if you have a freshwater acquarium i must shill duckweed till i die https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1DL-2ASTU8

if you want a freshwater aquarium that basically requires no water changes and no cleaning and even no feeding, just do the following:

- 2x glofish aquarium gravel 5lbs (10lbs total) - $8.18
- tetra easybalance nitraban water treatment - $13.87
- volcano bubbler - $15
- tetra whisper air pump - $17.39
- top fin 10 gallon starter kit - $87
- 10x neon tetras - $30
- 10x ghost shrimp - $8
- duckweed - free from your local pond
- fish flakes cuz they smell good - $11.09
- whatever freshwater plants they have - $20 idk
- Like $10 dollars worth of whatever freshwater snails you can get

$220.53 total ezpz

duckweed removes nitrates from the water, so your tank water will stay really healthy for the fish so you never need to do water changes, the fish eat duckweed because it's a superfood for them basically, and the duckweed grows really quickly so it'll always cover the top of the aquarium but that doesn't matter because you're looking at it from the side. also green plants look great. and then the ghost shrimp and the snails will eat any algae that grow if there are any, so you'll never have algae problems, and you'll have a beautiful tank of neon tetras with a cute volcano and neon rocks. duckweed is invasive so you can't get it from a store, but you can find it in almost any pond, just try to find some that is clean or just get it from another aquarium that has a good source already.

i had a tank like this and basically did no water changes and no feeding for like over a year and all my fish and shrimps and snails did fantastic, I'm pretty sure you could leave this indefinitely but it's probably a good idea to do the regular aquarium stuff if you want the best possible tank. but duckweed is fucking amazing

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz no i am not a fishey

@RedTechEngineer@fedi.lowpassfilter.link so you can smell them cuz they smell good. but you can feed the fish to watch the eat if you want, or whenever the nitrates start getting low (but idk why they would). you can tell when the duckweed gets yellow or whatever but i never had that happen in my tank. usually the problem is too much nitrates from fish poop and extra fish flakes that sink down, but like with ghost shrimp and snails they'll clean the bottom of the tank so you don't really get excess nitrates, and the duckweed will vacuum up the rest, and the fish absolutely love it because it's superfood for them. so literally no downsides, everyone who hates duckweed is objectively wrong

@RedTechEngineer@fedi.lowpassfilter.link like people's fish tanks are usually cloudy, algae infested messes that fish suffer in but you can literally just fix it by putting in this one plant that grows so crazily it's invasive and your fish will have a much better diet, there's like no downsides

@RedTechEngineer@fedi.lowpassfilter.link NOEEEEE the poor snails and shrimbbb

@RedTechEngineer@fedi.lowpassfilter.link there's a reason crabs keep evolving, they're apex predators XD

@RedTechEngineer@fedi.lowpassfilter.link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation crabs have evolved at least 5 times in the past 250 million years lol