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Nature Aquarium World
by Takashi Amano
ISBN: 0-7938-0089-7
If there ever was a book that changed the face of a hobby, I suspect this is it. Published in a large 9.5″ x 12.5″ format, it is a gorgeous photographic collection of aquatic plants, artfully aquascaped, in a great “coffee table” sized book. The plant layouts are breathtaking, but it is the photography that really makes this book come alive. And that’s no surprise, as at the time of the writing of this book, the author Takashi Amano had spent most of his career as a photographer. The book was published in 1996 - quite a while ago - and much has changed since then. Mr. Amano has since spawned a mini-empire of premium planted aquarium products under the Aqua Design Amano (ADA) brand. This was his first major book available in English, and it remains a classic today.
People that stick with the aquatic plant hobby do it for a number of reasons. But I think we all begin for the same reason… because at some point we all saw a planted tank that took our breath away. And we wanted to do the same thing. So after perusing this book anyone would have to wonder, “How many people started their aquatic plant hobby because of this book?”
It is an inspiration.
In this book Mr. Amano shows his “Nature Aquarium” style, a significant departure from the previously dominant “Dutch” aquascapes. He throws out the old style of neatly ordered avenues and rows of plants, and introduces a less ordered, but still artfully balanced arrangements of plants. The practiced eye will notice the liberal use of Riccia fluitans as a foreground plant, and even Cardinia japonica shrimp for algae control. Though you do have to look, and know what to look for, because surprisingly the book provides scant information about the flora or fauna in his aquascapes.
There are over 60 separate aquascapes presented, many with multiple camera angles and two page spreads. And most do have a good bit of information about them:
- Tank size
- Lighting watts
- Filter type
- Substrate
- CO2 supply rate
- Water change frequency and volume
- Temperature
- pH
- Total Hardness (GH)
- Carbonate Hardness (KH)
- Nitrite PPM
- Nitrate PPM
- CO2 PPM
- O2 PPM
But the book is not limited to pictures of beautiful aquariums. It provides a primer on use of the “Golden section” and basic aqascaping layouts. There is good treatment of driftwood selection and positioning, rock arrangement, and the use of both as anchors for plants (including Riccia). Also a bit of treatment on the correct tools for aquascaping.
There’s even a beginner level - though very good - treatment of the role of the critical components of a planted tank: CO2, biological filtration, lighting, substrate, fertilizer, and maintenance. There is even a bit of treatment of algae, snails, plant trimming, and diseases of aquatic plants.
With nearly 200 pages of beautiful photography, this is not - per se - a beginners book. Not in the sense that it provides all the technical detail you need to get started. But at the same time, all those technical books fall so far short in the inspiration department. And in that sense this is a beginners book, because it provide that in abundance. But even for the expert - and anyone in between - it’s one book that will be enjoyed each time you pull it out.
It could be argued that some of Amano’s subsequent books were better. I’ll review those too. But this one started it all. When I first laid hands on it, it was a major inspiration. I could barely put it down… turning page after page just wishing I could do the same, and deciding to try. Then flipping through it again and again, trying to decide which of the many aquascapes I was most inspired by. My personal favorites are on pages 16, 26, 60, and (most inspirational) page 90. What do those ’scapes look like?
Sorry. Get the book. But when you do, you won’t be sorry! Read it, be inspired by it, and go try it for yourself!
Well, as you can see, things are returning to normal after all the aquarium and fish excitement I’ve had over the last few weeks. From the pic below you can see the the fish seem fairly normal after my nearly killing them with a CO2 overdose last week. Two of the high bodied leopard discus actually spawned a couple of days ago. And a couple of the cobalt discus are doing their serious tail shimmy - let’s get it on - dances right now. I take breeding as a sign of health and well being. So I’m happy for that.
The tank is going through some changes. My CO2 tank ran dry, just as I was messing with the pH probe, and I shut off the lights and fert injections for a few days until I could get a replacement CO2 cylinder. So I’m leaving the ferts off for a little while, just to see how the tank (and algae) reacts.
In order to fight the algae problem, I’ve raised my lights by three inches, reduced my temperature to 82 (though lights and pumps still raise it a few degrees during the day), have reduced my total photo period to seven hours, and spit it up with a 90 minute siesta. So that’s three and a half hours light, hour and a half dark, and another three and a half hours light.
Lots of people will tell you that a siesta is bunk. It may be. But I also know my most algae free tanks has siesta. Coincidence? I wouldn’t know. But I know it won’t hurt.
The plants are growning back after my bone-headded huge trim. But with the ferts and lights dialed back, they are taking their time about it. But that’s OK. The algae’s kind of chilling too. And that’s the goal.
This is only an hour or two after my last post. WOW! What an hour!
After my prior diatribe of poor management of my tank, I went back to my tank to see my poor fish in BAD SHAPE!
This was a surprise! I’m used to happy, spawning fish. But I went back to the tank to see my fish laying on thier sides on the bottom! Or at the top of the tank, sucking air it the surface! Or worse… just floating randomly around in the current!
Can you say “total panic”? I can. And I did.
While this has never happened to me before, the first action is to correct the water! What went wrong can wait until later…
So I hooked a garden hose up to on of the Ocean Clears to get as much of the “bad” water out as quickly as possible. At the same time I whipped out the seldom used Python hose out of the closet, checked the tap water temperature, tossed the requisite amount of Seachem Prime in the tank, and started blasting tap water into the tank as the old stuff drained.
After a while it was clear that the water level was not changing quickly. So I shut off the new water, and just let the bad water drain. By the time it got to about 15% normal water volume. I stopped draining, and commenced fill only.
The tank is about 1/2 filled now, and many of the fish are swimming somewhat normally. At least they don’t act as if they are dying. But what the total impact is only time will tell. I guess I’ll finish this filling up, confirm that my water parameters are OK, and go to bed. It’s after midnight now.
Hopefully in the morning I will see a tank full of recovering fish. I don’t want to contemplate the alternative. I’ve had these fish a few years now, and until tonight I did not realize how great the attachment was. My wife even came down from her slumber, just to check to see - in hopes that everything would be OK.
I guess we all love these fish.
I’ll let you know the outcome as soon as I know. But for now - and figuring this out has NOT been the immediate priority - it appears that as I was diagnosing the performance of my pH probes, I forgot to turn off the CO2 injection. So somewhere along the line I stuck a pH probe in some 7.01 solution for testing, and the CO2 injection went wild trying to bring the pH down. When in actual fact the tank pH was fine, but the 7.01 solution I was testing caused the CO2 injection to go wild, and start a completely avoidable pH crash.
I cannot believe I was so stupid. But it looks like I was.
Tomorrow we will see the impact. Time for bed now. I hope the fish will be OK. 
Well, every once in a while if you highly automate your tanks, you will dip your toe into the cold, cold waters or highly automated hell. Welcome in! I’m there right now, and going for a swim…
My lack of posting for a couple of weeks is not for lack or desire. Nor has it been because the tank looks like crap, and I’m just ashamed to show it to you. No. The tank DOES look like crap. And I AM ashamed. But honesty and candor require that I show it to you. But I don’t have time now to deal with picture taking, Photoshop, and all that hoowie. But I’m happy to tell you about the tank.
A few weeks ago I was agonizing over the fact that I let the plants go too long without trimming. And that the deep trimming that neglect necessitated was a really bad bedfellow with the fact that I needed to change a filter. Well it gets worse…
I’ve got a pH controller, and a probe for it that I have mounted in-line, so it is perpetually sampling my water for pH and adjusting CO2 injection accordingly. This particular pH probe - Lab grade from Neptune Systems - was both expensive, and also WORTH it because it has been humming along for almost a year without any significant deviation from my other pH meters. In other words, while the probe vendors recommend calibration on a VERY regular basis (say monthly if you are lazy like me) this little puppy has been RIGHT on target for months on end. And being human, I’ve been ignoring it… as if it would be correct forever.
Well the deep algae on every surface in my tank caused me to quickly surmise that something FUNDAMENTAL was wrong. And at the very least, it was my pH readings, and subsequent lack of CO2 injection.
Now that does not mean that I did not cut my biofilter back too far. I did. A major trim of plants coupled with a massive plant trim was pure foolishness. But following this up with too little CO2 because of an out-of-calibraton probe was just stupid.
So, my tank looks like crap. Pics to follow soon.
That said, I don’t have a lot of progress to talk about. Nor pics to show you. My extra time - for what little there has been, has been consumed with stupid and time-consuming scraping the sides of the tank to clean the MASSIVE quantities of GDA, and trimming the RIDICULOUS amount of plant leaves of the same affliction. All in all, between the trimming, tank cleaning, and pH probe testing, I’d guess that I’ve wasted AT LEAST 8 hours on this crap.
So much for a low-maintenance planted discus tank.
Will post much more later after I dig myself out of planted discus tank hell.
Cheers - Steve
I recently posted a rant about eliminating tank clutter - all those tubes and hoses, and wires… really anything that is not a plant, animal, or water. If this is something that concerns you then please read on.
Setting Expectations
First, if you’ve been looking at Amano books, then you need to be aware… he usually has all sorts of equipment in hist tanks. He just removes it for pictures. But that doesn’t mean that you have to. And if you look at at The Inspired Aquarium by the Senske brothers, there too you won’t see equipment. But that’s partly because their clients have the money to hide equipment with custom furnishings.
I can’t afford that. And if you can’t either, don’t despair. With a bit of work, and a modest investment, you can get a lot of stuff out of your tank.
The Culprits
Let’s tick off the big offenders for planted tanks. Much of this will apply to fish only freshwater, and to a very limited extent saltwater tanks. The most common type of equipment we see are: water outflow tubing, Water returns, air stones, air hoses, HOB (hang on back) equipment, standpipes, overflows, pH probes, CO2 diffusers, CO2 drop checkers, thermometers, heaters, float switches, lights, UV filters, HOB filters, and of course, all the electrical cords, gas and water tubing that stuff needs to work, all hanging over the sides of the tank.
Approaches
There are a number of ways to tackle this problem.
Obfuscation
What? Hide the stuff. That’s the most common method, and a great compromise. I’ve got an air stone in my tank, and it’s hidden in plants. You’d be hard pressed to see the stone itself. The bigger trick is hiding the air hose - especially outside of the tank. Probes, like for pH or temperature have the same problem.
Camouflage
Or put another way - hiding in plain sight. That is what Amano does. Almost all of his equipment is clear glass or plastic - including is beautiful inflow “lily” pipes. I’ve done this myself, and the only real downside is that it requires a lot of manual labor to keep that glass or clear plastic clear. They are algae magnets, and it will require a time investment to keep it looking nice.
Another way is similar colors. I made a compromise in my tank - I wanted water flowing back into it at the top. Since water is leaving through the bottom, this would help circulation. But that meant either return tubes coming up through the bottom of the tank, or typical returns over the side. I chose the latter knowing I could get black returns - which fade visibly in front of my tank’s black background. Black returns would have faded too - of course - but like clear glass, everything gathers some algae, and I thought eliminating that tube coming up from the bottom would be the better path. I only have a slightly greenish black return flange at the top of the tank rather than that sitting on top of an also slightly greenish tube coming up from the bottom.
Removal
This is the big winner for hiding equipment. All kind of stuff can be pulled out if you are willing to do the work and go to some expense. There are a number of excellent options for removing that equipment.
Sumps
And many people will say that you can’t have a sump with a planted tank - that all your CO2 will outgass. Well if that is a concern of yours, just swing over to plantedtank.net and do a search on “sump”. You’ll find these can work very well with plants.
Though I’ve never had one personally, they are clearly great ways to hide stuff - not to mention other benefits. With a sump you can hide heaters, drop checkers, pH and temperature probes, fertilization injection lines, CO2 adding equipment and more.
In line equipment
If you don’t want a sump, much of that same equipment can be put in line if you have closed loop filtration. If you have a Hang on Back (HOB) filter, replace it with a canister you can stick in the stand. In my tank I’ve got heaters in line, UV filtration, CO2 injection, pH and temperature sensing, fertilization injection, and even tank draining and tank filling hardware.
Conclusion
Take a look at my plumbing diagram to see how some of this can be plumbed. And soon I’ll post on my in-line drain/fill, in-line CO2 injection, and in-line pH and temperature probes. With a bit of research, from info here and as can be found in the forums I’ve pointed to in my Links page, you can find out all you need to get a great deal of equipment out of your tanks and hidden from view, so your friends and family can see that they are really interested in - your plants and fish!
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