♪ This is for the people of the sun ♪
(gentle electronic music)
- What's up, fish tank people?
Dustin's Fishtanks bringing it to you on a Sunday, baby.
How's everybody doing?
I hope you're doing well.
In today's video we're gonna talk
about the most important part of our solar system.
We're gonna talk about the sun.
I'm gonna bring you some general lighting tips
and how to use the sun.
That's right, folks:
we're talking about the sun and aquarium life.
All right, I was a history major.
Can I get real woo-woo, can I get real out there with you?
Imagine you are prehistoric man or woman.
You've got no electricity, you've got no internet,
you've got no TV.
It's just you and mother nature all day long.
You wake up, you have the sun, you have light.
At night you have darkness.
You have animal predators and you become the prey.
The sun goes down, it gets colder.
The seasons change, the sun is out less.
The sun is out less, the plants grow less.
The sun is out less and there's less food to hunt and kill.
You notice this all because your life depends on it.
Each day you know where the sun is
and where it's going down, literally.
History major's coming out hard here.
You see the ancient civilizations,
the Aztecs and the Inca civilizations, worshiped the sun.
Heck, the Aztecs made human sacrifices to the sun.
The Mayans were some of the earliest people
to create a calendar.
That calendar revolves around the sun.
Stick with me, I'm getting to plants in a second.
This is Stonehenge.
I've never actually been here, but it's my understanding
that this is erected for various celebrations
evolving around the various stages of the sun.
There's actually a stone in Stonehenge called Sun-Stone
that at summer solstice an observer
can stand within the center of the circle, look northeast,
and watch the sun rise.
There is also a prehistoric structure called Newgrange,
which has several roof windows and openings,
all that let light in only during the summer solstice.
The summer solstice is the longest day,
the day with the most daylight, during the year.
I can go on and on and on about the pagan cultures
worshiping the sun.
I'm gonna get totally woo-woo here talking about the sun,
and I thought about this on summer solstice:
your place in the universe.
Do you know your place in the universe?
I would argue that due to modern technology
we no longer know or care
about our exact place in the universe,
and what I find fascinating about the ancient cultures
is that the ancients knew almost at all times
exactly where they were, where they belonged
with the constellations, where they revolved with the sun,
where they were in the universe.
And those of you into any sort of Spring Forest Qigong,
one of the parts of the meditation that I do
is I'm in the universe, the universe is in my body.
The universe and I are one.
Yes, believe it or not, Dustin actually does things
to relax every now and then.
All right, I'm gonna talk about plants.
I'm gonna break this down with how they use the sun.
This is a photo of my daughter Nola.
This is my dog Jasmine.
Jasmine was so smart we believed she could speak English.
Any Australian Shepherd owners, leave me a comment
in the comments down there.
Okay, what's the difference between the dog and Nola?
The dog could actually get hungry
and go fetch its own food.
My daughter Nola at this time could not get up
and go fetch her own food.
She was entirely reliant on us to bring her food.
I wanna break this down the same way with plants.
Folks, your aquarium plants cannot go anywhere
and get sunshine.
Okay, this is a big tip for you
that I want you all to understand.
Your plants are entirely in one spot,
so they are very, very opportunistic
when the light becomes available.
This is something I think people often overlook.
Yes, we put our aquarium lights on top of our aquariums,
but let it be known, and it just makes sense
by the way a plant is set up that plants can take in light
from all different directions.
Front light, top light, side light, you name it.
They got to get light wherever they can
because they can't move.
Here's how not to use the sun in your aquariums.
This is a Red Stem Thalia,
a little aquascape I set up a while back.
We left this tank intentionally in full sun
'cause the Red Stem Thalia likes full sun.
I know what you're thinking.
You're like, I'm gonna go outside,
I'm gonna set up an aquarium outside in full sun.
I did this about 10 years ago.
You can click the links, they're right here,
check out some old school videos.
This tank was left in full sun.
Unfortunately, in full sun, you have a couple things
that are gonna cause algae.
Too much light, excess nutrients, and not enough,
this tank particularly had not enough water flow.
You can see we have algae.
Note the Red Stem Thalia right here has roots for days
coming out the bottom, but see all this in here?
Too much light hitting this aquarium,
and also when you set a tank in full sun
you get something called temperature swings.
Let me roll outside, show you some wins
and show you some fails that we have going on in 2.0.
All right, so one of the big lessons
we're learning with here is how we can use the sun,
and now I've got actually space that's not in my backyard
to utilize the sun, so I'm gonna show some of the victories
and some of the fails.
Let's start with the fails.
I'm willing to admit my fails.
Come around here, Mr. Cameraman.
We'll show you one of the fails.
We had Staurogyne repens down in here.
This is our own substrate mix that we had.
This actually water level is low.
Now, the Stauro didn't die,
but it didn't like the hot temps, okay?
So the Stauro didn't make it.
That's a clay soil base that we have here,
but if you go one tub over, look at Sag.
We have our own factory of Sagness,
not sadness like the Cleveland Browns.
We're growing Sag in a ridiculous fashion.
I'm actually gonna pull out some of this well-rooted Sag
to show you just how it's rolling.
I'm super excited 'cause we sell so much of it,
but this is like the Sag factory.
Sag, Dwarf Sag on this species Sunday, can handle it,
likes the full sun.
Go over one more base
and you'll see one of my favorite plants, Jungle Val.
Now, Jungle Val was planted in here super duper tall,
but we've had it kinda melt back,
'cause that's what Val does.
It takes a beating initially,
but you can see this is fully growing in full sun.
Now, notice we have this right here.
When you're running a tank with full sun
we have a cinder block, very rudimentary setup.
Cinder block, we use passive CO2 up underneath these,
because when you have full sun your limiting factor
becomes either nutrients, so we've got the nutrients
'cause we have the substrate with the good nutrients in it.
Then we have the CO2 becomes our limiting factor
so we come out here and we fill these up with CO2.
Let's flip around to this side over here.
You can also barely see through here.
This is Echinodorus tenellus
growing in a nice little field style.
Over here we have Hydrocotyle triparta,
tripartita I believe it is.
This stuff is growing really well.
We're excited to have it in full sun.
And then last but certainly not least,
Amazon swords growing in full sunlight.
They come out, the above water growth melts,
but then you can see swords.
I'll just pull one of these out here.
You can see the sword is a heavy, heavy root feeder.
Now I just made a mess of the tank,
but you can see the roots at the bottom of that.
Look at that, root on all the way around there,
and then the new growth coming out there.
The sword factory in full effect, in full sun.
But here's the deal:
we have the ability to do easy water changes out here.
In your home aquariums outside,
if you want to mess around outside in the summertime,
I do recommend you actually put them in the shade.
I'm gonna show you a little example
of how we use partial sun, not full sun,
with one of our other plants.
Back here in the swamp behind 2.0,
one of my favorite zen spots,
this was a tub given to me by the Newport Aquarium.
You can see I used to have these inside,
but I didn't like the feng shui of them.
We run some great, great plants back here.
This is the Bolbitis grow-out area,
but the Bolbitis is actually already sold.
And then we put our swords
that have been growing above water
and we put them below water.
These were actually just added in here,
but one of the plants that we tried growing in full sun
that wasn't working is the hornwort.
This actually, if you look up in the morning,
it has shade, and then in the afternoon it gets sun.
So it's not full sun all the time.
I don't know what to tell ya.
I feel like a 700-gallon blue tub is worth talking about.
This is one of the places where we convert swords as well.
Plants are opportunistic, I talked about that.
You can see right here how this one's been growing,
and then it sends off a runner.
The runner goes into more sun.
So look: the plant sends off runners 'cause it can't move.
Sends off runners, and this plant comes out here like that.
That's a real fun time for us.
We've also got some of the Marble Queen swords
that just do awesome.
We keep these and we just convert them like that
so they've got the big roots.
The Marble Queen swords, the Echinodorus,
all of these in full sun most of the day,
with the exception of the morning.
Here's another one right here.
You'll notice we keep the water level above these
because we don't want them to actually come
and come up out of the water.
Then they'll start to try to convert back
to being above water grown.
They send up runners 'cause that's an easier way to go.
But yeah, loving the giant tub
thanks to our friends at the Newport.
All right, and I wanna bring
some final aquarium lighting tips in here
transposed over the greenhouse right here.
You'll notice I'm standing underneath a shade cloth.
I think this is a 60% shade cloth.
Why are you using a shade cloth
when you have a full sun greenhouse?
The answer is simple: temperature swings.
We noticed a couple of our plants
didn't like the higher temps they were getting
at the peak of the day.
Adding a shade cloth
makes the temperature swings a lot less.
Also, if you're doing aquariums outside,
you wanna make sure you use large bodies of water, 55s, 75s.
10s and 20s don't work as well
because there's not as much water volume.
The more water volume you have,
the slower it has to heat up and cool down.
Temp swings are more gradual,
and you will get less algae, as I showed you
like we have in the smaller tanks right here.
I also wanna point out something.
I talked about this earlier.
You want as absolutely much light as possible
in your aquarium to start,
because you can always reduce the amount of light.
You can always reduce the photo period.
Plants don't run 12 hours, start them at six.
But you can always ramp it up.
You can always use a ridiculous amount of light
and cut it back.
It's a heck of a lot easier for me
to run this with full sun and then reduce the shade,
unlike what I have going on at greenhouse 1.0.
You can see the trees are overgrowing 1.0.
It's going to be a heck of a lot harder
for me to remove trees to get more sunlight in there,
versus out here the sun is hitting full blast.
I get to reduce it with a shade cloth when I need.
Do me a favor, folks.
Drop me a comment on how you are using natural daylight,
sunlight, or other ambient light in your aquariums.
Are any of you into the history and people
who worship the sun?
Drop me a comment
on your favorite sun-worshiping civilization.
Everybody make it an awesome week.
Hit the Subscribe button and tank on.
Later.
♪ This is for the people of the sun ♪