Saltwater Biotope Aquarium

My last significant projects were about saltwater aquariums. I always thought: This is too tough for me, very complicated and very expensive!!! But not necessarily. A friend of mine had a short term experiment with saltwater species that caught my interest. He caught them in the wild, took sand, rocks and water from the same place and put altogether in an aquarium.

I tried the same thing with a little 40 liter aquarium and took some 'stuff' from our Black Sea. It's amazing how many creatures had been in the water, plants and sand as larvae and evolved afterwards!!! Later I slowly raised the level of saltiness to normal and added some species from the Mediterranean Sea. During all the time I did just water changes with self prepared saltwater and fed the inhabitants. No problems, no control...

Here are some pictures (Sorry, I had no decent camera then...)