Mark 1 fish tank, 90 litre freshwater tropical

Caveat - The information below is basically culled from our old family web site (housed on Geocities and long out of date). It was typed when I was a relative newbie at fish keeping. Re-reading it now, I realise that much of it is at least naive, more likely just wrong !! This first tank was a real clueless project, we went into the LFS and followed their advice ... "Of course sir, just fill up the tank and add guppies. After a week, come back and buy some more...".

Well, we filled the tank up, added four guppies, two silver mollies and two red platies. Predicatably, the guppies didn't last long, although the others started having babies almost immediately !! A couple of weeks later, we added some glowlight tetras (the last of which survived four tanks and some horrific treatment at my inexperienced hands, but still survived until late 2003 when the last ones finally died !!) and a bronze corydorus (which became known as the "Donald Duck Fish" due to a small child's unclear speech). The fish list shown below reflects the state of the tank sometime in late 1997 (I think).

Happily (for the fish at least), I discovered the wonderful rec.aquaria newsgroups a few months after setting up the tank. The information there helped me repair and restore. The tank did pretty well until Sept 98 when we decided to replace it with a bigger one.

• Tank Details and Water Chemistry (below)
• CO2 Reactor
• Plants
• Fish

Our tank was set up in August 1996 and has had a varied selection of occupants since then. Listed below are details of the tank, water chemistry, plants and fish that are in or have been in the tank. The three images on this page were taken by a friend who was testing out a digital camera. They were taken by simply pointing the camera at the tank (daylight, tank lights on) and clicking. Apart from the reflection of his shirt in two of them, they did not come out too badly. I am currently experimenting with some more sophisticated photography. If it is successful, I will put some images here.

Tank Details and Water Chemistry

The tank is a 90 litre glass tank, 30" long, 15" high and 12" deep. Filtration is via an IPF Duo2, running at the maximum flow rate. The hood holds two 20W strip lights, one Triton and one Flora-Gro. The water is very soft, pH varying between 6.5 and 7.0 depending on the time of day and the age of the mixture in the CO2 reactor. Nitrite and ammonia levels are zero, nitrates are around 5ppm.

The picture below shows a Red Sepae Tetra swimming past the Babys Tears. In the centre background is the Nesaea and at the back right are some of the Amazon Swords. On the very left is a bit of the Java Moss. If you look carefully, you can see a Flying Fox swimming past the remains of the Hygrophilia (left front). There is also a Red Wag Platy at the top centre and a Glowlight Tetra at the bottom right.

The picture below shows four Harlequin rasboras, two Glowlight tetras and a Flying Fox. On the right is a Nesaea, just left of that are some Twisted Corkscrews (scientific name anyone ?) and across the back are some of the Amazon Swords. I actually suspect that some of these Amazon Swords are another type of Echinodorus as their leaves are a slightly different shape from the usual Amazons, but I have yet to identify what type they are.

As mentioned above, this tank was replaced by the Mark 2 tank in Sept 98. I can't remember which fish came with, other than the amazingly hardy glowlight tetras which survived more than any poor fish should have to and eventually died (presumably of old age) in the winter of 03. As this made them around seven years old, I reckon they did pretty well.