55 gallon with bad glass.

[Emperornibble]

I wanted to use oak because it stains well, and with the red mahogany i think it will contrast well with all the greens and browns in the tank when its finished.

[Emperornibble]

Well, its been almost a year and I have made little progress on my tank. But I did find a really nasty looking stump that I believe is oak and have most of the materials I need to start the build. I just have to do some surgery on the stump to make it fit.


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I decided on Vietnamese mossy frogs, a false bottom and probably a clay background, but I have 2 questions about the clay background method. First, in the post I saw it was a clumping litter, I was wondering if its safer to use regular non clumping litter? Its basically just chips of dried clay. Second, is this in anyway possible to do with pottery clay?

Just curious because it can create different colors for your background. I would imagine, red clay would make a rusty brown color after mixing.

And now, to think about it I do know of a local clay deposit, and it is almost exactly where I found the stump. So make that 3 questions about clay backgrounds. Has anyone ever used locally collected clay, say from a creek bed?

I want a large water feature so there should be 6 inches or so of water, that way parts of the stump will lead into the water and I can have some small algae eaters, but I have a question about gravel for the water area. I want to use local glacial gravels that i can collect from the same creek, how would I go about sanitizing it?

[Emperornibble]

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The water will be deepest under the stump, and gravel with get thicker towards the other end.

Im not really sure how Im going to pull off the false bottom.

[Emperornibble]

I'm done with the background other than touch ups, just dont have a pic yet, but here it is almost finished.





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The stump has a large hole leading from the back where my pumps are into the bottom and will make a nice waterfall, and a good place for my fogger to emanate from.

I was curious are there any crawfish or freshwater crabs that can co-habitate with frogs?

[Emperornibble]

This is the finished background. It took for ever to get the motivation to do this but I'm glad I did!


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[jpstod]

fantastic looking

[Emperornibble]

It was finally warm enough to go to the creek, so I decided to get my gravel. The local gravels are formed of a glacial till, so its poorly sorted and has rocks from South Dakota into the Canadian shield.


There is a lot of very rusty Dakota Sandstone around here, so I had to go though and pick it all out, otherwise the water turns rusty.
This is how it looks after cleaning:

Then i decided to put water and gravel in the tank for the first time and got some floaty coco:

I also finally tested the fogger and fountain pump and they work nicely:


And the best part! I just got my bio luminescent mushroom spores! Already inoculated and incubating. The stump is oak, which is just what these guys like.

[Emperornibble]

Got my lighting up, I took all the larger stones out, and added more smaller ones, I think it looks way better now.


My filter works great, it pumps 45 gallons an hour and there is only about 20-24 gallons in the tank.


I also got my fans today, just have to rig some pvc to loop the air in the tank. Should be ready for moss and fish soon, then eventually my mossy frogs!

[jpstod]

looking great

[Emperornibble]

Made a fair amount of progress. The tank finished cycling and I added a few plants, some snails, a red claw crab, a small clown pleco, chinese algae eaters and some small schooling fish. The clown found a nook in the stump and hides there all the time, I've only seen him twice since I got him.
I finally got my fans installed and a cut a plexiglass cover for the tank. The fans I got have blue leds in them (thanks radio shack!), so I hope it will give just enough light for a bit of night viewing. I havent tried it yet...


I'm gonna go to the nursery and collect mosses and liverworts for the background tomorrow. The weather forcast says thunder storms tonight, so I think Im gonna build a makeshift rain collector. I dont want any of our heavy water getting on the mosses and killing them. I had the experience that putting liverworts on fertile soil will eventually kill it, so hopefully the lack of substrate in most of the background will help them live longer. Same with the mosses.