1/x
🧵
#autochthonousAquarium #Uruguay #permaculture
@mina
> Regarding the rain water, I thought it might need some filtering.
Actually that's quite a complex issue, and depends on a lot of factors, including the species involved, and probably even details like the quality of the rain, issues like like acidic rain, "Saurer Regen" in german. In general terms it's recomended to use it.
To begin with it depends on the filter system, the amount of water in the tank and the amount of water you replace. You normally would treat tab water with chemicals or store it at least in open buckets for like two days so that the clorin in it can evaporate.
We never did either of that.
Commonly they say that rain water is quite the contrary to acidic, in german they say "soft" (weich), there is the tale that it is very good for washing your hair.
The fish you'll see in the videos are where you are quite exotic and their for relative expensive, if you get them at all.
All those "exotic" species over here are not only "for free" but come with the added value of emotion of catching the unknown when you lift the trap, including the extra of joy with the kids when you got something and discover new species. Definitely way more exiting than colecting postal stamps or football album figures you'll have to spend lifetime of your own for to get the money to buy them.
Given those facts we started to preocuppy less, began to use "common sense" instead of the indications of the german "Aquarium Atlas of a 1000 species" and took the road of investigating and #learningByDoing.
Things like temperature indication in the literature:
18-22 degrees celsisus!
/head scratching:
"How strange, the creeks in the winter over here a painstakingly cold. Let's forget about the temperature, this is local climate as it is."
PH indication of all kinds:
"Let's build a good filter system inventing it due to our best knowledge with what is at hand and see what's happening."
At first we used the high quality Eheim filter we brought with us. Ultimately we ended up with only the motor, as you can see in the video.
The filters are:
* The floor of the upper tank, using the standard cheapest clay "baldozas" from the nearest "barraca", covered with sand from the creek, and the lower water outlet of the tank as flow out.
From there the outflow "manguera" goes up to mark the water level of outflow we want to have for the upper tank. From their the water pours down into the lower tank in a free fall, which is actually even much bigger than the one on top.
* Inside that tank on the bottom we put a kind a filter wool cartridge, made out of a big disposable plastic bottle. Inside that cartidge goes the feeding "manguera" of the water pump that feeds the filtered water, free of sediments to not compromise the pump, back to the upper tank. Ultimately the strength of the pump doesn't matter as the water simply overflows when the desired height of water level is reached in the upper tank.
A good aquarium filter system works mainly on microorganisms. The clearness of the water in any case is created by the filter wool. As you get your sand from the creek itself, it comes with the respective bacteria and microorganisms all along. Actually you normally wash it with clear water at least two to three times, so make sure to retain those organisms. A good filter system needs like up to a month to fullly evolve. As you can see in the videos, to really clear out the water of the recovery session, it took the filter system like four to five days to really create cristal clear water.
As visible in the video, the lower tank is nearly at the higth of the floor and sorunded by la lot of vegetation. So there are a lot of leaves year round falling into it that actually start to decay in it. Anaerobic decomposition is the fastest decomposition and actually an interesting way to create fertilizer. Maybe once a year we cleared out all that decaing material from the lower tank. In the upper tank we simply cleaned the sand by picking up visible stuff that feel into the open air aquarium and maybe every once in a while using the "campana" aspiration system, adapting a 0.5l disposable plastic bottle with a "manguera", evacuating the sucked water into the lower tank. But that's only for the purpose of beauty of the visible instalation, the "show room aquarium".
Just to get an idea of how something like that looks and feels like, when cleaning out the lower tank of the decaid material, actually even methan bubbles popped up. We never did a PH test of the water, so no idea about those details.
The lower tank had fishes too, of course. In part it was the recipient for the fish that were to many in the upper tank.
The composition of amount and diversity of fishes in an aquarium is probably the most creative and important detail for a nice living ecosystem painting.
youtube.com/watch?v=2rDhokkn0J…
@bitpickup @aiquez @crossgolf_rebel @dprieto @sinmisterios
