A while ago I put together this mini aquarium, sparking an ecosystem that very
quickly span out of control. It took me months to slowly stabilize it by building up a unique cast
of tiny creatures one by one. and this video follows the whole process;
through from setting up the environment to finally leaving it to
go on existing without me. The population in my fish tank had exploded:
with baby guppies and baby shrimp everywhere, and they were all lost under a jungle of plants,
so I had no idea how many there actually were. so it was time to set up a new home
for the overflowing population Lucky for me there was a free tank lying
on the side of the road near where I live, so between the free babies, and the free tank,
this project ended up being really low cost. I had to clean the tank a little bit
before it was ready for scaping, but that was just.. half an hour with..
a sponge and some glass cleaning powder. Oh and.. there was a bit of scraping as well; whoever had it before me must
have had a fake background on it, uhh.. so I just tried to scrape it off but.. ended
up just wiping it with acetone in the end. The tank's about 16 litres which is.. on the small side
so I couldn't really do anything crazy with it... ...and at this point I didn't know
exactly how I wanted to look. I did have an old shelf lying around
that I never got around to putting up so I just cut it in half
and turned it into a base for the tank. Yes I did completely have the wrong kind of saw for the job but besides it being embarrassing
it turned out fine. I cut a foam pad to size
(which I didn't actually need - just like the wooden base) 'cause I was just gonna put it on a flat surface anyway. It was kind of dumb, but I didn't really know what I was doing I was just kind of figuring things out for the first time. It looked alright for a little second-hand tank, so I filled it with water and left
it overnight to check for leaks. If it held water it'd hold fish
so I drained it and let it dry. Then, to scape the thing I got some landscape foam 'cause I wanted to try it on a small scale
before using it on a bigger project. I decided just to create a slope at first, but
reeeally overshot the amount that I needed, so when it'd cured 4 hours later, it was
massive (a massive waste of foam). but I was happy to make the mistake then
rather than on an expensive project. I chopped the excess off the top
which didn't take so long really, uhh.. then I got a knife and kind of..
started carving out a tunnel that goes all the way through. The idea was for the shrimp to have
a place to hide or get around the tank in secret and I'd still be able to watch them from the side. I cut out some space around the
entrances and glued rocks so everything'd more natural when
it was covered in dirt and plants. It would have been nice to make the
whole thing out of rocks instead of foam, but it'd be difficult to stop the
dirt falling through into the tunnel and it'd be expensive as well, so...
I don't know, I was happy with it. After the basic structure was done it didn't
take long to set up the substrate. I poured sand into the lowest section at first, 'cause I
didn't want to overtaken by plants straight away. It's nice working with a tank this small, 'cause I could just
pick it up and wave it around to get sand in the tunnel. 'Took some regular topsoil and sieved out the big pieces
to leave a bed of dirt for the plants to grow in. I just kind of poured it all over the top area
keeping it between the two different entrances so it doesn't.. kind of.. dirty the sand. I covered all the dirt with some
gravel as well just to hold it down and tidied it up a little bit with
a- I don't know what this thing is. Adding plants was easy; I just filled the water up a little bit
so they wouldn't die and then I stuck them in the gravel. I'm not good at aquascaping, so chopping up some driftwood
and just laying it on top of everything was the best I could do. I took some clumps of Java Moss and just
kind of stuck 'em all over the branches. After that I just took some frogbit and
dumped it on the surface. Oh, I had to put this rock there as well, because otherwise
the branches would just float-up off the bottom. I got this really cheap USB light
I think it was like.. £4 or something and then pretty much the last
thing I did was put a heater in it. This is what it all looked like when it was done,
so I just left it alone and let it all grow in. The floating plants had covered the tank and
they'd started flowering at the surface as well. I didn't realize t he roots would
get so out of control ..or I did and I thought it would be cool, I don't remember. Since they'd broken through the gravel, they didn't
have to rely on nutrients from the water column anymore. You can see exactly where they'd penetrated the soil and I was worried that they'd break through
the foam into the cave as well. Because they'd covered the surface, they had a monopoly on access to light so unfortunately they had to go. The roots had weaved their way
into everything which meant I had to pull them out very slowly, very carefully, and one by one. It was a mess, but I could just put them
in another tank and I learned my lesson: 'Don't put frogbit in small tanks' I added some red root floaters instead
because I know they've got short roots. I also picked out a handful of the brightest
yellow shrimp I could find from the main tank. The best thing about shrimp is that
when you put them in a new environment they just immediately resume life like nothing ever happened; they don't even care how ugly the tank is they
just.. get to work cleaning up the mulchy stuff. Watching the shrimp up-close, I noticed these other little dudes crawling around on the wood and on the plants. They're called ostracods, but
they're also known as seedshrimp. They're a kind of tiny crustacean that eats the
decaying stuff in a tank, so in my case it'd be the driftwood and the roots of the frogbit that
snapped off when I was trying to pull it out. Anyway it was very nice of them
to clean up the tank for me. They're only doing good for
the aquarium, and I read that their population would stay in-check as
long as you didn't overfeed the tank. Two months had passed, and the mosses
and floating plants had grown-in. The ostracods had also spread
to every corner of the tank. I never added food of any kind to
the system which means the shrimp and ostracods were thriving entirely
on biofilm and decaying stuff. The floating plants had absolutely covered
the surface, and the shrimp were loving it. ...and while filming the ostracods I
spotted a single baby shrimp in the canopy, but I lost sight of him for a second and
he just... vanished into another dimension. After a while, I figured out a little tap on the
surface would usually shove one into the open, which meant there were probably hundreds up
there, and maybe even more down below in the moss. ...and now that I had shrimplets, it was
time to add something new to the tank. I'd never seen or heard of these
guys before I was just in a random fish shop looking at.. stuff and.. there they were. Apparently this tank is the exact minimum
size recommended by a few different fishkeeping websites, and I read they were notoriously
difficult to feed because they only eat live food so then I was like: "Only eats live food?" Obviously I got four of 'em and poured 'em in They're called 'Indostomus Paradoxus'
which means "Strange Tiny Mouth' ...and it's a lot less of a fancy
name, but it's very fitting. They live in stagnant waters, eat tiny
crustaceans, and only grow to about an inch in length so I couldn't have been
luckier coming across them when I did. They look and hunt like little crocodile things; just hovering in place all day waiting
to snatch up anything that comes by. Honestly they're so much fun to
watch but extremely hard to find because they just lurk in the shadows all day. In fact, they love to sit in the little cracks between rocks so I wouldn't even see them for weeks at a time. I didn't want them to eat the baby cherry shrimp so I poured in some brine shrimp
instead for them to fill-up on. They definitely got excited, but unfortunately their mouths were
too small to do anything about it. [disappointment] and daphnia were too big as well. [cute cries for help] They spent their first few days hiding
amongst the mosses but eventually they started hanging around the front of the
cave picking off baby daphnia and ostracods. Sometimes the daphnia would
even give them a hard time. The brine shrimp won't survive in fresh water, but they'll get eaten by the shrimp eventually when they float to the bottom. You can see the floating plants get more
red the closer they are to the light but the other plants needed some light as well
so I took most of them out even though I like the way they look 'cause they're gonna to grow back eventually anyway. Another couple of weeks went by and I
added two anchor catfish to the tank. Though they didn't really do anything besides
sit on the wood pretending to be bark all day, and they're so good at hiding I'd
usually only see him maybe once a week. I tried to feed this one and he just seemed annoyed that I interrupted his busy day of doing nothing I think I only ever saw 'em out in the open
once, but I could finally see what they look like up-close so I just assumed they're nocturnal which
would explain why they loved the cave so much. Sure enough, one night after dark I shone a light
on the tank and there they were; swimming around. They seem to enjoy each other's company In other news: The Indostomus were eating the
smaller microfauna like the seedshrimp but they weren't bothering with the Copepods or even the
Daphnia which had started breeding out of control. The tank had been going for four months now, and I decided it needed a fish
that actually looked like a fish. The sparkling gourami likes to hide,
but only because it's a micropredator. He picked the biggest clump of moss in the
middle of the tank and used it as his lair. If any daphnia or a tiny shrimp showed up, this
guy would be waiting in the shadows nearby to pounce. Otherwise he'd be prowling around; looking
for something to bully-out of his territory. The shrimp babies were growin' up as evident by
the shed exoskeletons all over the tank, and the gourami never went in the cave, so it acted as
sort of a safe spawning ground for the mothers. You can see under the abdomen of the
females where they hold their eggs. This is going to be the third generation of shrimp and after I counted four mothers
with 30 eggs each that's 120 eggs When the shrimplets are born
they come out looking like this. ...and over a period of about two to three
months they get slowly bigger and bigger until they're old enough to breed, and
then the cycle starts all over again. This tank's been going for about four months, which is just long enough for the shrimp to have had babies and for those babies to have grown up and had babies. I know four months isn't a long time, but
I'd say it's long enough for a tank like to really develop, tell a story, and reach some kind of equilibrium. In the end the foam took up too much space,
and I didn't end up moving the guppies across - the tank would have just been too small for them. But if I've learned anything it's that you can
actually do quite a lot with a tank this size, and it can look really good with basically no
effort because nature's always going to take over. Though I'll probably just be using it
as a shrimp factory going forwards. I'll just harvest a handful every now and
then to sell, or to use for different tanks.
