All of the updates so far have been pictures taken after a pruning and I was asked to take some pictures before pruning showing the Rotala at the back. Not one for being bashful I took the pictures the very next day (10th April.) Not one for being very motivated it has taken me 6 weeks to publish them but here they are anyway.
You'll be glad to know that I will stop including the 'dog in picture' photos. Risking my own life I have been shifting him from his 23 hour a day slumber pad while working on the aquascape.
The aquascape is still in quite a young state here and not filled in as much as you will see in the next update. You can also see some symptoms of my laziness in terms of maintenance. I have left this scape sometimes for 3 or 4 weeks at a time without water changes. I have been lazy with the dosing too, sometimes not dosing at all for a week and the result has been some BBA directly opposite the filter outflow.
If you have sharp eyes you may also notice the middle row of the LEDs have been turned off. It was growing way too fast for me and that kind of growth is just a disaster waiting to happen when the aquascaper is as lazy as me. Those with sharp eyes may also notice that I have now routed an acrylic split lid.
And to bring us right up to date:
This aquascape is now starting to fill out really well. The Hydrocotyle is a pain to keep stuffing down as it really is a weed. The HM also grows really fast too.
The Narrow Fern is now starting to push on and has gone from being quite thin to getting bushy around where it had been attached and now is starting to creep further along the branches. It normally happens this way for me. I attach it thinly and it takes a while for it to attach itself properly and settle in before it then speeds away.
Hopefully it will get somewhere close to where I want it to be in the next month or 2 at which point I plan to turn the CO2 off (if it hasn't run out) and then leave it under 1 row of LEDs as a 'permanent' aquascape. I'm not one for ripping aquascapes down and moving on to the next one like many aquascapers. I tend to aim for something I want to keep for a decent length of time and only pull them down when they aren't reaching the vision I had or once I feel like a change.
There are a couple of pictures here of the Blue Jelly shrimp. These are of course the European version of blue jelly the Davidii / Heteropoda. I bought 20 initially and as you can see they have reproduced like mad. The annoying thing though is that you may notice the majority of offspring don't come out purely blue. They are still blue but with red patches of varying degrees.
Not sure if I got a bad line or if they normally don't breed true but it will mean I have to separate 'true blues' into a breeding tank if I want to sell them on.