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Thread: Hello! And, Moss on water. Bad?

  1. #1

    Hello! And, Moss on water. Bad?

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    Hi all! New member, and I'm pretty wet behind the ears when it comes to vivarium setup. Actually, I don't even have a true vivarium in the real sense of the word. But, I am working in that direction.
    Over a period of time, I have slowly been evolving my flying gecko/anole habitat into a full-on vivarium. It's slowly gone from a plastic-plant/repti-bark terrarium, through several experiments to hold live plants, including a carbon/perlite-sand-peat and bark mulch layered setup (which worked surprisingly well as a substrate I never really had to change, but plants didn't root into the mixture very well at all...

    But, recently, this past week, I changed my gameplan and converted completely to a half-and-half (land and water) terrarium setup, for which my roomate collaborated with me on a design that functions very similarly to his turtle setup, which was built the same way, and has been established this way for months now, and seems to be thriving. Turtles, fish, snails, algae, moss, plants, and all.

    Basically, it involved rockscaping the tank to form the land with bigger, then smaller rocks, filling in holes with dolomette gravel, and filling with water to the brim of the rocks. I used a 60gph in-tank filter on one end, and a 45gph water pump on the other to form two waterfalls and increase movement and circulation in the water, and to move the water in the general direction of the filter. The tank already had an undertank heater attatched, so this, along with the basking light for the lizards during the day keeps the water at a cozy 74-82 degrees.

    Now, for landscaping, I ran the roots of my plants directly into the water, achored with the dolomette gravel. To cover the rocks up and to give the impression of a nice solid ground, I used reconstituted "mood" moss which I basically layed over the open water portions on my "land" to cover them up.

    Now, this is where my concern comes in. The top of the moss farthest from the water is thriving already and has sent up several spore stalks. The problem is, the moss that is down in the water looks very, very waterlogged. [Edit: I'll elaborate this a little. In some places, the water is at most a a half to a centimeter over the rock fill. I pushed the "roots" of the moss down into these, so that the bottom edge and sides of some of the moss may be just slightly under some water. This is really noticeable along my "pond's" edge, where a good half inch of the moss is always soaked] Not dead, just waterlogged. It's achieved a very dark green color, and I'm worried that this moss that is in the water is going to die, rot, and compromise the quality of my water, which I planned to add a couple of small aquatic frogs to.

    Are my concerns unfounded, or is this something that, while not a problem now, might be, like, soon?

    Hope to hear soon, thanks for the help!
    Last edited by RTanger; 11th May 2005 at 15:24.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
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    yishun
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    some mosses can live underwater. in fact, many people do have all sorts of mosses in their aquarium thriving. But the same type of moss may look VERY different under water.

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