Let's play Fishville. For real.

On 17 January 2010, I had the idea of taking up fish keeping as a hobby. Two weeks of planning, research and conversations with an aquarist friend later, I turned that idea into reality. Here's a step-by-step account of how my fish tank went from a glass box to a working ecosystem.


When I first thought of taking up fish keeping as a hobby, I had my eye on a space inside a glass cabinet as the spot for my fish tank. My plan was to have a tank custom-made for the space. But after reading up about the hobby and talking to people about my plan, I eventually came to realize what a nightmare it would be to maintain a tank in such a location. And so I ended up going for off-the-rack equipment--sometimes it helps to tell people what's on your mind.

So here's what I ended up with:

• 20-gallon tank (untempered glass, 24" x 12" x 15")
• submersible filter
• tank lighting (consisting of two Compact Flourescent Lights with 40 watts of illumination each)
• about 15 kg of river sand
• a large piece of driftwood
• 3 kg of commercial substrate

I lost track of the actual cost, but roughly all this equipment set me back around PhP 3,000--not bad, considering that most other hobbies cost way more than this.

The Set-up

My friend, Laj (himself a veteran aquarist), graciously offered to help me set-up my tank--with a few plants from his own thriving aquarium, free of charge! However, he warned that it could take a whole day, so we decided to wait until the following week to do mine. Meanwhile, impatient to get started, my wife Alelee and I went and bought a male Siamese Fighting Fish (betta splendens), named him "Nemo", filled the tank with water and placed the fish there; Nemo would spend a week in semi-bare but livable conditions--with only an interesting piece of driftwood, and the bubbles from the filter, to keep him company in a 20-gallon tank.

Setting-up day, to me, was like Christmas to a child--it seemed to take forever to arrive. But eventually it did, and here's how it went:

1. After transferring Nemo to a 1-gallon fishbowl (which Alelee and I had owned but not used for years) and emptying the big tank, Laj and I began by placing alternate layers of river sand and commercial substrate to form the tank bed. We landscaped this to have its share of peaks and valleys--getting as much as 4 inches tall at the highest peaks, and about 1.5 inches at the lowest points. Some fine gravel (which I had lying around in the house) was sprinkled on the lowest point, to add some color to the tank bed.
2. Once we were happy with the tank bed, I placed the piece of driftwood at the desired spot, a little left-of-center. Not only was this going to be a focal point, it was also going to serve as a "current breaker" to break up the jet stream coming from the filter, thus preventing the current from getting too violent for my fish.
3. Next up were the plants. The plan was to start with the short ones, then work our way up to the tallest. This way, we could also fill the tank with water, portion by portion. As I understand it, aquatic plants can wither and die within minutes of being taken out of the water, so it's important to start "flooding" the tank as soon as the plants are in place. And so, in came the sagittaria subulata and the pygmy chain sword (echinodorus tenellus)--which we placed randomly across the tank bed (even under the driftwood); and the dwarf hairgrass (eleocharis parvula)--which we planted on the gravel patch. Once this was done, we poured water EVER SO GENTLY down the trunk of the driftwood (to avoid disturbing the gravel and sand) until the blades of grass were safely submerged.
4. The mid-ground plants were next. Since these were tall-growing plants, we planted a cluster of dwarf rotalas (rotala rotundifolia) in front of the filter (to eventually hide the filter from view). On the opposite end of the tank, for visual balance, we placed a small community of coloratas (rotala colorata) and sunset hygros (hygrophila polisperma), with a few stems of Cubas (ludwigia inclinata var. verticillata) Along the back wall of the tank, we also threw in a few stalks of rotala rotundifolia, to accentuate what would eventually become a curtain of straight and corkscrew vals (vallisneria spiralis). We then flooded the tank about 2/3 of the way to see how it all looks. It was then that it occurred to me how much I was saving by not having to buy my plants; and I can't thank Laj enough for this.
5. Satisfied with the plant lay-out thus far, we went on to line the back wall of the tank with vals, and then filled the tank all the way. Then, we sat back to take a breather (and appreciate what we've done), only to find out that we still had some stalks of pearlgrass (hemianthus micranthemoides) and the notoriously invasive water sprite (ceratopteris thalictroides) left to plant. At this point, we went the way of Mother Nature, and just randomly wedged the pearlgrass in the roots of the driftwood, and placed the water sprite behind the wood, to eventually help hide the filter from view.

Now, my tank was ready. Gently, I eased Nemo into his new home, and immediately I could see how delighted he was to find so many nooks and crannies to hide in, and leaves to toy with, in his new "fully furnished" home.

Home-made CO2

As Nemo explored his crib, Laj talked me through DIY-ing a CO2 generator--as he explained, plants need extra boosts of Carbon Dioxide in order to flourish. We took an empty 1.5-liter Coke bottle, filled it halfway with tap water, poured two cups of table sugar and two tablespoons of baker's yeast, and shook the hell out of the bottle until there was nothing but liquid inside it. Laj then handed me an improvised bottle cap (the regular Coke bottle cap with a small hole drilled through the center, and a short piece of plastic tubing inserted through the hole). Into this piece of plastic tubing went one end of a length of rubber hose, while the other end went into the Oxygen intake of my filter pump and out through the outlet nozzle.

The idea here is for the yeast to feed on the sugar and colonize the water in the Coke bottle. As they do so, the CO2 that they exhale would find its way up the rubber hose and eventually out into the water in my tank, where it will be dissolved into the water and taken in by the plants.

With our little contraption done, we placed the filter back into the tank, plugged it in, and voila! I now had a planted aquarium. I was officially a novice aquarist, and proud of it.

Next step: wait a few weeks for the tank to complete its cycling process (I'm expecting this to be shorter than normal, since Laj helped me out with a few drops of off-the-shelf beneficial bacteria), and then start adding new fish.

The question now is WHAT FISH TO KEEP. I'm quite decided on keeping Nemo in the tank for good (though if push comes to shove, I could transfer him to the old 1-gallon bowl), so I'll have to find fish that are good betta tankmates. My research points me to a combination of one dwarf gourami, a small school of zebra danios, and a few mollies or swordtails. Alelee, however, has been bugging me to get some fancy guppies, and that's where the big dilemma lies. Will fancy guppies be safe in the company of a gourami and a betta? Some sources say maybe, others say no. So which is which? I've got a few weeks to decide, and any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks.