freshwater native aquarium

[Mr Mag00]

Hi, looking to set up the above, apart from creatures which need to move one stage to another, caddis , damsel etc has anyone any experience of running for education a freshwater native aquarium with beetles, newts etc etc. I have tried to look online and found nothing relevant. i need info on set up, oxygen, temp etc. I really want to do this but dont want a green algae filled tank in a few weeks or it need drastic water changes every couple of weeks. If it cant be done then fine, but any answers??? ta

[C C]

Hi Mr Magoo.
A countryside park near me tried something similar, they used fish from their local lake. There was two very large aquariums, both of which contained Dace, roach, sticklebacks ect.
They kept the water temperture down by using a cooling system, i think they used the type you find in pubs? Although, the cooler kept on breaking down and the fish would die. It proved to costly to keep repairing the system, so they abandoned the idea.
When the system was runing however it was great, and it never produced algae. When it failed it soon bloomed with a thick green carpet.
I dont know how it would work with pond creatures and such, but i still should imagine for some pond life you would need to keep the temp down.

[Gill Catton]

I thought about this too.....
I came to the conclusions that its a bad idea as everything other than fish, shrimps, hoglice, leeches, flat worms and snails seems to need to leave the water at some point - newts are actually largely terrestrial too.

If you add fish they'l eat your crustaceans so then you're left with fish, leeches and snails,

and leeches need something to eat so they're likely to latch onto the fish - if that's they're natural food - which is likely to make your fish sick,

so then you're left with leeches, flatworms and snails...

and you don't necessarily want to be highlighting fish as an important part of a wildlife pond because well, they're not really, they eat too many of the interesting things.

You could keep a tank with a couple of stickleback and plants just for the autumn / winter / spring and put them back into the pond they came from for the summer perhaps.

I don't think anything beats having a pond and pond dipping, even better if you can get the kids to come visit at night with torches - they'l find that dead exciting doubly so because they've got to stay up late!!

Oh or I have read about a bitterling / swan mussle set up which was interesting - the fish needing the mussle to complete its life cycle, but I'm not sure how easy it is to keep the mussle alive in an aquiarium, you'd certainly need a strong current I'd have thought, and then you've got to worry about where the fish and mussles have been sourced (or at least I'd worry)