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All My Aquariums Tour

By King of DIY on

Joey:
This going to be almost a last-minute decision. A last-minute video. I've been wanting to do this video for about two years now. For those who follow me on Instagram already know what's about to happen. I've never had a fellow YouTuber in the aquarium gallery before, but today that's about to change. My friend Rachel O'Leary is here. You guys know her. I'll introduce you to her in a moment.

She hasn't been in the aquarium gallery yet. It's on the other side of the door.

What I want to do is get her first reaction and give her a tour of the gallery. I want you guys to come along with me. I'm going to get up here, right behind the 2000 gallon on the pedestal or this ramp that we built originally so you can see her reaction when she first comes in. Hi, Rachel, come on in.

Rachel:
I can't believe I'm finally here.

Joey:
Okay. Rachel, before we begin, just a quick message to these guys. This is Rachel O'Leary. She has her own YouTube channel here on YouTube, makes her own aquarium related videos, two years ago I introduced you to her. The point of that was to bring more quality information to the aquarium community here on YouTube. She's been doing that ever since, making a video every other day. You're doing like two, three videos a day. Now, behind the scenes, me and Rachel are close friends. I call her my fish wife. I'm her fish husband. You guys know I'm actually married, though.

Rachel:
As am I.

Joey:
Calm down. What the plan was, and this was truly a last minute decision. I was like, "Why don't you come to my house for like a Christmas special, almost, and being last-minute decision meaning, we don't really have much time. Tomorrow is actually Christmas Eve, she leaves. The plan was for her to come yesterday and be here by one o'clock. We'd have two days of filming, but her flights were delayed and it took her about 16 hours to get here as opposed to 6.

She got in late last night, and today we only have a very narrow window to film. A lot of the videos we wanted to do we're not going to be able to do, so we’re going to do a bunch of little videos. We're going to do some tours, we've got to do-- You guys will just have to tune in. She's going to do some videos on her channel as well, so if you're not subscribed to her yet, I'll leave a link in the description below. You're not going to want to miss those and either. Let's begin the tour.

Rachel:
I can't wait.

Joey:
Just do a quick overview of the entire gallery. You guys know the racking systems. Rachel, if you want to start at the-- Frank.

Rachel:
I got distracted by Frank.

Joey:
We'll start up here, I guess. This is the African tank, all Malawi peacocks. All males. This tank has been doing quite well. However, being all males, there's going to be some dominant males. In this tank, it's this guy here and this one here. I'm not well-versed in African cichlids enough to know what everything is. I know they're all peacocks, and they're all pretty cool.

One of the things I've had a problem with this is like, since there's dominant males, they are going after a lot of the other males. I've had to remove some. If you've noticed, a few of them were like just brown or black. This is sub-dominant, and they're just being beat into submission. I don't know long-run how this tank is going to turn out. It's exciting and interesting to watch it develop. Have you ever had Africans?

Rachel:
I just going to say, I've never actually kept any peacocks at all, though I've attended a lot of lectures about them in my fish club. With how colorful they are, I see why you were so attracted to them.

Joey:
Yes, originally, for me, Malawi fish never did it for me. It was like all Malawi tanks looked the same. Everybody had the same fish until I've got into discovering peacocks a few years ago. I realized the diversity there is and the colors, the blues, the oranges the reds, unfortunately the blacks.

Rachel:
Or gray.

Joey:
Down low, of course, is the Tropheus tank. This is another tank that's- you have to find balance with, especially with Tropheus. They're not a difficult fish to keep, they're a difficult fish to balance. Of course they have a specific diet being herbivoric, and they can get bloat, but the problem is you need one male to like six females type ratio, and the ideal troop would be something like 25 or something like that. I started with 40 and I had to cut this in half because it was just a complete war zone in here.

It's getting better by the day. What I like is the color transition that they're going through. These are Tropheus Ikola from Lake Tanganyika. You see the striped ones over here. That is more so what they look like as juveniles and as they color develop, we get over here with a solid black and a yellow bar. These guys would look like they're full-grown, but they're going to grow to at least twice that size. They get quite large. I think it's Pam Chin.

Rachel:
Pam Chin out in California has an entire fish house of Tropheus. I know that.

Joey:
Does she have the Ikola? No, she has the Duboisi, I think.

Rachel:
Yes.

Joey:
Absolutely amazing. These guys are a blast to feed.

Rachel:
She uses little clips right up at the surface so that they all go right up to the surface. It's really an impressive sight. I think you are really, really smart with your decision to overcrowd these guys at the start because, otherwise, you end up with that similar situation to upstairs that the dominants--

Joey:
Just going nuts.

Rachel:
This was really smart. That's one of the things I've heard Pam say many times, always get way more than you intend because overcrowding works very well.

Joey:
Yes, there's going to be all kinds of problems. Downside is they're actually quite expensive and not entirely too common. Tropheus Ikola are one of my favorite, Duboisi as well, I've kept-- Duboisi, I’d say, were easier than the Ikola in terms of temperament. This was actually the first tank we set up in the gallery and then, of course, the peacocks were second.

Rachel:
I really hope you breed these guys, because seeing the color change from the babies to the juveniles to the adults is so stunning and they're just such an incredible fish.

Joey:
Yes, it should be absolutely amazing. Let's move on to- let's do Frank. Here's the thing with Frank. Frank was put up here. He was in the 2000 It's awesome, isn't it? When you see it in person.

Rachel:
He's such a clown.

Joey:
He does it for attention. He's the true star. There is a Bichir in the tank as well always behind the wood. What I wanted to do, and I don't think I actually told Rachel this, but what I wanted to do while she was here was, I wanted to move Frank out of tank and the Bichir. We're going to move Frank to another 120 and the Bichir to the 2000.

I wanted to scape this as a Central American tank, but we just don't have time to scape. We will be moving the fish in a future video. Which should be interesting. However, again, we're just- so little time that I figured, let's just do a bunch of fun videos together and hope for the best. Frank has always been a crowd-pleaser. Do you think he's bigger or smaller in person or?

Rachel:
He's bigger than I anticipated. I'm not generally one who's particularly into flower horn. I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoy his antics. He's definitely got a ton of character.

Joey:
Everybody says he's bigger than they thought, and he's not done growing. He's going to grow into this big rollie-pollie fish. He's going to be probably 10 inches or so.

Rachel:
Reminds me of a toddler with the leg rolls of fat.

Joey:
Again, this is supposed to be Central American, South American below. Now, of course I had to go Uaru because my original channel name Uaru Joey. I'm not sure if you guys can see it with all the reflection, but we do have the Uaru here. These are Uaru amphiacanthoides. Originally, when I named my channel Uaru Joey is because I looked-- Everything was taken, I looked over to my Uaru tank. I tried Uaru Joey and it worked. It was the first name that I remembered the password to log into, so I just kept using it.

The Tetras go by a couple of names, either King Tetras or Emperor Tetras. There's so many common names out there, and then there is some Corydora in here somewhere. I did add a handful of them back in the corner. They like to hide in the shadows. It's interesting when you do more natural scapes how the fish react. You get a different outlook on them. Because I've came from years and years of bare-bottomed bear tanks to doing something like this.

Rachel:
I was going to comment on that too. I think it's really, really great how you can see the Uaru really interacting with the natural environment. Even at this small size, we can predict where they're going to breed, and how they're going to behave later. It's just really stunning to see they behaving as they should.

Joey:
Being an omnivore leaning towards herbivoric, they eat the wood a lot. One of the things I noticed about this wood, and it being raw manzanita, is it sheds.

Rachel:
It does like crazy. It grows fungus initially too, which is actually a really great food for them.

Joey:
The only problem I had with that was a Loach tank or the Clown tank, which we'll take a look in a minute. You coming from nano, I bet you can sex these Tetras.

Rachel:
Absolutely. This is a boy right there. The boys get a blueish sheen to them. They also have more color in their fins than the girls, generally.

Joey:
In the fish world, the males are always the prettier one, in the human world, it's always the women. I see, do you see a few of them displaying to each other.

Rachel:
Yes, you see how they get like that blue. You can see a couple of males sparring in the back. Here's a male.

Joey:
The thing about natural tanks or with organic escaping materials is that, not only are you feeding them, but they do all pick at the wood as well. That's what they'll do in them in the wild, is eat debris to an extent.

Rachel:
[crosstalk] too that grows. While the little bugs that eat those funguses. Even in our aquariums, such a great natural food, especially once they start reproducing.

Joey:
Moving on we'll go up to this tank. I've always been a fan of Discus, kept Discus for about 10 or 12 years, but angelfish and discus are unofficial rivals. Which one is better, Angels or Discus? Can you keep them together, et cetera? I wanted to do a themed rack where it's Angels versus Discus. The Angel tank by far has overtaken the popularity in terms of the comments. However, I held a poll on Instagram, and it was 50/50 of which tank they liked the best. These guys, I don't know if you're noticing anything. You want to point out any breeding activity or males to females?

Rachel:
There's a bunch with breeding tubes down that tell you that they're going to be spawning very soon. There's one right there that has a breeding tube down.

Joey:
This guy in the back?

Rachel:
Yes, right at wood there. You can only really definitively sex both Discus and Angels for the most part when they are getting ready to breed because that breeding tube will drop down.

Joey:
If you look right up in front of their anal fin, you'll only see it for a fraction of the time because it's--

Rachel:
It's super teeny.

Joey:
keep getting in the way. There you go. All these guys are good eaters. Angels, in my opinion, are so easy to keep. However, they can be jackasses sometimes in terms of fighting when you get these dominant males. I haven't noticed anything and I think it's just because I have so many.

Rachel
: I do think overcrowding is really working in your favor here. I never work with Angels because I like to say they eat my profits. They'll leave the small fish that I raised. The that I raised.

Joey:
They will, that's an interesting point because I don't find Discus do that at all, but Angels definitely will eat tiny Tetras and whatnot.

Rachel:
Yes, they have a seek and destroy mentality. They've got a very cichlid behavior. Whereas Discus are way more mild-mannered. I don't know if they're not as smart as Angels or if they're just more docile. That's up to interpretation.

Joey:
Over the past few weeks the Discus have been coming out more and more definitely, ever since I added in the leaf litter here and keeping it more natural. As you can see the Cardinals are not a Schooling fish, more of a Shoaling fish. I think you talked about this before, the difference between Schooling and Shoaling if you want to cover that again.

Rachel:
Yes, sure. The Schooling is more of a directional behavior. They both have the same end result where the fish have a bigger presence, so they're less often predated on, but I personally enjoy directional schoolers over shoalers because you can get a more predictable behavior within your aquascape. Some of the things that you can do to make them behave a little bit more predictably is to manipulate the filter direction and outflow in order to create all these channels in the aquarium in order to get the fish to stay in one part. This tank, they're all over the place and it may be because they're such a nice even diffused flow within the aquarium.

Joey:
Yes, the the Ecotech wavemakers are not necessarily jet propelled where it's just one stream. They diffuse really well. If we look here, we could see a little piece of the plant blowing. However, you can see clearly that the fish are not struggling to swim around. Cardinals and Discus are a classic. There's also some neurotic snails in there. They are loving the leaf litter. It's almost to the point where they don't go after any algae or anything like that.

Now that we're both standing in front of this tank, the discus are hiding over in the corner here, which is the downside to Discus sometimes. Overall, over the past couple weeks these guys have been out in the tank tremendously. If you're following me on Instagram, I've been posting some pictures and videos and whatnot of them out. These two are definitely some of my favorite tanks. It's difficult, every time I look at a tank and talk about a tank it becomes my favorite tank.

Now, the Asian tank. This is interesting because I added 20 clown loaches, I think, and a clown knife. Yes, there's one. They all go back behind the wood. We never see them. One of the things I want to do is add in some more fish that will swim and fill out the rest of the tank. The Clown Knife is in there as well. Everybody's doing well. The Clown Knife is a little more difficult to feed. He's not necessarily accepting every meal, but he's still in there, he's still doing okay, still alive, so that's a good sign.

Later on today what we're going to do is take the rainbows that are left in here, and put them in here. Those rainbows, the Iranian Reds can be from parts of Asia, so it's still going to maintain its Asia theme. Those rainbows are really going to fill this tank out. Then I know what people are going to ask, what we're gonna do with it 375, and I do have plans for that. The little ray is still in there, but she'll move to the 2000 here shortly.

Rachel:
When you add the rainbows into this aquarium, that's going to give those Loaches more of a sense of comfort. Sometimes in the wild when fish that are typically more bottom-dwelling have fish that stay up towards the top, it makes them feel safe because they know there's no predator swimming. Hopefully, that will transform their behavior as well for you.

Joey:
Now up top is nothing in it right now. I just have lights on. They're leaning towards blues and purples and pinks, but this is where I want to move Frank, and I'm going to put him in there permanently because I do need to turn that into a Central American aquarium. It can't just be a bad tank forever. We're going to take him and put him over here. Then we have two more that will do something special with. We got the 375, a little ray, a little pearl.

Rachel:
Yes, you can tell she's definitely a female.

Joey:
Yes, female. A lot of people ask me what this is, that's her belly button. Their yolk sac used to be attached to that. Sometimes they can have them wherever, some people call them a birthmark.

Rachel:
Do they always have lighter pigmentation?

Joey:
Yes, it depends on the species. This is a pearl, most rays that are not black diamonds will look like this. To give you an idea of what she looks like now compared to what she will look like. The big male over here, we'll take a closer look at that in a second, but the rainbows are- they're definitely getting more red.

Rachel:
They look fantastic. I don't know that one video, it really translates how absolutely iridescent and beautiful they are. It really matured beautifully.

Joey:
Still got a ways to go. I've got a special fish I want to put in here. I don't have it yet, but we will soon. I don't think that I told you what I want to do in here. I'll tell you when the camera is off. The moss is doing great, it's growing. I've noticed that it started growing above the tank, and--

Joey:
No, but it's growing straight up. A tiny little bit right over there. It's not lying across the surface of the water. It's trying to grow up and out of the water, which is interesting. When I was in the UK, and seeing different mosses growing with different lighting and different levels in the tank, it was really interesting to see how the moss would respond. This is spike moss. However, if you grow this in brighter light or higher up in the tank, it'll grow differently, a more bushier and lay down more. It's interesting to see that. This filled out quite nicely. This is exactly what I was looking to do. I love that. A lot of people didn't like how I did add a lot of plants. This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted a bunch of tree roots almost covered in moss.

Rachel:
It makes an impressive depth. I don't think I had seen the intricacies on video that are here in person. It's quite lovely.

Joey:
Yes, one of my favorite tanks. Every tank is my favorite tank. Look, like I said, the Discus are out. When you crowd the tank or the lights just to come on for the first time, they'll scatter. They're usually out these days. I put my hand in the other day, I was cleaning the tank, and they started biting me. They're starting to get aggressive with feedings. It's something people don't know about Discus. They can be aggressive too. Of course, the 2000. What do you think, is it bigger or smaller than you thought? Just about?

Rachel:
It's lower than I thought but about the volume. Way more impressive that I thought. I can't imagine how you get any work done out here.

Joey:
I usually don't. This is 2000 gallons, it's 10 feet long, 7 feet wide, 4 feet tall. The stalking, of course, is some freshwater stingrays, we've got- there's a close up of the male pearl. We've got one male pearl, we've got three black diamonds, there's two here, and then another one probably. I don't know where the other one is. He went on vacation. Where is he?

Rachel:
Right here. There's three right here.

Joey:
Another one, yes. One, two. The thing about this, is this like an eight inch drop. When they go close to the ditch, you can't see it. Then, of course, the Dragons. We've got four Asian Arowana. We've got a ultimate blood red, right here, panda gold supreme. This is the and that was my original blood red. Of course, these are just juvenile, so they're not looking the greatest. That's the thing about reds and is they take usually a couple years to truly show their coloration as opposed to crossbacks and golds which, as you can see with the panda supreme, it's already got gold coloration, it's already looking pretty decent. Now, when I added these guys, I knew that there was going to be some fighting, there was going to be some fin nipping, going to be some chasing. They want to establish a hierarchy. My red originally was the boss, but the panda supreme is a complete jerk. [laughs]

Rachel:
He really is a boy.

Joey:
Yes. I'd like to had seven in here ideally. Now, the algae or cyano, at one point I cleaned them all off and I need to do it again. However, I'm rescaping this entire tank giving it a completely different look. The entire inside of it is going to be opened. There won't be any of this wood in here. Maybe some of these rocks or something, but that should happen within a couple of weeks. I think it's going to look absolutely stunning. Of course, with the additional pro in there, we'll have five rays and four Asian Arowana. Again, I'd like to get the seven Asian Arowana, but I'm top to it right now. I need more time.

Rachel:
It's a huge investment both in time and money. I can't wait to see how they grow.

Joey:
You want to go swimming in it? [laughs]

Rachel:
I forgot my bathing suit. It's winter. [chuckles] Next time.

Joey:
Okay, a moment of truth. Out of all the aquariums I've shown you, Rachel, what's your favorite and what's your least favorite?

Rachel:
My favorite is the water tank. To be honest, I really, really love how they're interacting with this environment. I'm really excited to see this fish grow, mature, pair up and spawn. I think that the choice of the dither fish with them was perfect and--

Joey:
Well, I feel this tank is perfectly balanced in terms of the scape, the rockwork. The substrate was the right choice, but the lighting is what I struggled with the most. I was like, "What's going to be the best where I can have the lights on for the longest yet have them act most naturally." This tank, I'm leaving alone for lighting now. The others, I'm still playing with. For example, the Discus tank, I've only got one light on and just shining in at an angle almost like sunlight. I would say the Angel tank is balanced now.

Well, that's the thing with lighting, is everything. It makes the fish look a certain way. It makes them perform a certain way, act a certain way. It's a thing that I've always never really considered until I started up a gallery and I realized how important they could potentially be make or break a tank type of thing. Favorite. Rachel's favorite?

Rachel:
The empty ones, of course.

Joey:
What a disappointment. Well, I guess it's safer to say that because if you would have said, "The Angels are my least favorite" or something, then--

Rachel:
Well, it depends too. The the fish choice. My least favorite in what way? I think they all are working.

Joey:
Well, being so limited in scaping supplies really was the biggest challenge in trying to make them all look different.

Rachel:
I really think you've done a good job of giving them all a very unique appearance.

Joey:
By the way, guys, next thing I want to do is I actually want to see-- I've got a ton of food here. I'm going to get Rachel to feed all of my fish. She can choose what fish is going to feed them and why. That would be in an upcoming video. I'm sure she's going to do some filming as well on her channels. If you want to see those, make sure you subscribe to her channel. If you're excited with the videos I have coming up, make sure you subscribe to this channel. Anyways, I think we're going to wrap this video up. I'd like to thank you guys for watching. If you join me in a couple of days, I will have a new video for you.

About King of DIY

Joey is THE King of DIY, and when he built his gallery of aquariums he chose the Custom Aquariums rack system with 120-gallon tanks...a lot of them!

Joey Mullen is also known as the king of DIY, uarujoey or the DIY fishkeeper on social media. Providing education and inspiration for aquarium enthusiasts on YouTube, he is also the author of The Ultimate DIY Handbook; for the DIY Aquarist. His channel is about educating all levels of fish tank hobbyists who are passionate about caring for fish and keeping an aquarium of their own. Joey's aquarium rack systems were custom made by our professional fish tank engineers, here at Custom Aquariums.

Please watch the King of DIY's videos for some helpful information and great tips on diy aquarium keeping.

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