just cut it out of like a bottle so it's got like a ramp and i'm going to fit that underneath the part there and it should then stop the water going like that and it will just sort of scoop it along the surface which is actually really good as well for gas exchange oh there we go that's working a treat look exactly what i wanted to do skimming across the top you may also notice that there's no heater in this aquarium that's because this whole room is heated and all the tanks are set to a good temperature for tropical fish and it looks like i've spooked our new friend where is he oh he's right down the back here we can see him around here there he is excuse the wire coming out it's going to take him a while to get used to the whole place isn't it but he's looking so good already i absolutely love these colors there we go so i spoke to matt at made ahead aquatics and he said he'd never i know once only once he'd ever seen a fish with these colors before better fish so i was like well i absolutely love him and so i've got to have him [Music] [Music] so it's the next day guys and everything's going great look there's the new fish at the back hasn't got a name yet i don't know what to call it maybe i'll just not call it anything it's fish it's name is fish i don't know yeah whatever but so some of you might be thinking well how have you added fish to a brand new tank it's not cycled so what i like to do is something called a fish in cycle there's a few things you need to sort of make sure you've got or done for this to work so first of all lots of plants like i've got here second of all low bio load so one fish two fish something like that if it's small fish and third thing is you need to be prepared to do lots of big water changes for at least the first week i would go as far as to say as two weeks so every day i'm going to be taking the water down to like 60 down to about this level here and then filling it back up again with dechlorinated water now obviously we've added in our beneficial bacteria as well so we need to replace that as we do the water changes so what this basically means is that there's no time for any ammonia to build up in the tank because i'm removing and filling the tank up again before anything can build up so for instance the fish now has been in there for nearly 24 hours let's take a look and see if there's any ammonia buildup [Music] okay so it's been five minutes you can see there is basically no ammonia it's probably showing up a tiny little bit but that makes sense but that is why after 24 hours you do the water change and you've not got any ammonia in any sort of toxic levels at all and it's all safe for the fish if you're not going to change the water regularly you can't do this but if you are you can have great success [Music] oh and i know that this light can look quite bright on the camera guys some of you might be worried because obviously betters don't like really bright light but it's just the camera settings look i can turn it down and that's far more what it's actually like though that's not bright at all is it and that's why how boy over here is doing so well that is a really good light level i would say this is a sort of medium light setup it works really well look it's just enough to grow the plants although not too fast but it's not so bright that you know better fish are worried worried is is worried the right word yeah i guess so anyway look again he's doing really well day two i'm really pleased he's right out in the open not spooked by me coming up to him as well so that's great such a beautiful fish shouldn't he so one thing that i was slightly worried about is that they'd sort of see each other and just be constantly stressed out but so far i've been watching quite a bit i've not seen any signs of that at all i think maybe the gap between is is helping i don't really know if i come to the side here i mean you can pretty much see all the way down there but it doesn't seem to be a problem at all i'll keep an eye on it though and if need be i can just put a sheet of something in between the two tanks but again so far i'm not seeing any sort of aggression issues at all i'm in this studio a lot remember so if that's going to happen then i will see it and i'll you know make arrangements to stop it [Music] [Music] you

Channel: MD Fish Tanks

Views: 238,297

Keywords: aquascaping, aquascape, aquarium, aquascape tutorial, md fish tanks, md, fish, fish tanks, aquascaping tutorial, betta fish, betta tank, betta aquarium, plant, planted tank, planted aquarium, nano tank, nano aquarium, nano fish tank

Id: 0oYTcmM-D28

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021