Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

A sci paper states that, in an aquarium and for some sort of cichlid, time spent behaving aggressively was not associated with small-scale differences in group size or available space ((...)) aggression was significantly lower in a large aquarium with a complex habitat.

AFAIK aggression => stress => worse welfare => bad health, or worse

I don't know if/how it can be transposed to other species, nor how to design a "complex habitat" while forbidding solid waste to settle somewhere.

Any thoughts?

Make it movable?

"Complex" would work just as well floating and hanging down as it would stuck to the bottom and pointing up.

Those are two different suggestions. That wasn't very clear.

If the habitat on the bottom was moving around a bit ie weighed almost nothing in the water so a fish hitting it moved it, it might stop solids collecting.

But I'd go with the hanging stuff down from the top. I was planning to hang half terracotta pots (open at the bottom) so solids or dead fish couldn't collect/hide when I was working on my IBC system.

Is this for something that has to look nice in an aquarium?

I just can't think of an adequate material and shape, especially on an unprepared tank bottom (no rails...).



Indeed!

It may disturb sleeping fishes (assuming all fishes sometimes don't sleep while others do + non-sleepers usually avoid bumping on the others) and lifting or blocking this furniture (habitat stuff) during the night may lead to a somewhat over-engineered system, but it seems worth a try, thank you!



Are you now using barrels?



No , for a planned plain tank.

look up under gravel jets. lots of aquarium peeps use them to keep solids suspended until they can be filtered out.

I only have a single blue barrel system, but had a 5000L + system almost ready to go when we had to move after 10 years in the same place

All that was left to do was connect the pipe work.

But I kept a half terracotta pot in the bottom as a fish hide that the fish seemed to like. The only danger was a dead fish could go un-noticed so I thought I'd add some in the new system, but hang them so any dead fish or a dead rat or whatever would be obvious, but the fish could still have their hide. I was only planning maybe 4 hides at around a foot off the bottom. I figured if they were close to the bottom, the fish would still feel protected.

It might be worth looking at what people do for yabbies as well. I think yabby growers add PVC pipes to their system to increase hides and general bottom surface area. They might have some ways of dealing with trapped solids.