So I am in Cairns at the moment and went to see Paul at Aquarium world, a small shop in Cairns.  He has been doing planted tanks and breeding shrimp since 1982 (well he showed me his first co2 tank and that was from 1982) and knows a thing or two.  I used to live in Cairns and I remember seeing his shrimp tanks around 10 years ago, all planted and running co2 and it blew my mind.  I have managed to keep my obsession under wraps until the wife decided to get herself a small tank for mothers day - now the genie is out of the bottle!!

Anyway as I am in Cairns for a few days I thought I would drop by and ask Paul about my tank build.  My main question was, "Can I do this without CO2?"  That is can I have moderate to high light and grow some cool plants like H'ra or Wallichii.

So anyway Paul goes all Voodoo and sells me some laterite and a packet of rotting leaves.  He tells me to put this against the glass under all of the substrate and then the laterite, and then he gives me some hardwood aquarium sticks and says to put these in as well.  Finally when I get home I am to find some really hard wood - I have some ironbark that the fencers left over when they did our house fence, burn it and put in some of the charcoal.  Then the powersand and ADA amazonia over the top.  According to the Voodoo incantation this will incubate a source of carbon dioxide for a long time to come and in such a shallow tank will allow me to go pretty high light and grow some cool plants!

So what do you think?  I am going to make some youtube vids of the set up - will be interesting to see what happens either way!!

Really interested in your thoughts!! Have a great day

sub

That sounds very interesting and I look forward to hearing/seeing how it goes. I assume the leaves he got from a reliable place but I would check through them very carefully all the same as that was how I got water louse (scud) in my tank when I got leaves from the pond.

It's great you are doing all this research before starting so you should get a good result when it is all done?

Simon

Yeh so I did consider just going and getting some rotting leaves out of the bottom of a creek.. but these leaves are in a sealed plastic packet and goodness knows how long they have been in that shop!!  I dont know if it is great advice or not, but I am definitely going to give it a shot.  As soon as Paul started talking about laterite my ears pricked up because I had seen that name in some of my internet research on naturally boosting CO2 just a while before.  I think it is definitely worth the experiment (and wife is firm on no CO2!) ?

never question the juju, voodoo man KNOWS what he is doing.Give you good medicine, make plant and shrimp grow and grow. Make many more plant and shrimp then tank can hold.