"The Lost World"

**soltari007** · 31st May 2010, 13:13

Hi all,

Just sharing my single planted tankscape from an interesting perspective

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riPLyshNYBE

**johannes** · 31st May 2010, 14:32

nice video there... i like the below water surface scene..

**barmby** · 31st May 2010, 18:08

Knowing Soltari007, I will joke

When did you become a motion picture director? And endler with green neon ? hmm.. interesting perspective indeed

**soltari007** · 1st Jun 2010, 17:09

Haha both fish are from the Americas right?

Anyway I have posted some of the pictures on another forum, but since this is AQ, a planted forum, I will post up a pictorial guide of my tank from the first day until today.

**soltari007** · 2nd Jun 2010, 02:18

1. Inspiration

Got my inspiration from a story from my childhood, "The Lost World", by Arthur Conan Doyle. In it he described a plateau raised from the forest, on which exists dinosaurs which managed to survive from ancient times. I found out too that Doyle in turn got his inspiration from an actual place he visited in Venezuela, where such plateau mountains exist! The biggest is called Auyan Tepui, here's a picture of it with its famous Angel Falls waterfall:

Looks like the scene from Up the cartoon movie right?

**soltari007** · 2nd Jun 2010, 02:27

2. Design

As I wanted to create a surreal effect, creating two different worlds within one tank, I had to plan this quite differently from normal aquascapes. This tank would also be highly experimental and I subsequently dabbled in a lot of the ideas that were generated in my head as well as from this forum, which I will slowly reveal

First up to create the feeling of two separate scapes within the same tank, I decided to make it a planted scape in the background. This was achieved by filling up the back of the tank with a lot of ADA Africana to create a mound to up to 7inches high, like this:

only halfway filled, even after 9kg of soil is added in

using pearl gourami to test if the water is still hospitable to fish - they didn't like it very much but they survived in there

**soltari007** · 2nd Jun 2010, 02:48

3. Flora

First up, I must admit that this tank is setup mainly for 2 reasons: 1) to house my green laser corydoras, which require distinctly lower temperature, and 2) to play around with the ideas in my head. Hence I did not focus a lot on the plants at first, choosing to add in bit by bit. This was in hindsight a major mistake as I suffered algae growth which never really goes away, and I overestimated the ability of hornworts to control the excess nutrients at the start. But once stable, it is quite interesting to note that plants can still thrive with ADA Africana soil, almost every plant I added in (with the exception of Eriocaulon cinereum) doing well.

Here's the evolution of the plant growth in my tank

Day 2 of the tank after initial setup - still bare

2 months after setup - you can see BBA growing on the E. cinereum in front, while Eriocaulon sp. "Mato Grosso" at the bottom left of the picture is melting to a little stalk. Surprisingly, "Mato Grosso" survived and is thriving but cinereum died out.

6 months later - plants are mostly the same, with more growth achieved and almost zero BBA growth on plants. The tank has more or less matured.