‘Pangolino’ from Dennerle is thought to be the anubias with the smallest leaves and thereby very suitable for nanotanks. I’ve been looking for this plant for a long time but it has been consistently unavailable until very recently when I noticed some in stock at Horizon Aquatics. As a bonus Horizon is also a sponsor […]
Read more →Author: Andy Pierce
Learning about planted freshwater aquaria and WordPress.
The Marsilea hirsuta has been a wonderful carpeting plant, but it first went into the Fireplace Aquarium nearly 27 months ago and has started to become problematic. Over long periods of time the marsilea can build up into a mass, I think as newer individual stems try to outgrow the existing carpet layer, so there […]
Read more →The goal is to get epiphytes such as Anubias or Bucephalandra to grow emersed in the open-topped Shrimphaus exposed to normal room humidity. There is a lot of internet opinion, most of which says “forget it”, but some people have managed to make a go of it. My first try was Anubias nana ‘Coin’ which […]
Read more →The initial concept for the aquaduct of the Shrimphaus was for water flowing over slate with epiphytic plants and mosses clinging to the slate under the water with leaves growing up out of the water. That didn’t work out very well. The underwater rhizome of the Anubias nana ‘Coin’ slowly rotted away, killing the plant. […]
Read more →Following on from the disastrous experience of adding new cherry shrimp to the Fireplace Aquarium I decided to give the shrimp their own aquarium with no predatory fish! I built them their own customised Shrimphaus and after a couple weeks of equilibrating the water chemistry and biology I added some Bloody Mary shrimp sourced from […]
Read more →Neocaridina davidi are small freshwater shrimp and very popular for tropical aquaria. These come in many different vibrant colours, most commonly a bright red usually referred to as ‘cherry shrimp’, but they can also be blue, orange, chocolate, white, black, green and several with alternating block patterns of colour. Looking some something that would be […]
Read more →The newly planted vallis seemed to be doing poorly with the leaves suffering structural damage and since vallis is thought to be sensitive to damage from liquid carbon I stopped the daily dosing of EasyCarbo. Stopping the daily liquid carbon is something I had been thinking about doing anyway, on the grounds that with injected […]
Read more →My wife suggested planting something “long and grasslike” so I straightaway thought of vallis. There are several species of Vallisneria commonly available and I plumped for Vallisneria asiatica as sold by Aqua Essentials. This is the second smallest vallis (Vallisneria torta being the smallest), and is listed as growing to 30 cm with pretty corkscrew […]
Read more →They say Cryptocoryne lutea ‘Hobbit’ is a small crypt, but saying it and seeing it are two different things. This is a really small crypt! The original idea was to have a small plant to go in front of the Lobelia cardinalis ‘Dwarf’ to hide the rooty lower stems of the Lobelia without covering up the […]
Read more →I picked up two pots of Cryptocoryne parva from Pro Shrimp as produced by Aquadip with the idea of putting in a crypt a little larger than the Cryptocoryne lutea ‘Hobbit’ in front of the Ludwigia palustris ‘Dwarf’. The pots arrived promply and in excellent condition. It was straightforward to remove the rockwool growth support […]
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