Honestly, I wasn't sure they hadn't. There was very low visibility for the first month or so as the plants were establishing and algae was doing most of the heavy lifting with regards to filtration. I'm certainly not seeing as many of the larger bloodworm-esque critters, and I'm not sure if there's still an active population of those. Mostly, I know the fish will eat snail eggs, so the size of the snail population is one of my barometers for the overall health of the ecosystem. Another is the behavior of the fish: aggression or weird swimming patterns are a sign that something is off. Finally, I look around for small things swimming around or climbing on the glass. A lot of things are too small to tell what they are without magnification, but you can tell that it's something alive by how it moves through the water. And they have lots of cover from the plants and other aquascaping, so the odds that the fish will get everything is pretty low. And there's no rule against adding more stuff if it's needed. You can add actual critters like mosquito larva as a temporary food source, or add rotting leaves from a body of water to introduce new life. But mostly, you want to add fish slowly so that you don't create a huge swing in resource needs at any level of the food web, and then watch how things adapt and respond before changing anything else. It's pretty Zen at the end of the day.
Excellent job!
What’s the secret to making sure the fish don’t eat all the microfauna in one go?
Honestly, I wasn't sure they hadn't. There was very low visibility for the first month or so as the plants were establishing and algae was doing most of the heavy lifting with regards to filtration. I'm certainly not seeing as many of the larger bloodworm-esque critters, and I'm not sure if there's still an active population of those. Mostly, I know the fish will eat snail eggs, so the size of the snail population is one of my barometers for the overall health of the ecosystem. Another is the behavior of the fish: aggression or weird swimming patterns are a sign that something is off. Finally, I look around for small things swimming around or climbing on the glass. A lot of things are too small to tell what they are without magnification, but you can tell that it's something alive by how it moves through the water. And they have lots of cover from the plants and other aquascaping, so the odds that the fish will get everything is pretty low. And there's no rule against adding more stuff if it's needed. You can add actual critters like mosquito larva as a temporary food source, or add rotting leaves from a body of water to introduce new life. But mostly, you want to add fish slowly so that you don't create a huge swing in resource needs at any level of the food web, and then watch how things adapt and respond before changing anything else. It's pretty Zen at the end of the day.