four years ago when i launched the aquarium gallery the entire purpose of this facility
was to simply educate and inspire my fellow hobbyists and i did so by setting up new aquariums
uh new fish and cycling through them setting it all up then starting over exposing you to more
and more different methods and ways switching out the filters lights everything just continuously
doing it for four years and i gotta say i'm not complaining it's it's it was so much fun it was
an incredible experience and but i never thought that i was going to learn anything
i was just teaching you guys what i already knew i was giving you my what 18 19 years
of experience and dumping it into video and my aquariums and i hope that that helped many of you
but what if i told you that over the last little while i personally experienced the largest
shift in my hobby of all time man that's changed the way i look at aquariums and i think it's
changed the way i look at them forever let me explain i thought about this for a while now
i taught you guys everything based off of my level of experience and
my knowledge and my method of fish keeping i'm sitting in front of this aquarium because this
is a bare bottom aquarium housing fresh water stingray asian arowana and there's a bishop
in there as well that nobody wants to talk about because he rarely comes out on camera
i built everything from aquariums the stands the filtration the lights every method and type of
equipment i could possibly imagine my background as a fish keeper is a do-it-yourself fish keeper
but i built everything and designed everything around the idea that this will be on one of my
bare bottom aquariums i never built it based around an aquascaped aquarium community style
substrate perhaps there would be plants and algae and you know a complete ecosystem so
to speak but of course i knew if i was going to have an aquarium gallery these aquariums better
darn well look like one of your aquariums or something that you might want to set up
because i know you don't want to set this up you might want to have it but if you could
only have like a small tank or one aquarium type of deal maybe you would want to plant a tank or
an aquascaped aquarium in some method or form but you probably don't want this and if you do
me too bro the bottom line is this when i'm designing an aquarium or building a filtration
system or whatever i'm doing and i know it's going to be a bare bottom aquarium my lord you guys are
gorgeous stop distracting me i need to know that the filtration system that i'm going to design
and build or purchase or whatever we're going to do has got to be the sole method of biological
filtration that's going to house and facilitate the nitrogen cycle and some of my older bare
bottom aquariums you wouldn't even find a speck of algae i would consider absolutely everything
there's only one downside to that method of fish keeping if your filter crashes everything dies
there's nothing that's going to save them and i'll tell you why a bacteria that is
within the nitrogen cycle like nitrous sonomas and nitrobacter are not they are not a free-floating
organism they are a bacteria that lives on a surface and what do i do
i reub i remove absolutely every possibility from the aquarium and every surface that it might be
able to live on besides the glass and whatever that i actually clean and focus it and make sure
it all lives within the filtration system which isn't a bad thing there are pros and cons to a
bare bottom aquarium and i'll probably always have a couple of them but let me show you this aquarium
what's going to happen to this fish tank if the filtration systems all of a sudden quit
on me you know they just stopped working or i got to replace it or there's a power outage
what do we truly think is going to happen honestly probably nothing well this is not the best looking
aquarium it certainly started to inspire a project that i started working on that we're going to take
a look at soon and is the whole purpose of this video if the filtration stops working on this
there's so much bacteria within the substrate the substrate can house so much more bacteria
than the filtration system but there's no direct flow through it so we can't really depend on it
then of course we have all kinds of algae in here and that's going to help extract phosphates and
nitrates and then of course the plants these are the same plants that i added in like a year or two
ago whenever this tank was set up everything's still doing fine everything is still healthy
the fish are breeding they're growing everybody in here is doing well you know what i'm going to
say absolutely phenomenal but that's not what i'm trying to get at even my water change res regiment
prior to the aquarium gallery was to do like massive water changes on a consistent basis
and then i started to apply that out here does this aquarium require as many water changes as the
one that we just looked at and the simple answer is it does this tank needs far more water changes
than that one because this has no nutrient export there's not if we look at the oscar aquarium
this is a temporary situation these guys were only supposed to be in here for a very short while and
i just think it's hilarious i mean come on tyreese just sitting there perked up he he literally looks
like he's smiling with his buddies but the oscars we've got seven one two three four six oscars
and tyrese the fajaca puffer in 120 gallon aquarium and we're only using your common basic
rod of the mill hang on the back filters but this aquarium is doing perfectly fine why
well i've created a you know of the basic ecosystem where we do have
lots of substrate it's not too packed it's not too compact where it's going to cause
uh water quality issues but a tremendous amount of bacteria will live in there and same with on
the rocks and the wood but we also of course have nutrient export that is a lot of pothos
we just put the roots in here and let the lights grow it's pretty simple casts a cool shadow on the
tank the camera's making it look much darker than it is let me see if i can adjust that so you can
see what it looks like more so more like that in person i guess but it's super super cool
now these guys will be all getting their own tanks here shortly they're going to go in 180
gallon tank and we're going to do something very similar but it just goes to show if this filter
shuts off these guys will probably be good for a couple of days no problem as long as i provide
water movement and oxygen exchange at the surface i got nothing to worry about you know that's the
thing that i like about the aquarium hobby so much the thing that excites me the most and why i know
i'll probably always have an aquarium is because you simply will never know everything there's
literally no such thing as an aquarium expert it's impossible to have kept every aquarium and
every type of fish in in every type of scenario using every method of fish keeping you have to
continuously expose yourself and like i said that was the whole purpose of the aquarium gallery is
to kind of like fast track you guys uh into and exposing you to so many things in such a short
period of time that you can kind of select what you like and what you don't like because you've
seen so much these are my two quarantine systems in this aquarium we have a bunch of apistos and
in this aquarium we have a bunch of tetras and corydora and there's still some festivums as well
we're going to take a look at that in a while don't let this fool you though i do have a couple
of very large uh hang on the back filters that were not there yesterday once i shut down the
tank that they were on i wanted to keep all the media cycled and i decided i'll toss them on here
but it kind of ruined this video because it's kind of fixing these tanks but what do you see
when you look at these aquariums filthy disgusting gross insane amounts of algae and detritus
and it simply just looks gross it doesn't look healthy at all these are by far
the worst looking and worst set up aquariums that i've ever had by far but i've been busy for
the past couple of months and kind of neglected these aquariums in terms of general maintenance
i just allowed them to do their thing i never uh did water changes didn't then i
did a little bit of water changes here and there but as soon as they started growing allergy it
started kind of feeling like it's getting out of control um i just left it alone i thought you know
what the algae is going to help prolong water changes and boy did they for the past couple of
months i haven't done a single water change i did find a balance of how many fish i can have in here
running only a medium-sized sponge filter some moss and some floating plants and whatnot and that
was it and it's about a hundred fish we've got about i don't know 30 40 of uh the bleeding heart
tetras and then a handful of corydora and uh well there's some other like tiny little tetras another
little fish in here all of these are going into the 2000 here shortly but this one's really cool
this is the apisto aquarium look how look what i got to do for you guys i i gotta come over here
okay you guys stuffed in here look at the apisto tank the water's crystal clear the
fish i can't measure nitrates in these tanks so i stopped doing water changes
and the tanks just and the fish just flourished they the the epistles well this is a disgusting
aquarium i just got a few flower pots a sponge filter some moss in there that's covered in
detritus but the apistos are literally flourishing doing absolutely amazing some of which are
incredibly rare and very rarely seen in the hobby but i got a tank for them here shortly so while
these two tanks are literally the most disgusting aquariums that i've seen on youtube or even in
person look at them all thinking that i'm about to feed them i only feed them one boat once a day too
they're all absolutely enormous and these epistles wait till you see them maybe i should do some
gopro footage here shortly but i got a super cool video they'll come out for them really cool tank
so the experiment that i've been running was quite simple how many fish can i keep in this situation
without kind of doing water changes very little maintenance and uh over time you know remove a few
tetras and remove a few corey door and it got to the point where there's about a hundred tetras in
corydora in here and that was the perfect balance i haven't done a water change literally in two
months but of course all this time i didn't want anybody to know and you've probably seen a few
videos don't show this don't show this i didn't want anybody to see how bad these were and and i
kept having to remember how many fish i originally said were in this one and and that one and because
i didn't want nobody catch on to what i was doing because sometimes you guys know that sometimes i
have to order a hundred of one type of fish just to get 20 type of deal and then kind of send
the rest back to the fish store or to a friend or something like that but anyways well these
are really gross tanks they're no less healthy than this aquarium or that aquarium or that
aquarium and the only thing that's separating my prized fish my favorite fish of all time
and all of these aquariums is simply the basics substrate and plants and a filtration system
and you know there's things in the tank for the bacteria to grow on and whatnot
anyways what i'm trying to get at is this um coming from a guy that came from bare bottom
tanks and you know designed everything we already went over that to going to this i've realized
a couple of things it doesn't matter what your tank looks like in terms of having some algae or
being pristine or anything like that i'm finding that your fish are going to be equally as happy
in a well-established uh tank that has detritus analogy and if the water parameters check out
don't worry about it too much the more you mess with things
the worse it's just gonna get and that certainly applies to new aquariums and setting them up
let the damn thing cycle anyways i think that's it for me today i think the purpose of this video is
just kind of let you guys know that even myself we stress a little bit too much about our aquariums
don't we we do probably do way too many water changes and maintain it and clean it polish it
way too much don't we i'm guilty of that i do it all the time but i gotta say there's something
incredibly satisfying looking in an aquarium that isn't perfect but the fish are and i guess what
i'm really trying to say is that if my tanks look horrible moving forward now you know why
yo but that's how it's pinched my ass oh you bastard oh
i sit down this moves a little bit and i sat down and clipped me it's like my
tank bit my bit my butt i stand on it so much and it's all wobbly anyways
but product placement is from the last video sorry
well now i don't know what i was gonna say