Creating A FILTERLESS AQUARIUM Using Anoxic AND Aerobic Bacteria. How to Setup A Natural Fish Tank

hello this is alex williamson and welcome to the secret history living in your aquarium you know guys for years i thought that you had to have all sorts of filtration in an aquarium i always believed that you know it was some debate between do you have a big enough canister filter do you use sponge filters do you use air stones or do you have a hang off the back what what is the answer are you doing airline filters or do you have a pump of some sort like a fountain out in a pond and for me the the only question was which kind do i need to use and how much media do i need well it turns out that the conversation is actually a whole lot simpler than that in some ways and on the other hand it's a lot more complex once you get into the science but you can keep a robust and beautiful aquarium without any filtration no electric filtration no bubbling nothing like that going on whatsoever it is possible and i'm going to explain to you how there are two kinds of people that have figured this out it's either completely on accident or years of experience and methodically working towards it and figuring out how to do it so let's get into what that looks like this aquarium clearly has a filter but let's go downstairs and look at a couple that don't have one and we'll talk about the difference and how you can set that up and what that will look like for you if you want to emulate that as well and how a natural ecosystem can be established and flourish in your aquarium even at a small size even at 10 or 20 gallons it's possible all right let's go downstairs and take a look so you guys have seen the setups that need filters that need two filters that need a light that need a heater that needs co2 for the plants to flourish that need active substrate this is common sense in our hobby these days you go on to any forum board if you want to grow high-tech plants you're going to have to have the co2 and there's some truth to that with some of the plants some of the animals need very specific conditions very hot water for discus for instance however common sense is not always so common and sometimes we've been sold a false bill of goods what is it that a lake or a pond or a river needs to thrive well fast-moving river fish need things that other fish don't and fast-moving river fish really do need a lot of times cool water uh you know like trout and those kind of things salmon and oxygen because they need that moving rapid water to go through their gills and to feed them however other fish like rice fish or guppies for that matter there's guppies in here too they don't need all of that stuff and when you start to think about it what is it that we are missing that we could supply into our aquariums that would allow us to get rid of our heater for instance to get rid of our air stone our sponge our sponge uh filtration even our hang off the back or canister filter whatever it may be could we get rid of the light i don't know so i started thinking and it all started when i became one of the two people who have historically been able to pull this off now here is a tank that was set up with and hang off the back filter and a heater the heater is still technically on but it's set to 72 and this light even though it's an led puts out a little bit of heat just a little and this tank has been running for five years at one point it started getting clogged up the filter back here got all gunked up with mud debris and uh i don't know moss duckweed all sorts of stuff and i let it because the fish looked happy now what happened over time was i noticed that the water was getting a little bit cloudy and i got worried what could that mean usually it means that you have a bacteria bloom or die off or an algae bloom and i started going back and looking at other youtubers what they're doing at pond fish and looking at the wild and going over old books like diane walstad's ecology of the planted aquarium and thinking about what is it that we're missing because all of a sudden i had a tank that has rummy nose rasboras danios uh corydoras tons of shrimp uh snails you know nerite snails and malaysian trumpet snails and substrate that should be depleted by now yet somehow this tank is doing fine and i hadn't realized that after the filter got clogged then it was just running from one side it was the clogged side and so it was just water just cycling and falling back out of this overflow and i thought okay well they need the oxygenation surely and you know i don't have all the filtration but maybe there's enough surface area in here that it's getting filtered so i started doing research and i found that when you have a strong enough light that causes the plants to create enough oxygen in the day by taking that light and the nutrients in the soil or substrate that they can support even hill stream species this panda gara look at his color he's so happy in here they're happy in this tank in this 17.5 gallon tank we have eight of the uh corey uh pepper corey's long fins we have a group of the beautiful panda loaches and then we have long finn daniels and more than that we have the oftentimes delicate rummy nose rasbora or saabwa splendens rasbora from lake inlay so i started thinking well we've got fish from all over the place a lot of these are southeast asian fish and some of them live in areas with monsoons and i've got a good light on the tank but now i don't have any you know airflow really going on it well and so one day i decided to see what would happen if i just didn't experiment i took the the the panda garage out at first and i figured the the the rummy knows tetras could do okay um they'd be my guinea pig they would be the canary in the coal mine if they lost oxygen i would know from them first because the quarries can go up for air and gulp and uh some of cypriots can also do that some danios and things and gouramis can live in really low oxygen water so um i thought that could be a fluke right you know maybe kind of like goldfish they can just live in extreme conditions well it turns out that you know of course labyrinth fish like bettas and gouramis they can totally breathe air but cory's can gulp it but that's not what they're doing in this tank they don't need to gulp it they're still hanging out on the bottom in groups still doing their thing with the shrimp and eating and it's because even with the air filter turned off the light is strong enough and the soil is nutrient enough has enough nutrients that at night the plants are going to release carbon that's what they do in the form of co2 they're going to use most the carbon that they sucked up in the day in respiration and transpiration and they're sucking up water they're sucking up carbon and they're building with that now they need nutrients so they need nitrates they need potassium they need iron they need manganese zinc the trace elements so if you have a substrate that still has those metals and important things in it you can use root tabs to keep that in there or powders like ada's um magic super powder there's they're their their starting power powder that they suggest you put in their their uh substrate package and i mean beyond that what if you just feed your fish a good diet and you have shrimp and snails which break down plants and fish waste into smaller and smaller units they may not eat the fish waste but they take the usable things out of it they're eating the carbon they're eating the protein they're eating the leftover starch the leftover whatever and as long as you've got those tiers of secondary digesters and tertiary or third level digesters so that's going to be your snails and your planaria a lot of people think are gross and they get rid of them they're gonna actually go to the bathroom and create malm now we've known for a long time that mom is enough to actually kick start a new tank you don't need the filter media with the oxygen running through it a lot of people think you need oxygen running through it like fast like you need to see it moving these fish are moving the water around the temperature throughout the day in this room goes from say 67 at night to 72 in the day or something like that on average and that temperature change the hot water rises the cool water sinks and that naturally happens the plants naturally put out gases and water and actually heat they're burning calories just like any other living form of life and they will slowly move those things now you may think that this is bad like you're getting a level of all this dead stuff that's going to make ammonia and all that well these little cleaning critters and in the cleaning crew they're going through that and breaking it down it's getting small enough that it can work its way down through the layers down through the substrate and if your substrate's thick enough it begins to stratify just like a lake bed and this is the next key thing so first we had that we need enough light for the plants to make enough oxygen that your surface area in your tank is your beneficial bacteria that is your filter so you know that you can have a hang off the back filter or a canister filter but it needs the oxygen right that's that's what it needs for and the surface area we're always told that it needs surface area you need all the little nooks and crannies on here for it to clean the bad bacteria and then you need to do water changes well i found in this tank it couldn't live without the filter my nitrates started to spike and i had to call off the project essentially but that tank kept chugging along and other tanks i had set up kept chugging along even the little ones they had deep substrates and this is something father fish diane walstead lucas brett's lots of people have noticed this and this is just my kind of twist on it or my holistic the whole ecology of the tank needs to be in place but this this stuff breaks down your eco complete or your amazonia ada or fluval stratum whatever it may be uh dirt from the garden that will break down and the the uh ammonia and the nitrates and nitrites break down and turn into their simplest compounds your plants use them your plants grow they either die and fall back into the system and it gets recycled or you cut them or sell them and you remove that so you're taking out ammonia and nitrates things like that whenever you remove a plant well if you can get them to crest the water or float then you're really in business because they don't need to compete with a better quality light so then we can knock off another element so we knocked off the heater by just having the room at a subtropic temperature range which if you don't have discus fish like medaka rice fish like guppies like bettas they can stand 72 degrees now is it ideal for spawning and things to keep them at closer to 74 yes so maybe just keep your room heated a couple degrees warmer if your tanks are mostly in one room and then in here again we've got the snails and we've got shrimp and we've got surface area and the malm and all the little crags and cracks and spaces on here are the same as a sponge if you look at the entire container and that bloom i was seeing in the other tank was not bacteria getting washed out of the hang off the back filter it was actually water borne bacteria there are types of nitrifying bacteria that yes they need to colonize on surfaces but just because they're 90 percent denser on a surface doesn't mean that they don't exist in the water also so sometimes you'll see a cloudy look to the water and as long as it's a clear cloudy look that's either just tannins and a bacteria and fungi relationship happens with fresh wood sometimes or it's that bacteria living and dying in its bodies in the water and that all falls down and gets recycled and you start getting stratified layers now you can see here that below this layer right here it's gotten really dense within an inch and here we see cyanobacteria which usually needs light but it can grow anoxically it can grow without air it can grow anaerobically the bacteria and what it can do is it can take nitrites and nitrates and it can turn it into ammonia now plants actually eat ammonia a little bit better than they do nitrites and nitrates it's just fish get poisoned by it by the ammonia and deal better with nitrates so that's why we use nitrates more so in liquid fertilizers and additives that's why on a high tech tank i'm adding liquid fertilizers in low amounts daily and we're doing lots of water changes and that allows the fish to not get poisoned well in a tank like this it's all getting trapped down below and the bacteria is breaking it down and literally handing it to the roots the roots need oxygen so they're bringing oxygen with them and they're breaking that up and there's little pockets of nitrifying bacteria there's little pockets there's a dead snail right there and there's these things are breaking down now it may not be as you may not have as much uh filtration area granted these tanks have all of what was going on in the other tanks plus these reservoirs of oxygen and all this surface area that's open right now so you can see that's all colonized by good bacteria and you know you don't want to get rid of that you want to save that but the substrate here has done the same thing so as long as i keep my heavy metal nutrients and my micro nutrients in these tanks they are completely fine with that deep substrate and we see that stratifying here too so you can either do it from the start and just start slow you get some shrimp and snails and you put those in and you barely feed them you just have lots of plants and a good light and you just let your tank go for a few months no fish then you add a couple fish check your nitrates if they're fine good if they're high do a water change if they're really high add a few more plants and you can build it and build it and build it and that's what i've done in those tanks over there however in this tank it took pulling the plug and thinking do i really need all the stuff they've sold me to keep these fish alive or is that just the quickest route the easiest route and now that this system's set up i literally just feed it and top it off with water there is a slight cloudiness i will admit on this one and that's whenever the light is up very high so it could be a slight algae but i think it's more of a bacteria relationship bacteria eating the nutrients in the water something along those lines i still need to learn maybe you know why and you can put that in the comments but i want you guys to think about other ways to keep your fish i mean they live in ponds and lakes and yes there are those species that will need extra help and this won't work for but i'm not gravel backing my tanks i'm not puncturing this layer it's like a cap it's like paving the street over the sewer lines over your septic tank and it's not allowing it to come up except for in the form of gas bubbles every once in a while methane sulfur gases and things like that so once you've impregnated the soil with the iron and the sulfur that the anoxic bacteria likes it can also make oxygen so it starts making oxygen as well as all the little surface areas here making oxygen in all the plant surface areas now granted at night the plants also let off their co2 but it's a cycle that they've let off more oxygen than co2 over time and they're eating the co2 that the fish are expelling in waste and in breathing and agitating the top of the water can help get them more oxygen so sometimes getting fish that come and feed and hit the top of the water is a good idea or create little currents but you can see this tank things are still moving i have active fish in here so with a little bit of planning you can do some amazing things and like i said the two people i've seen pull it off are complete accidents where they don't know why their fish is still alive and it should be dead and their filter's dead and their heater's gone and it's green water algae which green water tanks are excellent for fish they love eating that green algae filled water almost most the time means that plant life is flourishing and that the nitrates aren't too high in in most aquariums now farm runoff and things in the wild is different but the other person is someone who does it intentionally and has studied these systems so you want the substrate with a dense layer a heavy layer the bottom with the anaerobic surface area and then you want some sort of a rich layer with nutrients for the plants so you know something like the eco-complete or soil from your yard or whatever it may be it can have ammonia in it even and then you need to cap it off and if your weight patiently silts from mom will form like this and this will allow you to actually have an aquarium that takes care of itself with its oxygen and it's waste it's just like a lake it's an entire ecosystem and we've been told that we need all these things we need to pay all this money when really we just need to give it the things it has from nature and we need to have the different levels of creatures breaking things down and moving and we need to give them food with things like calcium magnesium so that gets into the water live animals naturally have those things they bioaccumulate it and so do plants so any critters eating your dead plants or or like snails will also do that and when they die their shells and things leave them in there and by looking at this and studying the natural world a little more and having a good light so that all of it can be simulated like it's under the sun you can actually keep tropical fish without a filter so i'd love to know your tips your opinions i don't want to lecture you guys on what buttons to push or bells to ring but if you guys enjoy this content i appreciate you watching your support and i've got a lot more videos on all of this sort of stuff so check it out and i'll talk to you guys next time take care have a good one bye

Channel: The Secret History Living in Your Aquarium

Views: 25,732

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: aquarium, planted tanks, planted aquarium, filterless aquariums, how to set up a filterless aquarium, deep substrate, anoxic, anoxic bed, plenum, anerobic, aerobic, bacteria, fish, fish keeping, how to remove a filter, hide, help, coop, diy, the Secret History Living in Your Aquarium, the nitrogen cycle, pets, walstad, nature aquarium, natural, substrate, filter

Id: CLaWAYem6aw

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021