Bare bottom aquarium
- Thread starter ASR
- Start date
One of the important considerations of bare bottom, is biological filtration,.
In a tank with sand or substrate all those interstitial spaces between sand grains and gravel, are extra places for beneficial bacterial to colonize.
And in the case of a power outage, they can be a life saver, because without them, you are relying almost totally on your filter for ammonia control (the glass side are also colonized, but not to such a great extent). And in a power outage flow to you filter is often cutoff.
If it were me, though, I'd be using sand instead of all those random stones (of course that's a personal tic), I find lots of random and colored stones, distract from the fish.
I just went through about a month with no flow in my tank, and only had 1 fish die, I attribute that to the substrate and its bacterial colonies, the aquatic and terrestrial plants, that held the ammonia at low amounts until flow was restored.
In a tank with sand or substrate all those interstitial spaces between sand grains and gravel, are extra places for beneficial bacterial to colonize.
And in the case of a power outage, they can be a life saver, because without them, you are relying almost totally on your filter for ammonia control (the glass side are also colonized, but not to such a great extent). And in a power outage flow to you filter is often cutoff.
If it were me, though, I'd be using sand instead of all those random stones (of course that's a personal tic), I find lots of random and colored stones, distract from the fish.
I just went through about a month with no flow in my tank, and only had 1 fish die, I attribute that to the substrate and its bacterial colonies, the aquatic and terrestrial plants, that held the ammonia at low amounts until flow was restored.
This last weekend we changed my daughters axolotl tank from a bare bottom tank to a slate tile bottom tank. It looks MUCH nicer and is just as easy to clean as the bare bottom tank. We did silicone the slate tiles into the bottom of the tank so debris can't collect underneath the tiles. I doubt we would ever be able to get them out.
my osar tank is bare bottom and I had huge rocks in it but they would pick them up and throw them around so I had to remove them so they would not crack the glass
Chief Tom
yes mine would break it mine will grab rocks or other decor and swim around with it and then drop it or swim at the glass with it a bottle would not last in my tank if I put a cucumber in the tank for my plec my oscar shreds it so I have floating stuff every were he does not eat it just shreds it
The only problem I see with bare bottom tanks is they have less of a biological filtration safety margin should you have a power outage or such so that the filters are out for awhile. I run bare bottom and like it a lot though we had a power outage a couple of weeks ago and things in the tank headed South pretty quick.
+1 on the lack of safety net.
My last crash was from a forgotten power switch for my filter, about 2 hours off. Ammonia spiked the next day, even with large amounts of drift wood in the tank. It recovered in about a week, with some daily water changes I had no losses.
My last crash was from a forgotten power switch for my filter, about 2 hours off. Ammonia spiked the next day, even with large amounts of drift wood in the tank. It recovered in about a week, with some daily water changes I had no losses.
