Spent some time over the Xmas holidays creating a new Paludarium home for our mudskipper “colony” out of some old polystyrene packaging and a bag of cement…

Raw Materials

• Snoop around in your neighbours garbage for bits of polystyrene packaging (a couple of days after xmas or payday is a really good time for this!). You could buy sheets of it too if you want to waste money!
• Concrete / Quickcrete
• Playpen sand
• Coarse Salt
• Concrete stain pigments (Red, brown, yellow, white & black)

Construction Details

It’s a pretty straight forward process that goes something like this:

	Start with a concept sketch and map out the placement of filter and heater.
	Stick bits of polystyrene together to form the basic shape of your design using marine/aquarium safe silicone. Remember that you’ll be adding a layer of concrete at least 5mm thick so allow for this on the sides and all the parts that fit together.
	Use a candle, soldering iron or hot air gun to burn the square edges off the polystyrene and make it look rock shaped.
	Mix some concrete - We used 1 part lafarge quickcrete 37.5 to 1 part playpen sand and 1 teaspoon coarse salt Paint concrete on to polystyrene with paintbrush. It may take several attempts to get it to stick but keep trying. Wait 12 hours and repeat the process until you have 4 or 5 layers. Use a mist spray bottle with a bit of salt water to lightly coat the dry layer cement in between coats.
	Wait 12 hours after the final coat then mix up some pigment colours (eg: for light reddish brown use 1 spoon red oxide, 3 spoons yellow, 1/2 spoon white and 1 spoon neat cement). Paint the colours onto the touch dry layer of cement using a paint brush or sponge. Experiment with darker and lighter shades to make it look more “rocky”.
	Silicone the completed contraption into your tank - use lots of marine silicone as polystyrene floats regardless of the the weight of the concrete around it (If you need to remove some of the polystyrene try drilling a small hole and squirting a bit of pure acetone into it - flush well with water afterwards). Now the hard part - wait at least 7 days for the concrete to cure in air before submersing it in 50:1 water and vinegar solution for a further 7 days (removes a bit of the alkalinity from the concrete).
	Check water parameters every day and up to 100% water change every 2nd day for about 2 weeks. Once stable, add plants, some pond snails and a couple of “crash test pilots” (feeders or whatever) if they survive the next couple of weeks you should be A for away…

Lighting Hood

You may discover that a standard plastic hood, apart from looking really crap, doesn’t focus the light correctly and the globes are quite visible. We decided to make our own hood from plywood, fitted with 2×14W compact florescent globes. Lots of wood filler required if you can’t cut straight! lol

Results

Results may vary! This worked for us (so far) but it may be a case of beginners luck! The 3 skippers have now been in the tank for 2 months and seem really healthy and happy. We lost a couple of test-pilot mollies but the skippers ate them so that don’t count!

Added bonus - 3 different colours of algae growth on the waterfall!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 3:11 pm and is filed under DIY Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.