i keep bye
is this my best aquarium well many of you guys seem to think so but what is it well technically
this is a brackish water aquarium somewhere is in between fresh water as well as salt water a
mixture of two essentially you guys will remember it was about a little more than a year ago we got
the archer fish we originally got them for the 2000 gallon aquarium and eventually i thought
why don't we just dedicate an aquarium to a brackish water tank simply because it's not that
common i've always wanted to do it and there's other fish that i would love to keep that would
make absolute sense with the archers and those include the scats as well as the monos now we got
those guys a little more than two months ago and after quarantine we added them to this aquarium
now in the last video we did a complete walk through and update of the oscar aquarium including
the filtration the lighting everything that i thought you guys needed to know about that tank
and almost everything is the same on this aquarium besides how i do my water
changes now all aquariums suffer from water evaporation eventually the water level will drop
and that's simply due like i said to evaporation but what happens on a brackish water or even a
saltwater aquarium water does still evaporate but only the water it leaves everything behind
all the minerals and salts which means as the water is evaporating the tank is getting
saltier and saltier the salinity continues to rise because as the water evaporates it's leaving
all those salts behind so of course we want to monitor the water level and top off with fresh
water not brackish water and not salt water if we continue to add salt water this is just
going to get more and more and more salty and we don't want that we want to control that salinity
as for a water change it's a little cumbersome and i'll admit annoying however because i have
a saltwater aquarium already it's kind of simple for me to just do my water changes
with more diluted salt i take a 55 gallon barrel and i mix the salinity in that to what i need
this brackish water aquarium to be and right now it's at 1.008 and that's about as high as i want
it to be right now when we first added the fish i believe it was 1.004 and over the last month
or so we've slowly increased the salinity mind you in a full saltwater aquarium the salinity is
one point zero two five or two two two three two four two you get the idea way more saltier so i do
everything the same i remove the sponge i clean it i drain some of the water and i simply pump
the water that i've already mixed and i already did the water changes yesterday so i'm not going
to do another one today for today's video but you get the idea i've shown you this a million times
i mix it in 55 gallon barrel and i simply pump that fresh brackish water back up to the aquarium
and that's essentially it now the downside to a brackish water aquarium is it does have
that added expense of having to buy salt but you don't need nearly as much as a saltwater
aquarium but a brackish water tank certainly does open up the doors and to such a wide variety an
array of fish that you might not have ever kept before and it is sort of like a stepping stone
to salt water with that said everybody's doing absolutely fantastic in this aquarium they're
all growing they're all getting nice and fat some of them aren't doing as well as others but that's
the case when you have like a hundred fish you're gonna have you know five percent 10 that's not as
healthy as everybody else unless you want to start over feeding the tank and polluting it
a lot of the times these guys will bounce back we have had zero losses in this tank so far
the interesting part about this aquarium is the fish's behavior the it's like the
perfectly balanced tank we always want activity on all levels top level middle level bottom level
and when we have a freshwater aquarium maybe we'll do some hatchet fish up top maybe some tetras in
the middle corydora on bottom but what do you do for a saltwater tank personally i thought
everybody was going to occupy the top of the tank everybody's hungry this is a great tank to feed
which we're going to do in a second the archer fish remain at the top almost exclusively the
top 20 percent is where they stay in between the top 20 and the middle or in the bottom 20
the monos typically occupy however they kind of go wherever they want which is ideal because when
they are filtering out throughout the bottom of the aquarium or so the middle of the tank
when they are swimming throughout the middle of it it's almost like they're inviting everybody else
to as well and they kind of all blend the scats i find spend almost all of their time at the bottom
half so when i show you clips and montages of this tank it's always incredibly active and
the tank is always filled with fish they're not really shoaling they're not really schooling they
kind of do stick together sorta kinda mostly the archers everybody else just occupies everywhere
else as for feeding luckily these guys all have the same diet requirements the archers as well
as the models are very similar except their mouth sizes are incredibly different the the archer has
a big gaping jaw bridge of a mouth whereas the mono is closer to like an angel fish or a discus
whereas the scats have a medium-sized mouth for their body and it gets bigger and bigger with time
i'm not worried about the scats and what they'll eat they will eat anything and i have found they
are the perfect fish for hair algae which is incredibly difficult to find a fish that will
actually devour it but within two days they ate everything now one of the things i was really
proud of at one point was the fact that i started to be able to grow algae and it was looking
more and more natural until i added the scats and they decimated the algae within a couple of days
and i'm telling you i had out hair algae just stringing everywhere and i like the look of it
but the scats like the taste of it more than i like the look of it so with a variety of fish in
here and you're going to see this repetitively especially with the 2000 since it's a community
aquarium with so many different size fish and so many different diet requirements what do i do
but you guys know i mix up my own food what do you see in here a little bit of everything big pellets
little pellets tiny little floating sticks we got floating sinking we have a little bit
of everything in here and it's absolutely perfect for community aquariums i highly suggest instead
of having a ton of different types of foods and opening up all these bags just mix it up if you
have a community aquarium everybody's going to eat it just don't over feed because it's super
easy to overfeed on this stuff now the archers do tend to be a top feeding fish and if you don't
know where your fish prefers to eat just look at the shape of their mouths is it pointing upwards
self-explanatory isn't it is it pointing forwards they're probably a mid-water feeder or they could
peck off the bottom and the the the mouths that point forward are typically the easiest types of
fish to feed uh whereas the upwards uh pointed mouths are the second most difficult because
you definitely need a floating fish and this isn't difficult it's just uh and then you have
the bottom feeders which you have to get past everybody to get to the bottom feeders and you
risk over feeding that way me i give everybody a little bit of everything i don't worry about the
scats they will eat anything the monos do need a smaller pellet whereas the archers do prefer the
floating stuff and something a little bigger more wholesome now let's feed them a highly active fish
if i leave the top off you guys are waiting for the archers to do target practice and
whatnot i'm not sure at this point if it's going to be possible with everybody in there
but if i leave the top off and i'm over there editing it's not unlike them to literally spit
at me i'm talking the water goes from here all the way over to my chair where i'm editing and
i get it all over the desk all over me it's not it's not a bunch but it's it's kind of funny
and then i know i gotta feed them they're like cats they're annoying when they're hungry
very aggressive feeders though a very fun tank to feed i mean look this is why i put in a
bunch of different sizes all at once they're just going ballistic over it now if i did
only uh floating sticks it gets a little more wild than this but as you can see everything i said
archers prefer the floating stuff but they will eat during from the middle of the tank
and or even go down closer to the bottom but they rarely pick anything off
the models are going after the smaller diameter pellets whereas the scats they're eating the
big ones they're eating the little ones they do not care so long as they're eating
and they will eat and they will eat and they will eat and they will eat they are the oscar fish of
the brackish water world just a fun tank to sit here and look at a fun tank to feed these
fish are not skittish at all unless of course i put my hands in the tank or something like that
but for the most part i got this tank is in competition for being my favorite aquarium however
you guys know time and time again i've said it this rendition of the gallery every aquarium is in
competition with me every time i set one of these tanks up i want it to be my new favorite aquarium
and historically every aquarium has technically been every new aquarium has technically been
my favorite tank but i mean come on the oscar aquarium this is and i am a little biased but
my favorite oscar aquarium of all time i've never had a shoal and it's just so much different and so
much rewarding the brackish water aquarium i could never have imagined having these fish at one point
because i would have had to do something so specific like brackish water and mix it and
it seemed so unobtainable at one point but i wanted something original and different and new
so look at it's just gorgeous then we have a bunch of fake plants at the bottom this does
help the archer fish feel more secure they do like to have plants in the tank i will say that there's
not a whole lot more to them besides making sure they don't spit at you the piranha tank
i mean this is not your average common piranha aquarium but it's mine and i love it when i
look at this tank it's my favorite when i stand in front of it no tank competes with it when i
stand in front of that tank it's my favorite and now no tank competes with that one same with the
oscars as well as the lake tanganyika aquarium i will admit when i'm ranking my personal tanks
of which one's my favorite and which one's not i do not include the asian arowana that's not
fair and i do not talk about my stingray aquarium because that's also not fair in my heart nothing
competes with them yeah no this is my favorite tank like i said i mean if you stan and i wish
you guys could come here with me and i'm trying to do these updates as every aquarium just focus
on each tank just to show you the beauty and the splendor and the fascinating things about them and
just a general update it's so difficult for me to even even focus on anything educational when
i'm standing in front of this i got to try to remember things but i can't because aquariums
are having the effect on me that we all love we just get lost in them and for a moment in time
nothing else matters i said aquarium so many times in this video i think i say the word aquarium
to be fair 20 to 30 times per day and i'm being fair i could say oh i said 100 because i'm the
king of diy no 20 to 30. how many times do you say out loud the word aquarium let me know in the
comment section below i also want to know and i only have a couple questions before we get to that
you got to see this this aquarium is going to get its own update at some point but i want you to see
something see all this algae i removed all plants and began allowing the uh algae to simply flourish
and literally cover every piece of wood and isn't that gorgeous some people will hate
it some people call it disgusting some people will say they don't like algae in their tanks
et cetera et cetera et cetera but i'm not saying what everybody else likes i'm saying that i find
it absolutely beautiful nitrates in this aquarium are non-existent for the most part phosphates etc
the algae is taking care of it and the fish are simply flourishing just absolute beautiful tanks
so unique so different you know what this is in my opinion a planted tank well an algae tank and
when i do look at it it becomes my favorite aquarium which brings me to my last question
out of all the aquariums out here what is your favorite aquarium i wonder if it's everybody's
and the top voted comment will do an update on that aquarium here shortly i'd also like to know
i lied this is the last question what is your personal favorite aquarium that you
have right now describe it in the comments section below so i can steal your ideas
i hope you guys like this update i i just really enjoy this aquarium we just recently
added these fish short uh a short period of time ago so there's not a whole lot to kind of update
and talk about but i am working on something really special about these fish in this tank um
and the others so if you're not subscribed to this channel yet you enjoy these types of videos
make sure you subscribe you're gonna miss them
so