tenner redo- again

I find I don't have a lot of motivation to take care of a tank that doesn't have fish in it. This one was two days past its regular maintenance and ferts dosing for the plants. Which is important- I do care about my plants. To help myself take more interest in it, I did a bit of rescape today. It seems kind of perverse that now the betta is gone, the plants are thriving again- but that's probably because the frequent wc for sake of the fish were depleting nutrients...

I made it into a kind of 'island' scape. The photo is dim because lights were not on and lots of stuff got kicked into the water column, of course. I will get a better pic when things have settled.

Basically I moved my two pieces of hardscape to be together in the center, wood piece overlapping and hiding most of the fake skull:

Funny surprise I found when I had the piece out of the tank- one java fern rhizome instead of growing across the gap of the skull's nasal hole, went down through it and the new leaf came out the mouth.

It's like the skull creature has a tongue, haha.

So in the tank I moved all the rotala stems to be a row across the background again- I haven't seen them look so healthy since I had some in my old 20L, to be honest. Some have rosy tops now- they are happy about something.

My baby anubias barteri- it has grown quite a bit, but is still very small! Now in a front corner.

Here's a quick overhead shot.

I shifted the crypt further back into the corner, moved a few buces forwards, and replanted the anubias afzelii on the other side, middle ground off the end of the skull. I really like how the afzelii, buce 'selena' and anubias laceolata (behind the afzelii group) echo each other's leaf shapes. The only thing I don't like about the new arrangment is the placement of baby anubias barteri and that other anubia in the back corner- they are too straight in a line, maybe. And all the subwassertang is now on the back side of the driftwood piece, so I can't really see it (until it grows crazy out of control).

The floaters are still looking bad. I scooped them all into a small bucket and picked out with tweezers the worst of them- lots have black or brown spots of decay. I am still hoping it's just because they were so starved of ferts, and will recover.

Snails still look fine in here, btw. In fact, the trumpet snails that I pick out of my window tank seem healthier than those in the other two- they don't have as eroded, whitened shell tips. I wonder if because that tank has less safe-t-sorb in the substrate? Hm. Here they are piled in a corner where I gave them half a cooked pea yesterday. (They don't seem too interested in the flake of fish food I dropped in once in a while).