Malawi Community

After posting the hideous photos of my old tanks, I felt I had to redeem myself a bit by posting a current photo. (Okay, so they're not really all that hideous.) It'd be nice to be able to find enough rocks of a single kind around here, but the local stuff is Virginia-clay red and has a tendency to crumble. The camera makes the river jack look a bit lighter than it does to the eye; the tank lighting itself is softer than it appears here. This aquascape is likely to stay unchanged for a while, unless I stumble across a fresh pallet of stones identical to the dark gray, jagged pieces. I plucked what I thought I could use from the local garden center, but unfortunately when you have 12" of depth to work with, you can't just load up a whole bunch of random large rocks and hope they stack okay at home against the fragile glass walls of your aquarium. (That and they were expensive. Why can't I live somewhere with rocks I can just pick up off the ground for free?)

You can see the three species of mbuna in this photo: electric yellows (self-explanatory), Ps. socolofi (the little blue one above the big rock), and Ps. acei (the purple ones with yellow fins). The long striped fish at the bottom is a flying fox, native to someplace in Thailand or thereabouts. His job is to keep algae from growing all over the sand, and he does a good job and holds his own against the cichlids, so he gets to stay even though he doesn't fit the biotope. I'm not that much of a purist (yet). Not visible in this shot is a picture of a common bristlenose pleco, native to South America. His job is to keep flat surfaces clear of algae, but he doesn't seem to do a good job on green spot algae so that's what ends up growing on the glass. I scrape it clean every so often when I do a partial water change.

The mass of tubing in the corner belongs to two Rena Filstar XP3s, which is technically more filtration than required by my current understanding, but algae growth dropped off a lot after I added the second filter (it was originally on the leaking tank) so it's stayed. I've been experimenting with the placement of the intakes and outputs: originally they were split, one at each end of the aquarium, but I've been reading some discussion of water flow and filtration methods that inspired me to wiggle things around to get them all arranged in the same spot, or near as could be managed. I actually replaced one of the intakes with a spray bar that the previous owner had drilled to make the holes larger (I was going to do that myself, so he saved me some trouble!) but I'm not sure what exactly I hope to gain from all this swapping around, since I didn't have a problem with water clarity before - how am I going to tell if this improves anything? I don't know. I figure I'll be able to tell if it doesn't work, at least. At any rate, both DH and I like having the tank equipment corralled into a smaller, less visually distracting space.

Some improvements I'd eventually like to make to this tank: homogenize the hardscape, aka use only one kind of rock; paint the light blue pieces of equipment black; upgrade this entire tank to a larger one with more front-to-back space (like a 75 or a 90) and get an awesome background made to look like stone. Those last two things aren't likely to happen anytime soon even if I am on a meddling kick!