I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about the aquarium... of the Future! Well maybe not that dramatic, but it's been something I've been tossing around for awhile. Currently I have a little 10 gallon planted aquarium that I set up last September.

The current aquarium is nice, but it is just too small. I can't put very many fish in there, or any big fish, and even some plants are too big to grow in there.

So I was looking around on the web for ideas for an upgrade to something bigger when I came across the concept of a paludarium. A paludarium is a combination aquarium/terrarium with live plants in both environments. I found some excellent examples. This one is probably the most impressive, though it has the least written about it. Other good examples with better writeups are here and here.

The thing that really appeals to me about a paludarium is that I can grow some relatively exotic plants (both on the land portion and in the water), have everything my current aquarium has, and keep some interesting small land pets, like anoles or salamanders or frogs or something. With luck, I could find something that will spend time both on the land and swimming around in the water portion of the tank.

The first link, above, really has it set up right. Below the paludarium, inside the cabinet it rests on, is a small 15 gallon sump tank that receives all the water from an overflow pipe hidden in the main pond. The water in the sump is continuously filtered by a great external canister filter and heated by a submerged heating element. Then, a pump takes the water from the sump and sends it back up to the paludarium where it enters the pond either through one of the two waterfalls or through a perforated feed pipe under the gravel. There is also a valve he can turn to divert some of the feed water into a spray tube that mimicks rain for the land plants.

The great part about that setup is that all of the maintenance equipment is in a separate tank that is out of sight. You don't have to look at a big filter lift tube or heater in your display case, like I do now with my aquarium.

I want to set something like that up. I could even use my current tank as the sump. In fact, everything you need to set that up is relatively cheap except for the big tank itself. For some reason aquariums (and their canopies and cabinets) are crazy expensive. It's not like they're all that complicated. But if I wanted to get a 75 gallon acrylic tank (I'd need to drill a couple holes in the bottom under the dry side) I'd be looking at the better side of $1000 just for the tank, canopy, and cabinet.

I'm looking into the options for building my own tank out of lexan or something. More on this later.