Surprisingly, my 2 mini aquariums were still bubbling with activities 4 years on. I started one of them back in March 2015 and added a second tank in December that same year. They were located next to my in-door balcony area where I kept some of the potted plants. The balcony-facing side of the tanks will get about an hour of sunlight in the morning when it was a sunny day.

I used to spend about an hour each weekend to clean up the tanks. Gradually, the initial enthusiasm turned into a chore. The frequency reduced to once in 2 weeks and then became once a month. For the last few months, I had stopped cleaning the tanks. The ecosystem in the tanks seemed to have reached some kind of balance. The only stuff that I had to do these days were merely topping up the water in the tank once a week to counter evaporation. Occasionally, I do remove some of the overgrown aquatic plants. The water in the tank that housed the mollies was green in colour, likely due to over population of floating algae. However, the mollies appeared to like it based on the fact that they were reproducing all the while in the murky water compared to rare reproduction activity when the water was clear in the past. Though it was not ideal visually, I guess it should be fine as long as the fishes were happy and I saved my hour over the weekend. The tank with the guppies was having clear water.

On top of that, I had added 2 auto-feeders; one for each tank. This was the result of my travel last year when no one was available to feed the fishes. From then on, I had let the auto-feeders to do the feeding job. All I do was to top up the food in the feeder once a week.

A few months back, when I was trying to figure out the variant of the sweet potato plant in my pot, I read that their roots had water cleansing property in ponds. Arm with that information, I cut a long section of the plant and dipped portion of its creeping stem into the water in both tanks. Sure enough, it started to put out roots in the water. The plant had been in the water for about a month now. I did not observe any significant visible change of the water. The water in the molly tank remained greenish. I understood that the plant was not likely to take care of the green algae in the water. However, it was a nice natural decoration to the mini aquariums.

If are interest to adopt some of the molly fish, you can contact me. They are simply reproducing too fast.