Hello fish loving friends! I just thought I would share some photos that I think look really neat of my aquarium at night. I love the different lighting when the plant lights are off and so are the kitchen lights, but there is some light coming in from behind in the living room.
The aquarium sits on my kitchen counter, and there is a higher bar-height shelf on the living room side. So even though the lights are on in there, the bottom part of the tank is blocked by the higher shelf. So it doesn't light the tank as dramatically as leaving the kitchen (or plant) lights on.
I love how the pothos roots look just growing through the water. :)
CuChulainn (my betta) backlit so that his fins seem kind of like stained glass.
One of the snails is on a leaf on the right of this photo, but I'm not certain who it is and I didn't want to turn on the brighter light to disturb them. Nerite snails are nocturnal, so Macha and Sanglainn are more active at night and CuChulainn is more active during the day.
Here is CuChulainn sleeping on top of the pot where some of the lucky bamboo and pothos are (there are pebbles in the pot holding up the stems of the lucky bamboo). You can see that Macha has bedazzled the pot and even one of the bamboo sticks with her egg sacs. :) Bettas like to sleep near the surface, so he usually sleeps here, or in this little nook made by one of the Anubias leaves and the cone that holds the spider plant babies. Yes, bettas do lay down on things like this! This is why there are "betta hammocks" that are a fake leaf attached to a suction cup that you can put near the surface and they will likely sleep on it like this. I want to get one off of Etsy, or perhaps a moss ledge.
catnip banana for scale
I did finally just get another thing I have wanted for the aquarium for a long time today, and that's this nice piece of mopani wood! It is currently soaking in a bucket to waterlog it so that it sinks (it is floating right now), but when I add it it should make some tannins which are healthy for CuChulainn (it should tint the water like tea, how darkly depends on how many tannins are in the wood), but also, and the main reason I wanted to get some, is it will also be snail food for Macha and Sanglainn. They do eat the catappa leaves, and sometimes they will eat calcium chips, green beans, or white sweet potato (but not often), but their main diet is algae, biofilm, and diatoms and not a lot of that grows in my tank. A lot of snail people said their nerites like to monch on mopani wood, so hopefully they enjoy it too. :)
I did also finally add a couple of rocks from my algae growing attempt in a jar on my windowsill (I mentioned it here ), which after about two months, this is what they looked like. I think that's probably diatoms as it's brown. In the second photo, they are the two rocks on either side of the middle rock that is in front of the Eiffel Tower. They've been in there a couple of days and I haven't seen either of the snails go for it, but hopefully it will be tasty noms for them eventually. I had three rocks in the jar, so I put those two in the tank and swapped in a new rock from the aquarium to grow more algae on, and left the third rock in there to hopefully seed the new one. I've been putting liquid fertilizer in the jar to feed algae growth. I might get more algae in there come the summer months, as light levels are of course less right now and algae likes a lot of light.
So that's the news from the Otherworldly Aquarium. :) I hope you all are having a wonderful day! Just keep swimming! 🐟🐌🐌