Hello, it's now September 6, 2010. This is my entry into the 2010 Aquatic Gardener's Association competition. I call this composition jungle bubble. As you can see, it's very jungle-y. There's a lot of Ecuador's telonis back there. A little bit of a what I think is a giant red crypt, but I'm not sure on the right. There's also some green cryptocornies fighting to compete back here by the piece of wood. There is by the little bit of moss on the wood. It's hard to see. In the back, of course, we have a large Amazonicus. As far as fisher concern, we have these two ember tetras here that seem to be a pair. One of three cardinals is just floated by. It's beautiful ram, cyclet down here. It's a blue ram. Very, very beautiful fish. I have some nice shots of him on the Aquatic Gardener's page. It should be linked in the description. There's two blue rams, actually. I think they're male and female, judging from their behavior. There's two otosinkless catfish and two Yamato, a mono shrimp. The mono shrimp are really visible because they have a full-time job getting rid of algae as do the otosinklesses. There's a lot of sinkless right now. My camera doesn't want to focus on him, but there he is. Down here, I have this lovely stuff. This is a very dark green, small leaf plant. It's in anubia, but it's not an anubia snana. The leaves are actually much smaller than that. You can see the blue ram playing in front of the shell there. See if I can get one of the cardinals that come out. Besides this enterprising young guy. There's one way back there. You can see him. Thank goodness for HD. This isn't just to try to win a competition. In fact, judging from what I've seen in prior years, I don't think I have much chance. My point here is to show how to construct a no-moving parts aquarium. Basically, all that we have coming in, let me zoom back a little bit, is this twisty light with a twisty neck. It's an LED light. It's about four points something watts for the foreground. Then in the background, and sometimes I switch them, I exchange them. It's another 11 watt, and this is a fluorescent. Between the fluorescent and the LED, we're looking at a total of 15 watts. Very little light. This bowl, by the way, this is not a perfect bowl. There are some aberrations in the glass. You probably can't see them here in the video. But this bowl cost me about 45 US bucks. It was made in China. The entire bowl grossly is about 35 liters. I suspect, though, that because I'm using up so much of the gravel on the bottom, I had to make the gravel about, oh geez, even 10 or 11 centimeters deep, just because of the curvature of the bowl, so that it had enough space at the sides to get some good rooting on the plants around the edges. I suspect that I'm only using probably 29 liters or something like that. Maybe let's call it 30 liters. But back to the point of this, it's just to show that you can create a virtually independent, not quite independent ecosystem, with no filtration at all. The only thing I'm adding again is 15 watts of light, and I could probably cut that if I used all LEDs. I'm adding carbon dioxide here. I'll show you the carbon dioxide. A little system down here, which is my CO2 system, CO2. The regulator is reading about the 70 or so 71 psi. There's a little bubble counter down there and a splitter. It comes up here to the back of the bowl. Here you can see CO2 bubbling out. That's all it's going in. There's light and there's CO2. Then I use some C-cam trace, C-cam iron, and C-cam potassium. I don't pay too much attention to the recommended dosage. I tend to go on the low side. I basically intuit based on my plant health or lack thereof. The rate of growth of algae as to whether I'm overshooting or under-shooting any of the various nutrients. Then of course nitrates and whatnot come from the fish. Then of course the plants also produce oxygen for the fish. Now granted, let me show you. There is an open top to this thing. Here I'll take this back a little bit so maybe you can see. This is big, huge bowl opening. I do by the way as far as water changes are concerned. Basically at the end of a week, if there's been no water change, this water is probably clean enough to drink. Don't try that at home. As far as it looks, it's clean enough to drink. I don't need to change it at all, but I do simply to get myself access down to the plants on the bottom so I can trim them back. If anything, the growth is too excessive as you can see. Basically I clean out the excessive growth on the bottom of the tank and the bottom of the bowl to make it look a little bit more reasonable and not just a total jungle. That's why I actually changed the water. I do like to scrape off any excess algae that I find in the glass, but that's pretty rare because the otosyncluses are busy all day doing that for me. I think one thing that's really important here is biolude. As you can see, I have only three cardinals, two embers, two otosyncluses, two rams, two Yamato shrimp, and two otosynclus. It's not a heck of a lot of biolude for eight gallons, particularly when I've got this many plants and I think that's part of the key to sustainability. But it's just great to be able to have something this beautiful on your desk that really frankly helps me think and focus during the day, but to not be dependent on any plastic parts or motor parts or anything is completely silent. The only thing going in is gas and light, and that by the way is a shell down there. Let's see, oh, here comes my ram. I can get him in focus. My digital camera doesn't have the greatest focus. Anyhow, so there it is. So I'm sure you can do this on a much larger scale, and I'm sure I could get rid of the need for light simply by putting it outside. If I had good outside access and temperature support year round, it would be compatible with this kind of environment. Unfortunately, I don't have those. You know, so in your case, if you have a really cold environment, you might have to actually put a heater in here. I don't because the weather's pretty warm right now, but that's about it. Even if you put a heater in, you wouldn't have any moving parts. And it's just just beautiful. You can see off the left, it's my computer. It's a great way to focus when you're working on something complicated on the computer. Just take a step back and look at the miracle of nature. So anyway, that's it. That's my jungle bubble. I hope you've enjoyed it, and I hope I've inspired a few of you to try to make your aquarium so sustainable that you hardly need any maintenance at all.