It's not a bad idea. Just one that would be hard to manage without quite a bit of difficulty. With Hypancistrus species, you're not losing much by reducing the footprint of the tank. You can get as much use out of a front/back or side/side divider. Just provide multilevels of caves to mimic a bank or root niche to compensate for loss of footprint. However it's set up, provide a perpendicular current to the orientation of the caves/recesses and they'll find plenty of spawning places. And, with open access, you'll have an easier time maintaining the tank and providing fresh veggie and fruit pieces to augment their prepared diets.
Halfing the aquarium...
- Thread starter davo
- Start date
maybe i'll scrap that then. the other idea, was like you said the caves, and make a wall of them in each half. after you said that oddball i think thats prob better, was just thinking of doing something new/different. i was going to place caves both so the flow would be going horizontal to the cave face (like so the cave would be sideways to the flow) and some so the flow would go around the back of the cave (hitting the opposite side of the cave opening. is that what you meant?
don't get me wrong, I mean I'm no genius, but usually I have found from years of tinkering with aquarium setups, if it hasn't been done and on display commercially, then don't bother. oddball had a good point of cleaning gravel, your hatches seem a lot more trouble than it's worth. I think you may regret doing it that way, follow what people have done before and just do the vertical dividers. less time waste, less space, easy to maintain and remove the different breeding fish/fry
p.s Listen to oddball, he's a fish freak.
2c
good luck anyway!
p.s Listen to oddball, he's a fish freak.
2c
good luck anyway!
These cats dig their nests perpendicular to the direction of the current, or 90 degrees off the current path. Having the current run across (not into) the mouths of the caves will help ancistrus cats in choosing their spawning sites.
Keep coming up with new ideas. What's considered as "conventional" today are methods that required alot of trial and error in finding what works for a particular species back when that species was new to the hobby. Can you imagine the blasting the hobbyist took who came up with stacking caves, in the water column, for what was originally thought to be a bottom fish?
i guess when they found out that half of them were cave spawners they were laughing their tits off. that, and the fact that some nest in the mud banks. theres a great pic of their "nests" all over a bank at low river level. cant find it now though
