The BucketPonds Blog

  This might seem like a strange question but... Who turned my aquarium blue?!  I've recently noticed some blue green algae in my twenty gallon pond tank. Not a big deal, bga is part of nature but it still caught my eye. This "algae" can be toxic in certain situations. Some varieties are safe while others can create deadly cyanotoxins.  So I cut the blue green algae away from my "good" Nitella algae. I collected some of the bga and set it aside to study. My goal was to find a way to control it naturally. Well some interesting things happened to that 32 oz sample jar.  As you can see... The jar turned a brilliant SAPPHIRE BLUE. This caught me completely off guard! I didn't expect anything like this to happen. The jar itself was fine one day, then blue on the next.  Now I know, blue green algae is generally a bad thing but my god! Can you imagine the tanks we could build using this blue water technique? I immediately had to do some research and learn more abou...

 Tonight's video is all about bladder snails. Specifically: Bladder Snail Slime Trails.  These are bladder snails. Physella acuta. I have been breeding and raising them for about two years now. They are typically called a pest or a "plague" in the aquarium industry.  The truth is: These little snails are BENEFICIAL and they are extremely adaptable. They clean algae off your glass and hardscape. They help to remove leftover food and dying plants. Bladder Snails will completely ignore living plants.  I think they do this, refusing to eat live plants, as a way to promote their own survival. Physically they should be able to eat live plants but they choose not to do so. These plants clean their water, thus helping the bladder snails to survive. Not destroying those plants is a survival strategy and bladder snails are full of evolutionary tricks like that.  The negative stigma they receive in the hobby is more about the snails themselves. They are cheap to keep. Easy...

Hi I'm BucketPonds and I run a lot of jar aquariums. Today we are looking at my 1 year old, 1 Gallon tanks. Which have been outside for quite a while!  This was one of my first large jar tanks. Setup using my best methods at the time.  Each of these jars is over a year old but these photos are from when they were first setup.  I don't keep fish in these gallon jars. Some people might but to me it's just cruel. You cannot host a breeding population of any kind in such a small tank. 1 gallon just isn't enough But! You can keep TONS of tiny pet invertebrates inside. Bladder Snails, Aquatic Worms and Ostracods (aka Seed Shrimps) are some of my personal favorites.  Over the last year I admit, I neglected these tanks. I actually put them outside about 4 months ago, to free up space indoors for my other aquarium projects. Let's look at them now, current pictures after I brought them back indoors to get warm.  This is Spikerush and it has done EXTREMELY well when kept o...