help me!! you all seem like much more experienced fish keepers and you talk of plecos and i have this great 8" polka dot pleco in a 60 gallon and he's the only fish who survived when the power went out for 2 days and my 5 baseball-sized Orandas died...my 3 1/2 year old daughter named him "Detail" when she was 21/2 and now he's grown into this cute lummox who gets scared of me if i stare at him and talk to him for too long. i would like to put him in a 120 gallon tank ( it's one craigslist, i have my eye on it) along with about 20 Platys--bought 5 and then they started having babies--11 Black Lace Tetras (?!) and 2 blue Gouramis, one pair of reg. Corydoras, with 5 or 6 short-finned Bettas--hard to positively identify in the Miasma--and about a million snails. currently i have this many fish divided between two tanks, a 60 gal and a 20 long... o.k. so i have 2 tanks and now both are completely cloudy...they've been cloudy for the past 6 mos. and i have these tiger striped lilypad plants i got as bubs which now sprout all the way to the top in the 60, and i've got swamp-like growth of Water Milfoil and those odd little plants that resemble a bunch of bananas with these War Of The Worlds tendril-roots.
i have two boxes of primordial soup. my most ardent hope is to set up the 120 gallon with partial old gravel--seeded gravel?--and partial new, all the plants and rocks and Detail's ceramic flower pot bat cave, and as many snails as i can transfer w/out crushing...little pond snails, i think...but have the water miraculously be clear because i start with all new water. i have well water, i live in Falmouth, ME and i have access to 60 gallons filled n' reserved well water, and would use well water for the rest. what do i do for filtration with a tank that big? i don't want a vat of murky water...i do bi-weekly water changes, i have at least double the necessary filtration now, but i don't know how to get my tank clear. whenever i can see my fish, they look great. the Platys have a second generation of babies as big as you'd buy in a petshop, so what am i doing wrong? what should i buy for filtration for this big tank--and i know it's not big like you guys all have, but 120 gallons is big to me--to have it be clear like everybody's? please advise