Sorry for the break in posting. I may be moving in the next month. That’s good news, but I’m definitely not looking forward to moving my tanks. The move isn’t far, but breaking everything down is a pain.

Well, it’s been just about two weeks since I got my Olive Nerite Snails. I wanted to see if these little guys could live up to their fabled algae eating skills. I let my 20 gallon tank get some algae built up before the guys arrived. I put a single snail into the 20 gallon tank. Check out the before and after shots.

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We have all seen tanks overrun with algae and have probably all dealt with it ourselves. How do you get rid of the blasted stuff? Let’s start by getting one thing straight. You can’t get rid of algae. The fact of the matter is, algae is always present. Whether it is present in quantities that are noticeable is a completely different story.

Algae can look very good in a tank and give it a more natural look. I have some stones in my tank that have grown a fair amount of algae on them. I think the stones look much better with this growth. It adds more color to the tank than would exist in an algae free environment.

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This is the story about how I got into fish keeping. This was no more than a year and a half ago.

You can see two goldfish in a tiny container. In the background you can see the bright red colors of a carnival booth with different colored bowls of water. You all know the game. The object is to toss ping pong balls into these bowls to win goldfish as a prize. Well I won two little goldfish that I knew nothing about. I left them with my girlfriend, who knew just as little about fish as I did.

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I did a water change and was dosing my liquid fertilizers and carbon supplement when my plants started pearling. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, but there was one stem plant that had its top cropped of during one of my trimmings. It had bubbles pouring out of it at an incredible rate. I have a picture and a very short clip of this.

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I was reading through one of the forums I frequent and stumbled across an old post, where one of the members posted a picture of a tank he worked on for a client. My jaw dropped when I saw this aquarium. This tank is the work of Tom Barr, also known as plantbrain in many of the forums. I  believe all the photos are his as well. I don’t know much about Tom other than he is well respected for his aquarium work, and he apparently does this for a living. Add me to the list of those that admire his work.

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Well, it’s about time I got this website off the ground. I thought I’d start by introducing myself, or rather introducing my tanks. I’m not a photographer by any stretch of the word, so if you have any tips, please let me know.

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