Fish Scales and Snail Trails

So I already made a post about how to make a moss wall, but I want to make a rocky wall for the back of my 40 gal. and I thought I’d show you how. ( this is a multi day project so keep that in mind! )

Materials: a bunch of rocks AND pebbles that fit the aesthetic, aquarium safe silicone, cyanoacrylate superglue a razor scraper, and Great Stuff expanding foam.

First, you’ll need a clean, dry surface, so your tank will have to be empty for this. With your materials at the ready, you’ll spray down the entire back wall of the tank with the Great Stuff expanding foam. You’ll want to make it nice and thick at the bottom of the tank so it has mass to support itself. 

While the Great stuff is still soft and spongy, you’ll place your rocks in their desired location. Then wait for the foam to cure over 24 hours (or whatever the can says). It will look funny, don’t worry though.

Eww terrible. Anyways, all you need to do is rip or cut the foam away to show the rock face. This will also look ugly, but don't worry. We have pebbles! 

You can just slather that b with the aquarium safe silicone and use the pebbles to cover it up. The superglue can help secure larger pebbles and rocks. If that's not your style, use my moss wall idea and cover the spongy insides of the expanding foam with moss and epiphyte plants.

You’ll end up with something like this (depending on the style you’re going for. This is for a paludarium).

Once you add the hardscape and plants you can end up with something like this:

Obviously, you could always buy a false background, but if you like a challenge/being cheap/DIYing, etc, then this could definitely work for you!

This is an idea I've been thinking about for a while now so this is more of a hypothesis than a tutorial lol

Okay! So there is a way to get a moss carpet started by using string to tie moss to a small square of window screen.

That's the bitch.

I want to expand this idea

So a piece of window screen the size of the back wall of the tank. Place all kinds of moss and epiphyte plants, like java fern and anubias, by using a needle and string to secure moss and super glue to secure the epiphyte plants.

Use suction cups to secure the whole thing to the glass

Add accent rocks in the back to make it look more natural idk

Like I said in a different post you can use cyanoacrylate super glue to attach plants to something, or secure string.

Apparently this is already a thing, but I think it'd be cooler with a bunch of different plants instead of just one type of moss.

in terms of tank size lol

Okay, so you've got yourself a fish, let's say it's solitary for the purpose of the demonstration. The minimum tank size is "five gallons", so that's the size of tank you put it in. Now imagine something goes wrong, like suddenly there is an ammonia spike, the heater breaks, or a disease is introduced. The source of whatever can kill your fish is easily going to spread throughout those five gallons of water very quickly.

Now imagine you have your solitary fish in a 40 gallon. The same thing goes wrong, but now there is a lot more water. This means that much more ammonia is needed before fish death, heat is kept in the water better, or the disease has to work harder to travel to your fish.

This type of fishkeeping is unacceptable. It's not funny. It's not cute. You are willingly abusing and mistreating fish.