I can't thank you enough for everyone's kind words! I'm pretty self conscious about showing people my tanks, but Zak and the rest of the community have helped me begin to feel proud of them. I loved seeing everyone else's submissions, even the ones that didn't quiiiite understand the assignment. Love you all!

who ever owns that cichlid tank should be proud. its an easy 9.5-10 compared to other cichlid tanks. really impressed you got the plants to grow that well.

THAT CICHLID TANK AT 16 MINUTES SHOULD GET A 9!!! If not higher, because for 1, he's managed to keep healthy live plants in a cichlid tank, and for 2, Cichlid tanks are suppose to be overstocked to keep aggression low. That tank would score lower in my mind if he had less fish due to aggression.

Hi ANVJ, at 16:27 the tank has to be overcrowded so as to reduce agression. When having cichlids in the tank it has to be over 100% stocked. (not my tank)

African cichlids are very aggressive, overstocking along with hides is the best way to prevent it. That African cichlid tank shouldn't have lost points, in fact with the plants its 9/10 in my eyes since Africans are hard to keep with plants.

I had the betta fish aquarium at 11:03. Made my day that it got reviewed!

16:05 African Malawi Cichlids, are Cichlid that do best over stock (need very good filtration), they are very aggressive especially Mbuna Cichlids, the more their are the better they do, so it harder for one fish to be targeted, it's like controlled chaos.

Love the cichlid tank. It's a bit overstocked, but that's for aggression purposes. As long as you have good filtration and do water changes, it should be fine. So hard to find a good planted cichlid tank! I love this!

12:30 it’s super cool to see my tank in this video! I will note that fish that is in there ate my living plants but I’ll be sure to get some drift wood and more muted sand next time I change stuff around!

That straw at 19:00 is probably there to replicate the natural enviroment!

I agree with zak. Greyscale's fish tank has to be the best fish i've seen in my life, if i were the fish living in that tank, i'd be living the best life.

Please do this more often! Maybe like every 3 months or something? This was much more interesting than the shitty aquariums that are all doing the same thing wrong...

The cichlid tank is supposed to be stocked high because they will fight in smaller numbers

Please make a episode 2. I have a really good tank to show you.

Thank you so much for your kind words on my tank (3:44)! Since taking those photos the tannins are nearly all gone

Haven't had fish since I was a kid, and wanna get some when I can so I've literally just been binging AVNJ's aquarium videos to see what to and what not to do.

Probably the most positive community on twitch and KZfaq. Chat had zero unwarranted negative comments, even congratulating Grey. That’s awesome

AVNJ you like are the only thing that just allows me to laugh while being super entertained

"But i guess from a human Perspective its cool" zak not a human confirmed... Maybe he is a fish himself??

I love all the tanks with the little tetras and guppies. They're reasonable for upkeep and also really pretty.

If you are keeping African cichlids, you have to over stock the tank...there is just no other option, I am amazed that he is able to keep live plants, because generally plants don't survive in African cichlid tanks due to low PH.... I don't know, it looks really beautiful.

Awe man I wish I had submitted my biology teacher's overpopulated tank. There was a structure in it that I believe was once a replica of SpongeBob's house but nobody knows anymore because it's overgrown in some weird fungus lol. Feel bad for the hundreds of fish in that tank

Fish👏 tank👏review👏

The og macen at 7:33 should have won. Getting plants to carpet like that can be extremely difficult without co2 and the Java ferns look incredible considering how picky they can be. If you can barely see your hard scape you know you’ve done an incredible job.

greyscales tank was truly impressive

This is such a great idea! It makes me wish I had an aquarium, but then again I have no time to take care of fish so I'm going to stay away from them for their own sake.

If you don't overstock that Malawi cichlid tank they will tear each other apart. Winnie knew what they were doing.

I would also give the cichlid tank a 9.5 because it’s beautiful tank and you also have to overstock the tank to keep aggression down but overall I love it

I was hoping to see more shrimp. When I had my tank I loved my amano shrimp. I had two and just watching them pick away and eat at the substrate was fun. My brother loved keeping plecos. We had two common plecos and a third from a friend at some point. My dad always made sure to keep the plants well and gave the fish great places to hide. The attached to plants to three small pieces of drift wood and it really filled the tank.

I absolutely NEED a channel like this but for paleonthology. Fuck it I need a whole collection of specific biology channels

Hi everyone. I got a question for any fish expert. I just got a 10 gallon freshwater tank, and I would like as many of the following as possible: Golden shrimp, kuhli loach, hillstream loach, Dwarf puffer fish, cherry shrimp. I understand I wouldn't be able to get all of them but what is the best combination of at least some of those for a happy tank. I'm planning on getting some live plants and lava rock if that effects anything.

When I was little my parents had a huge salt water tank that had small sharks, cleaner fish, and a few larger fish. It was like having an aquarium in our house. The reason that it is no longer around is simply that they all died to a disease that a new fish had when it was introduced. Also it was right before the 2008 recession so my parents then no longer had the money to restock it. Miss it

I love how fun and educational this is

I love these videos and hope to see this and more series to continue as long as possible and hope y'all are having a great summer

I've been aquascaping and running my planted tanks for years and I love how he reacts to every plant

Hey, I really like this type of content you should do this more often! Love your vids

omg please do more of these videos this was so cool and insightful tbh. i wanna submit pics of my family's tank because i don't know much about fish and i'm genuinely curious if its a good tank or not

2:24 “but I guess from a human’s perspective it’s cool” … something you want to tell us, Zak?

I like how you not only make funny videos but also are very educational

Not gonna lie, I was half expecting reuploads from s****y aquariums but most weren't that bad

I would love to see the full vod of this stream it seems like such a interesting thing to watch unedited

How do you feel about Robofish? It looks quite real, and it swims around like a fish that has too much meth (thus, any). It's a toy robotic fish, imagine if we can get the bad aquarium folks to use these! The amount of fish saved!

I think the palidarium at the end was the best, there is so much work that goes into those

You should do a part two, it was a really good idea

I wish I had photos of our aquarium as a kid. It was quite large, probably like 50 gallons. It contained a ton of local wildlife (southern Ontario). We stocked a lot of minnows, and then some crayfish, a couple plecos, and a tadpole that never morphed (probably due to bad terraforming). We planted some local flora and placed a ton of cool looking rocks. One of the crayfish actually burrowed under a rock adjacent to the glass wall, so you could see inside his home. It was awesome to look at as a kid, even if we sometimes accidentally mistreated the animals... i.e. that tadpole. It did live for several years though.

This made me extremely happy with my tank

I would be intrigued to hear your thoughts on the show Tanked - they do some crazy gorgeous shit in the custom tanks they build and I wonder with some of them how well they’d actually work out long term considering the plants, fish species and others they put in all together. Also just aesthetically since a lot of natural things go in there but in ways designed to be flashy and sometimes kinda artificial-looking.

Skinks are my favorite types of fish

This new one boutta be a banger 🔥

The first two entries captures perfectly the vibe of a contest that took place on Discord.

I don't know why but "there's a whole ass plecco there" had me laughing for a minute.

I feel like "4/10, needs more drift wood" has some good meme potential.

0:58 what a pretty fish

If you ever do another one of these I’d love to send my tank, it’s not perfect I’m sure but I love my fish and try to keep them happy. My tank is very dense in terms of objects and plants with very few fake plants even though it’s pretty big, but it’s good because it’s full of hiding places and my fish live hiding and playing around the stuff. It’s also got a filter pump thing and a heater and an air brick with a pump to keep it oxygenated.

My ten gallon half circle tank had a big statement driftwood with so many tunnels, with one Betta fish and a few cherry shrimp, fully natural plants, covered in duckweed, dark sand, I miss that tank and that betta

I’m not a super big fish guy, and even though I love your videos, and they’ve made me love fish more, they’ve also made me realize that I wouldn’t really want an aquarium. I guess I’m just not a big fan of aquatic environments when they’re in a small space like a fish tank. I think I just appreciate them more when they’re a part of a larger ecosystem I guess? I don’t know how to explain it

I remember seeing this in the your ideas suck video and was disappointed thinking that this sort of video wouldn't be made. Glad to see I misinterpreted it!

That lizard was trying his best you can't blame him for being hydrodynamically challenged... 10/10 best fish

Thank you very much Mr. AVNJ very cool

That Greyscale tank is a work of art!!!

7:43 * looks over at my tank with a squidward house *

Gotta love the Johnny darters, such an underrated fish!

I couldn’t remember your channel name while searching… so I tried just searching for Fish and it was the 3rd choice lol

16:58 the heater isn’t even all the way in the water🤯😂

3:02 When the picture is so blurry it could be evidence that the Megalodon still exists

Thank You for the upload, Mr. Fish

19:04 java moss just takes over everything when it establishes, its hard to mantaim when it over grows, though malayan shrims love them

I remember I had a lot of guppy in a large tank before. They died a few years back when there was suddenly a 20C drop they lived for like over 6 years before dying rip

I really love the tank with a single betta, it just seems like my kind of tank

Hope you do another one of these so I can send my aquarium

Just waiting for the glorious collab between avnj and fish for thought

god i wish my parents and grandparents still kept their tanks. they loved saltwater fish and my parents had a few clownfish and blue tangs and anemones as well as a brittle star somewhere in the rocks and my grandpa had a lionfish and a second saltwater tank dedicated to shellfish, anemones, coral and sea stars (it was a hugeass tank with a lotta basically non fish sea creatures) they ended up giving the fish and tanks away bc of work and not being able to maintain the tanks daily but i remember watching the lionfish as a kid when i visited my grandparents and them warning me not to get too close or he would jump out the tank and sting me to death.

16:00 - Those Mbuna are not really overstocked, African keepers do it deliberately to mitigate bullying and fights. Plenty of hiding places but no real territorial establishment. And it means one fish is unlikely to be the target of overt aggression and harassment. The aggression is spread and usually limited to fin flares and body shakes, not outright fighting. Provided the filtration set up is enough to provide for the bioload, then there is good reasons to heavily stock African Rift Tanks. For this reason, trickle sumps are usually used that double the water volume. As long as these filters are set up properly, they are extremely efficient and effective at the conversion of ammonia through nitrite to nitrate, and provided there are regular water changes or a plenum setup to get rid of the nitrate build up, you can run a system like this happily for years. With fish breeding etc.

When he pointed out the fake flowering underwater plant, it made me think of the underwater flowering plants from the San Marcos River

Once went to someone's house and they had this HUGE tank, it wasn't super tall but man was it long..It was very cool me as a kid; not as good as some of these really good ones but impressive :)

Now I wanna show you my tank 🙈 3ft tropical with 3 kuhli loaches, 2 sidthimunkies, 4? bristlenose, and 5 guppies. two big bits of driftwood that the loaches live in covered in java fern and moss and a large arched rock with just a tonne of java fern scattered through the tank. Been running for close on 10 years now, I've moved twice and just sealed up afew buckets of water for the moves. That plus the external canister filter means I have an amazing microbiome in there. When im stressed and/or can't sleep I just sit for a bit and watch it to chill out.

If you know any herpetologists bring them on for a round of this with lizards and snakes because that would be fun.

I follow fish for thought and found this awesome

The first one was my entire school career

That african cichlid tank was crazy though

this is the best Chanel ever

I loved that cichlid tank. They need to be overstocked to avoid aggression

That paludarium at the end would be great for a newt species.

If you’re just starting with plants in a tank and they are still small mix in some silk plants. They can host beneficial bacteria better than plastic and they in general look nicer

Love that! Are you going to do another round of tank ratings?

Wow some of those aquariums were so amazing. I just happened to come across this video and channel while browsing around. I used to have two aquariums. One around 5 gallons for a beta and a 30 gallon for goldfish. My goldfish tank was my first one. I tried setting up a really nice one with plants, rocks and really nice substrate. My plants were uprooted everyday by my fish, I eventually just got rid of the plants. My goldfish would rearrange anything they could. They had stones that I set up in shelves for hiding places. It worked really well but I used stones from my grandparents quarry and I had no idea what kind of stones they were. My fish ended up being very hardy with all the mistakes I made. They thrived I had them for a very long time. Sadly they were too friendly with people. One of my nephews even after I asked him to please never do that again would catch my poor goldfish and carry them around. The parents didn't care and the kid he just thought it was pretty funny. Poor fish though never learned to just avoid him. I wouldn't leave him alone with my fish but I wasn't always there when that kid was. Saddest day for me was coming home and finding one of my fish freshly dead. I don't know how he died honestly but I guess he stuffed the gravel in his mouth and couldn't dislodge it and eventually just died that way. I know it wasn't long as his eyes were still clear, he was still shiny black. Man I miss my fish... They had their own personalities and I grew to adore them. I don't know if I would ever raise goldfish again though. Maybe I'll set up a small aquarium for a beta fish again.

I love how he ignores the fact all these tanks have disgustingly low water levels

Hi, I just wanted to say. I started watching your videos about a year ago and you really got me way more interested in fish and marine life in general, also the biology as well. I got a tank about 4 months ago and would love for you to see and comment on it. Thanks

I've since moved my fish into a larger tank downstairs, so if there's a second competition like this I'd love to show it

“i don’t know much about aquarium fish” **is a fish biologist**

Would love a part 2. I have 5 aquariums I can submit too.

Ahh, my dad had a tank built in a wall, but sadly we moved away when he died. It was beautiful, I wish I had any photos of it.

I'm not on discord, so I didn't submit my tank, but I keep my Veiltail Betta in a 10 gallon tank along with an Inca Snail. I've got a fake plant that I'm using to hold abunch of java moss in place, along with an anubius plant growing in the middle of the tank that the snail likes to nibble on. I've also got a betta hammock leaf and I'm using a small dish to baffle the filter so the water current isn't as harsh. The substrate is just aquarium gravel that I'm pretty sure was meant for Glofish tanks, mainly black with scattered neon pebbles. My betta's name is Arthur, because he's a beautiful shade of red with a few iridescent details, and my snail is named Merlin. Both of them love to dig around in the moss and Arthur is very demanding about getting his food right when he wants it. Merlin doesn't seem to care when he gets his algae wafers, granted he eats what grows in the tank as well.

17:57 those are definitely mollies. look at those pitch black eyes and only mollies and guppies have those traits. Platties and sword tail has white "iris" like structure in their eyes.

Best tank was the first one

I dont have a fish tank or know anything about fish tanks... but this was satisfying to watch 😂

I think the last tank with the land feature shouldve won, it looks really good

We now know that Zak is in love with drift wood

Great video

When my giant piece of driftwood gets fully waterlogged, then put in my aquarium, i will be sure to send in mine ^^