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I have been searching around the internet to find underwater pictures of Rio Xingu to get inspiration for furnishing a 720 liter tank. The tank will hold a rather large number of home bred Hypancistrus zebra of different sizes.
It is easy to make the tank work well tecnically, but i want to recreate some of the atmosphere and looks of the biotope as well.
I have seen a few pictures of the river banks with large rounded boulders and also aerial photographs, but i wonder how it looks like along the bottom. I guess there are a lot of boulders and maybe sand and gravel? Have anyone filmed there or taken underwater photographs available on the net or elsewhere:)
Christ, that's already a beautiful tank...why would you want to change that?
Anyways, there are several nice xingu shots in the cat-e-log, last I checked. Those should suffice, and really, it's not all that different from what your tank currently looks like, merely with more rounded rockwork and random piles of debris.
The Xingu cachoeiras (rapids) are made up of a network of dark volcanic bedrock of often a fissured honeycomb structure (breeding holes for loricariids!).
The majority of loricariids are reported (in the dry season) to be found sheltering in crevices in the deep fast-flowing channels of solid rock.
To be honest, I think your tank represents this biotope very faithfully with the steep wall of rock full of crevices.
I don't think you would be able to make it any better if you tried.
My 312 liter tank works just fine, but I want to make my next tank a little more authentic.
racoll wrote:The Xingu cachoeiras (rapids) are made up of a network of dark volcanic bedrock of often a fissured honeycomb structure (breeding holes for loricariids!).
The majority of loricariids are reported (in the dry season) to be found sheltering in crevices in the deep fast-flowing channels of solid rock.
To be honest, I think your tank represents this biotope very faithfully with the steep wall of rock full of crevices.
I don't think you would be able to make it any better if you tried.
I really like it.
This is really great information! I would really-really like to see pictures or film of these rock formations.
I have a large selection of locally collected rocks. A great number of them are large, dark and pitted ones. Almost like swiss cheese. I will take a few pictures of the rocks later. They look like what I imagine Racoll describes.
The pictures below are all from the same cave in my 312 liter tank. The cave is made from a dark and hard rock I have split in two, hollowed out with a diamond grinder disc and glued together again.
racoll wrote:I don't think it could be any more authentic short of actually going there and collecting the rocks yourself.
As you can imagine that is not a real option for me, but I have collected a few hundres kilos of lokal rocks that might fit your description.
racoll wrote:Maybe a blend of sand and gravel with some small pieces of your rock as a substrate would look more natural.
I think you are right. In my next setup I will not make a complete background of rocks, but instead focus more on the bottom. Also I will try to make everything slightly more caotic.
The rocks on the pictures below are pitted, but I can also enlarge some of the pits with various tools to make them more honeycomb like.
A large tank with all the neccesary equipment is expensive, so I want to make the most out of it. Therefore I spend a lot of time on my setups.
Been googling for a while now. The picture of the rock formation on the link below might suggest the kind of rock you described. I will search some more.
that is really amazing, I have been toying with the idea of setting up a rio xingu tank for ages ago and posted a thread about it back then. I really can't wait to see your next creation, biotope tanks are the way forward.
Racoll your tank in the other thread is way cool too.
One more bucket of water and the farce is complete.
I had the opportunity to have a look at two of Janne`s pictures from Rio Xingu´s volcanic rock formations. These pictures cannot be published by me. The pictures gave me a lot of inspiration.
Here are some rocks spread out randomly about 2x0.6 meters.
It is made from a few of the rocks that i cut in half with a diamond wheel on a huge grinder. The reason for cutting them is to get a clean surface which I can laminate to small pieces of glass.
The rocks with the glass backing can then be spot glued to the rear glass of the tank. I don´t glue the rocks directly to the glass in case I need to empty the tank in the future. In smaller tanks I glue the rocks directly.
I glue the strips to the rocks to get a huge surface of attachment.
Finally I will glue the rocks with the glass strips to the back of the tank. I can then use a small amount of silicone for final attachment. This way they are semi detachable modules.
That´s right. Silicone sticks better to glass than to most rocks, so I need a huge surface between the strips and the rocks. For final assembly I only use a pea-size amount of glue. For removal I simply twist the module free.
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