🐠 TOTM Vote Now - April 2023 Tank of the Month Contest (17 to 30 gallons)

Please Vote Now
We have 6 unique tanks entered in Fishforums' April 2023 Tank of the Month contest featuring tanks sized at 17 to 30 US gallons.. View all the tanks and descriptions below and then go to poll at the top of this thread, click on your choice for TOTM, and then click the "Cast" button.

Please DO NOT post any comments about any specific entry in this thread...such posts will promptly be deleted. You are not allowed to update your entry picture or video once voting has started.

Please Note:
Any attempt to influence competition results, other than by casting your allocated vote, is not permitted and may result in your entry being removed and / or further action being taken. You are not allowed to have friends or family join TFF for the main purpose of voting for you. This is a public poll so source of votes can be viewed.

Winner will be awarded a neat "Tank of the Month Winner" banner in his profile area and will be featured in a "TOTM Winner" thread for all to see and to comment on. Winner will also be added to our TOTM WALL OF FAME

You are allowed to change your vote if you wish.
This poll will end on April 15th at 10:30 AM (ET).

It is a jungle but, if you have ever done fresh water snorkel of diving, nature seems to like jungles. Sorry for the light burst just left of center but the bubbles from the UG air risers do that... Just on the left edge of the fake tree trunk is my boss cichlid.

Tank basics:
20 Gallon cube using under gravel filtration along with a built in sponge filter. Under gravel powered by 2 Whisper 20 pumps. Sponge pulling ~94 gallons per hour.
100 watt heater.
Bank or red, white and blue LED lights.
Not the best substrate but not worth tearing down to change.
Fake tree trunk to act as a cave system with 6-7 openings with a Java Fern glued.
Spider wood to the right.
More solid chunk of wood just right of center with an Anubias mounted.

Residents:
4 South American Smiling Dwarf Cichlids (Laetacara araguaiae).
1 7.5 inch rope fish (Erpetoichthys calabaricus)

Plants... Phew, this may take a while... there are a LOT!
Myrio Green
Golden Melon SwardSag Dwarf
Val Italian
LimnoHippo
Broad Leaf Chain Sword
Sagittaria Dwarf
Red Tiger Lotus
Radican Swords
Hornwort
Amazon Swords
Yes it is heavily planted but it gives veggies for the cichlids and the rope loves it.

Here is my entry for ToTM. This tank is still in progress. It is a 20 gallon breeder tank with a Pair of Kribensis in it with babies.
Plants are Bucephalandra Green Godzilla, Anubias Nana Petite, Water Wysteria and Pogstomen.
I have a double sponge filter powered by a 40g Air Pump, black sand and a heater.
I plan to add a few more live plants and remove the plastic ones.
Cheers and have a smurfy day.

I would like to submit my tank for your consideration for the April 2023 TFF TOTM Contest.

This is my 29 gallon tank. I've been working on it since last October. I started adding plants last November and added the first fish in February. The tank is an Aqueon that I got at Petco during one of their tank sales. The lights are hygger HG-957 Programmable LED. The heater is a Fluval M150 Submersible heater. I have two filters. The main one is an Aquaclear 50 that I added a prefilter sponge and baffling made out of a water bottle (to disperse the output flow). I also have an Alegi sponge filter rigged with an air stone that's rated up to 30 gallons. I believe that it's better to over filter than under filter as long as the water flow doesn't affect the fish. The sponge filter is rigged up to an AquaMiracle Lithium Battery powered air pump. So if the power goes out, my tank will still have filtration and aeration.
The substrate is Quikrete play sand. For driftwood I have Manzanita branches along the back wall and Malaysian driftwood towards the front. There's a random Seiryu stone and some pebbles I attached some of the column feeder plants to. The big clump of moss on the left is actually a fish hideaway that I attached moss to so it would look a little more natural. And I have some Indian almond leaves in a back corner. The tubes you see floating up top are homemade feeder rings and a plant corral that's moderately successful.

My centerpiece fish is a honey gourami (Trichogaster chuna). There are a dozen neon tetras (Paracheirodon innesi) and I got a dozen pygmy corys (Corydoras pygmaeus). The corys hide a lot, especially during the day. I just got the neons up to a full school and I'm hoping that the neons will be a dither fish and encourage the pygmys to come out more. I'm also going to add a few more pygmys to encourage them to be less shy. There's a bunch of ramshorn and bladder snails and I got 2 assassin snails to help control their number. The assassins are in there. Somewhere. Waiting.
Now the plants....
Jungle vallisneria (Vallisneria americana)
Water wisteria (Hygrophila difformis)
Moneywort (Bacopa monnieri)
Java ferns (Microsorum pteropus)
Anubias Frazieri
Anubias Nana Petite
Java Moss (Taxiphyllum barbieri)
Amazon Sword (Echinodorus Sp Red Diamond)
Cryptocoryne Usteriana
But the most important plants are the floating plants. Water spangles (Salvinia minima), a few Amazon frogbit that aren't doing too well (Limnobium laevigatum) and a big clump of Anacharis (Elodea densa) that I only occasionally prune.
I feed the fish once a day, alternating between high quality flakes and pellets. I believe a varied diet is essential to fish health. The honey gourami and neon tetras get New Life Spectrum flakes and Fluval Bug Bites. The pygmy corys get Omega One Catfish Pellets and Fluval Bug Bites Bottom Feeder formula. Since the pygmys are so small, I grind their food into powder with a mortar and pestle. I also include frozen foods in their diet; brine shrimp, baby brine shrimp, daphnia and bloodworms. The pest snails are on their own. I didn't invite them. Every five days is a fasting day. For the plants, I dose Seachem Flourish Comprehensive Supplement twice a week and use Flourish root tabs every 3-4 months.
I do a weekly water change of 50-60% every week.
So that's my tank. I could talk all day about it. I'm pretty proud of it and it's good for my mental health. But I didn't make it by myself. This forum has been essential. I've gotten so much good advice here and so many good ideas. I hope you all like it too. And if you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Here's my tank. lt's a 19 gallon aquarium (it currently holds 11 gallons though) that houses my pair of Betta Coccina. It's also home to 100 or so Ramshorns that seem to do pretty well even in those not so ideal for them water conditions. The tank's substrate is gravel, whith peat on top of it, which helps lower the pH so that my Coccinas are happy. It's not really heavily planted, because the plants don't thrive in these low-light and acidic water conditions. I collected the wood and all the botanicals for the tank myself from the countryside, and l'm loving them. It's heated at 78F. The water parameters are:
Ammonia/Nitrites: 0
Nitrates: 5
pH: 6
It's nothing special, but I love it and my fish seem to like it too.

Hi folks,

This is the early stages of my 29g Keyhole Forest. Im lucky to be surrounded by beautiful forests and nature reserves where i live in the Uk so im always taking inspiration and ideas away from my walks. So this tank is based on those ideas to bring nature indoors

Tank setup:
*Substrate: Play sand with a base layer of Tropica soil.

*Decor: Redmoor sticks (tree trunks), Green angel rock, Alder cones.
*Plants:
*Cryptocoryne
Beckettii, Wendtii, Willisii, Balansae, lucens, Parva.
*Anubias Heterophilla,Lanceolata
*Sagittaria Subulata
*Frogbit Floating.
(Plants Fed with Tropica, root tabs and seachem flourish)
*Water Parameters:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrites: 0
Nitrates: 10ppm
PH: 7.4
GH: 9 gdh
KH: 7
*Maintance:
50/75% once a week
*Equipment:
Eheim air pump, 2x Eheim 150w heaters, Inkbird temperature controller, Large duel sponge filter, 6500k Nicrew light (on 8 hrs per day)
*Stocking
4x Keyhole Cichlids (Cleithracara maronii)
5x Fiveband barbs (Desmopuntius pentazona)

Thank you for looking and good luck to everyone

Hi all! This is my 20 gallon tank. It's one of the first tanks I started with. I actually had to restart the tank once but since then it has been running it for about 10 months now. I didn't start getting into live plants until recently and trying to figure out what I can use in rock only substrate. I've also recently started using Seachaem Flourish tabs, API Leaf Zone, and API CO2 Boost to try and help as a lot of the plants were struggling that I tried to put in. They have been doing better since I started using these thing but I do know that having a soil substrate would help so much more.

Fish Stock: GloFish Danio (1), GloFish Tetra (4), Mystery Snail (2), Neon Tetra (9), Angel Fish (1)

Maintence: Weekly water changes sometimes bi-weekly. I've had kind of high nitrates, up to 30ppm or more and it's hard to keep them down. I've been using API Nitra-Zord pads but I don't like them in the lower gallon tanks because the filter box is too small for them. Going to try using some Seachem Denitrate soon instead.

Ammonia: 0
Nitrites: 0
Nitrates: 30ppm
PH: 7.6

End of Entries:
Please scroll up slowly as you review the 6 great entries and then click on your choice for Tank of the Month. Then be sure to click the "cast" button to register your vote.
Thanks for participating in the TOTM contest.

Coming up in mid April will be our Fish of the Month contest. For April's FOTM contest, we will be featuring Tetras. If you have Tetras, we hope you enter one of them in the contest.

59 fine members have voted. Did YOU vote? If not, please cast your vote now.

Coming up in mid April will be our Fish of the Month contest. For April's FOTM contest, we will be featuring Tetras. If you have Tetras, we hope you enter one of them in the contest.

Last chance to cast your vote in the contest. Poll closes tomorrow so cast your vote now.

Coming up in mid April will be our Fish of the Month contest. For April's FOTM contest, we will be featuring Tetras. If you have Tetras, we hope you enter one of them in the contest.