hi everyone i'm alex and this is tank tested
and today we're taking a look at my jurassic park themed aquarium
now this tank has been a long time coming about five months ago ultim nature systems
sent me some beautiful 20 gallon aquariums and at the time i said i wanted to create a new aquascape
in each one of those tanks inspired by films that meant a lot to me and jurassic park was an
obvious first choice so i know that i'm going to create a jurassic park tank
but before i create the tank i need to figure out what my actual inspiration is a movie is too broad
i want a scene and there are a couple that stick in my mind one is this scene where alan grant
and the kids are hiding up in a tree and they look out over the vast jurassic landscape
jurassic is a stretch most of the dinosaurs aren't from the jurassic period but that's neither here
nor there the next scene that i was interested in exploring was the famous scene with the t-rex
you know we've got the jeep and the road and the forest behind the electric fence
but creating a scene like this felt a little bit too much like a diorama i would just end
up creating a true representation of this and i didn't want to do that i didn't want to create a
diorama for my first tank uh that's inspired by a film i wanted something that was a little bit
looser a little something that kind of embraced the spirit of the film but unless you knew what
shot i was addressing you would just think it was a beautiful aquascape and that led me to probably
the scene that most sticks out in my brain it's this one where again dr grant and the two kids are
hiding behind a giant log this feels like a scene that i can recreate the framing is beautiful
and it can be augmented a little bit to make an aquascape but it's not so iconically jurassic park
that i need to have a jeep in the aquarium nor do i need an electric fence or a dinosaur to
read that way i can create something that stands on its own that's still referencing
jurassic park so with that in mind it's time to think about building an aquascape so with my scene
selected i started doing some illustrations and in this tank i wanted to capture that
log moving across the frame i wanted the branches reaching over framing the entire tank from above
and then i wanted to bring the ground up a little bit so that we could have a carpet of plants
and then fill in the background not with mountains but instead with some plants so basically create
an aquascape version of this moment now the characters themselves aren't in this illustration
because i think that would be a little bit ridiculous but hopefully as you look at it
you can see the inspiration and what i was going for so with my inspiration drawn out it's time to
move on to the tank today i'm using a ultim nature system 60u and that's 60 centimeters across about
24 inches across and about 14 inches deep and 14 inches tall so it's a really beautiful tank
for building aquascapes with quite a lot of depth in a relatively small volume it also happens to be
almost the exact same aspect ratio as a 16x9 film which is great if i'm referencing a bunch of films
i kind of have the aspect ratio within the ballpark already so i'm not trying to stretch
a scene out which is perfect for what i'm going for so to set up the tank the first step is the
hardscape the most important part of the hardscape is absolutely the wood
so i started with just wood now i used a couple of other materials to kind of prop up the wood in
place because i didn't have aqua soil in the tank yet but i wanted to get the positioning of all of
my wood first and this wood i don't actually know what species it is or really where it comes from i
bought it off of etsy believe it or not about two years ago for a biotope tank that i was setting
up to recreate the rio negro and i love this wood it's so beautiful it does take a long time to sink
but i think the results are worth it and i i hope you agree so i set up the wood and i didn't have
a big piece of wood to create a central log so instead i used two pieces of wood that i kind of
meshed together and that's fundamentally different than what the jurassic park scene looks like but i
thought it made a really dynamic and interesting structure for this aquascape then i used another
piece of wood to create the upper branch and with just three pieces of wood hardscape i'd kind of
created the core the backbone of this aquascape i sat on that for about a day made sure that i was
happy with it made some tweaks moved things around just a little bit but ultimately i felt like i'd
pretty much gotten the hardscape where i wanted it on the first try so with a little bit of
moving around i had my hardscape so the next thing that i needed to do was add my aqua soil
so i started creating these mounds these systems where i could plant a bunch of aquatic plants
i poured a bunch of contra soil which is the aqua soil that i'm using for this tank it's by uns and
i really really love it and then i added little bits of dragon stone this dragon stone was just to
kind of hold the aqua soil in place and maybe add a little bit of texture while the plants grew in
in an ideal world maybe a little bit of it would peek out once the actual plants were all fully
established but these are such small pieces that it's unlikely that they were really going to make
it to the final scene they might just be there for me and for you and this is the hardscape i wanted
to film it before i added any plants so that you could see the skeleton of this aquascape from here
on out the plants will begin to hide the detail of this scape but they'll also unify it all together
planting an aquascape is always one of the most satisfying and potentially frustrating experiences
because no matter how many plants you get it never feels like quite enough you start out and you're
like i've got so much there's no way that i'm going to use all of it and then by the end of your
planting session you wish you had a little bit more but in this instance uh uns sent me
pretty much the appropriate amount of plant material for this setup i started by planting
all of my hair grass to plant the grass i broke each and every little pot of grass into
maybe 100 or so individual pieces or blades of grass that maybe had like 10 or 15
blades in each clump then using my aquascaping pinsets i placed each individual bit of grass
in the aqua soil in order to get it to actually stick you soak the aqua soil down with some water
first that way the aqua soil can kind of grab onto the root system but you don't want too much water
in the aqua soil because then the aqua soil will start to like just collapse under its own weight
you'll you'll loosen up the aqua soil too much you'll add too much lubrication and it'll kind
of just down but with just the right amount you have enough that uh the aqua soil will grab on
to your root system this process believe it or not took probably more than an hour and when i'm
planting aquascapes i always listen to podcasts that's kind of how i kill the time as i'm spending
what amounts to be six to eight hours planting one aquarium and the reason why it takes me so long is
because i do individual little pockets some people will plant larger clumps goes faster but i enjoy
the process of one little bit at a time edging my carpeted area i also planted a bunch of s weapons
now s weapons is one of those plants that's just fun it makes really nice little bushes it stays
low it really fills in a space and it just makes a tank look healthy and alive its vibrant green
color really pops i used a couple of pots of s repens to fill in both the left and right side
of the aquarium in doing so i hid a little bit of the seam between the pieces of wood especially the
branch and the log itself i tried to hide that so it almost felt like it was one big piece of wood
to fill out the back of an aquascape you often use stem plants and uns provided me with a bunch
of stem plants almost an embarrassment of stems typically i might use one or two because i don't
love stems that much but in this instance i had four different type of you know background plants
that i wanted to use in one system then i did some landscaping i wanted to add a sand path that would
guide your eye under the log but to do that i needed to scrape away the contour soil then i
poured in some white pool filter sand and i think it really makes the plants pop to fill up the tank
i connected my python to my bathroom sink and just started slowly pumping water into the aquarium
but i knew that the wood in my tank was extremely buoyant so rather than have the water kind of
flood the tank and destroy my aquascape with all of my hardscape kind of floating on the surface
i filled up a bunch of mesh bags with lava rock and used them as weights all over my hardscape
surprisingly this did the job but just barely i had to keep adding lava rock bags to hold the wood
in place and it took about a month before the wood was waterlogged enough to stay where i wanted it
it was a long process initially there was a big explosion of algae a bunch of brown diatom
algae that made the tank look pretty gross but over time the tank became stable and the plants
began to grow and that led us to this point this is the tank as it stood about a month ago
the wood is staying in place the carpet is beautifully grown in
the stems have established themselves really well the only thing that's not quite perfect is
that right now the stems still look a little weedy but with one more trim they'll get in their place
to add to the theming of this jurassic park tank i've included a hidden dinosaur
a little velociraptor now you'll see him three times over the course of the rest of the video
let me know if you see him all three times and where you spotted him in the comments down below
so this is my jurassic park inspired aquascape what do you think while it's a
subtle homage i really love the broken log bridge and the fish seem to love it too i decided to add
a school of glow light danios because i thought their coloration mimicked a herd of the galamimus
featured in the scene which the tank is based unfortunately like the gala ms these danios are
quite skittish and spend much of their time hiding it's only when i feed them that they all come out
the carpet's grown in nicely it's a mix of the hair grass you saw me plant earlier
as well as marcelia hirosuta which is the lobed plant scattered around i felt the mixed carpet
looked a bit more natural and felt more organic compared to the hair grass alone the s repens has
also done incredibly well so well that any hint of the dragonstone has completely disappeared
it does provide a beautiful base to the fallen log though so i decided not to trim it back
in the back of the tank the stems are also quite healthy but they're still growing in
and in case you were wondering the background is made up of two species rotala bosai and ludwigia
arcuata growing on the fallen log is hygrophilia pinatafida which is one of my favorite plants even
if i'm not great at pronouncing it i picked it for this tank to highlight its unusual leaf shape
which i think looks almost prehistoric the plant is finally well rooted and it's starting
to enter into a period of explosive growth so within a month this log should be fully covered
the whole system is powered by a pair of twinstar led
light strips twinstar makes both low and high light output setups but i only have the lower
light models and i found that this tank really needed two light strips to flourish
hopefully disappearing into the glowing background is my filter
outflow which is a glass lily pipe i bought off amazon it's connected to a uns delta 90 filter
which pumps water through both a heater and an inline co2 diffuser
this tank was a few months coming but i have really loved
watching it mature even if the plants are still a little underdeveloped
unfortunately this is where this journey ends with this beautiful tank with plants that are not quite
perfect don't worry you'll see the final version soon enough the next video you see
on this channel will be the final reveal it'll be a cinematic look at this beautiful aquascape
so i hope that you hit that subscribe button and tune in in just a few weeks when you
see the beautiful conclusion of my jurassic park aquascape thanks so much to all of you
thanks to ultim nature systems for supporting this channel and this beautiful aquascape and
i promise i will be back soon it won't be another six months before you see me bye