>>Could you expand on this? I've sort of tinkered for years with concepts
centered around a low-energy input fishkeeping system - no filters (barring
plants and water changes) are certainly part of this - maybe one day I'll
actually put it into practice! <<
Actually I seem to break all the fishkeeping rules and get away with it. I
generally like to use fast growing easy plants, what many would consider aquatic
weeds.<g> I like using natural sunlight best but I don't have many windows so I
use hanging shoplights in the fish room. I have a few tanks with just the
standard one tube flourescents too. I would have to say my tanks are generally
pretty heavily planted.
I keep trying to keep the tanks from being too crowded but my fish seem to spawn
a lot and I never have enough room for them all, so my tanks tend to be more
crowded than I'd like. I feed pretty heavily (3 or more times a day)and don't do
as many water changes as I should.
I also try to encourage other life in the tanks, I often have gammaras, daphnia,
ghost shrimp or other populations. I try to keep cultures going too.
It just seems in my observations that natural bodies of water that I've looked
at are filled lots of life. I'm trying to recreate that in my tanks. Kind of my
own little quirk.<g>
I don't want to go on too much and bore everyone. If you would like I can e-mail
you a couple copies of some things I have written on non-filtered tanks. I did
an on-line lecture on FishNet a few months ago and had an article published in
AFM in April of this year(though I would change a lot of it if I had it to do
over again <g>. I'm also starting to get a web page up, it's not really ready
for prime-time viewing (I want to get some new articles ready for it<g>) but I
have what I think is a pretty good plant list up. It's at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/RhondaWilson/plants.htm.
Thanks,
Rhonda