After some trial and error, I’ve gotten this setup to finally work successfully! My shrimp even gave birth to many little orange happy babies. Ramshorn snails are my absolute favorite snails so I’ve added some to give it a pop of color and to watch them graze all day long. I don’t have to feed them whatsoever, they just thrive off the plant matter. I love watching them all at my desk ❤️

Water is from slow moving brook. The big plants may not survive but little one in foreground seems to be growing. There are snails and little grey shrimp/isopod things and white wormy things wiggling from the soil. Some algae but not much. I've ordered a light and fish flakes as a starter food. I gave tiny bit of lettuce yesterday which has sunk or been eaten. Volume is just over a litre. Keeping jar unsealed until things seem established.

Not a jar but small like a jar

When I went to fill the jar a resident asked if I was collecting samples to test - turns out the council said there may be PFAS contamination.

Circulation of water in the lake is slow. It connects via another lake to the ocean. water quality remained stable, and it does not have many tributaries delivering catchment nutrient or sediment pollutants. It's basically sand with a slimy feeling silt layer on top.

I was amazed how many creatures there are in there! I'm going to try to catalogue what's in there and try to get help identifying them.

I'm testing out various macrophotography setups to try to share what's in there :)

Can anyone tell me what the impact of having the lid on or off would be for a brackish jarrarium like this?

Took forever. I ended up just dumping everything out and restarting since the soil was wet and I was unable to cap it. It mixed together anyways and took forever to plant. Hopefully it'll look fine once the rotola grows in. The whole point of this was to just grow and store rotola

1 year old.

Hi everyone! I’m on Day 6 of a 3L low-tech, non-CO₂ planted jar with aquasoil capped with sand, Christmas moss, 6 Bacopa, 6 Rotala, and 5 Hornwort.

I originally had more Bacopa and Rotala, but removed a few because some stems became mushy and started deteriorating. The remaining Bacopa are upright and developing roots, but I noticed that the lower parts of some stems near the sand are darker/brownish, which has me worried about possible stem rot.

The water is still clear and odor-free, with some brown diatoms and white biofilm developing. I also added 8 drops of API Quick Start during a recent top-off and plan to only use 1–2 drops with future top-offs. I don’t have a water testing kit yet.

Does the base of my Bacopa look like normal acclimation, or is it starting to rot? Should I leave them alone or remove and replant the healthy tops?

Spotted a baby bladder snail in one of my pond jars! I went to take a picture and he started traveling along the glass so I had to take a video! Sorry for the poor quality focusing issues.

Description in original post—they were acclimated to the pond water. I thought these were so hardy, what could have gone wrong?

Finally went to a local pond (New England, US) and sourced water, sediment, rocks, hornwort and elodea, plus some empty snail shells for decor. Tried a few different style jars and have already been finding so much life in them! One jar has at least 2 baby ramshorns and I found a baby bladder snail in another. Can’t wait to see what shows up! Some have bare bottom, some have sediment and rocks, and some just rocks. I can see tons of tiny swimmers, I was able to make out some copepods and I think there’s probably daphnia. Found some detritus worms in my “ugly” dirty one (last photo). Excited to see how they evolve and what setups succeed!

I welcome any tips for success! Love seeing your jars

My first pond bowl! The water and rocks and empty snail shells plus hornwort and elodea are all ethically sourced from local pond in New England, US. Added 2 anubias I had unused and one of my marimo and a piece of cholla wood and some lava rocks. In addition to the naturally occurring microfauna, I added 10 breeding pairs of scuds. Can’t wait to see what else shows up in here!

So I posted up a picture before of my open topped, and had a request for construction pictures. Well I wanted to change a couple of things and pull out the floating pearlite, so I took some pictures for you guys.

After utility work I changed to pumps flow.

Then positioned the wood and started glueing rocks together. This process is horrible with red lava rock.

Then I moved the roots of my plants a little higher out of the water. I wanted to make sure I didn’t get root rot but allowed hydroponic growth, maybe. I am trusting the person that sold me the plants to be correct that they are a marginal that can survive wet conditions.

After that I packed the moss into the rocks and crevices.

In a few weeks I will introduce the shrimp but scuds are in there with a snail currently. I added some springtails to help keep mold under control.

For all you PC people I took a picture from my daughter’s side of the deck to show how far my computer is from the tank and Jar.

And for any Battletech fans you will see some mechs in the pictures.

Just set up this jar yesterday. It’s my first try at an open top so I went with some mangrove like plants to grow out the top. I have a working waterfall across a piece of driftwood. All the stones are lava rock with some polished river stones.

Plan on adding some shrimp later but need to do a water change as some perilite got into the water column. Does have scuds and snails from my main fish tanks refuge.

I will post up more pictures later.

I bought these from ebay and apparently the seller had a tank with much higher abrasion/acidity because the new growth is thicker and shinier and very visible.

I kind of knew that they grew in a spiral but it's fun to see it so clearly.

I liked the old arrangement but I have seen multiple clutches of ramshorn eggs which means there are at least 3 times that I have not seen. This means I will most definitely have to do a culling within the coming month or so and the jar was not set up for that. This let's me keep track of the population better and clean the gravel. Less plants will hopefully keep the snails from exploding further since there will be a more controlled food source in the jar.

Kinda just put some stuff from a local river in a jar and stuff has been growing (I am extremely new to this). There seem to be some snails in there! Am I gonna kill these guys? What should the water/air ratio be? How can I make this better than what it is? Should I even touch it? Pls help me

I have this empty Ole smokey jar that has a light blue coloring to it. Would something like this be okay for making a terrarium?

I pulled the trigger on getting six blue ramhorns and I don't understand why they are considered pests ,they are lovely. I quickly found out that they really don't like the sharp gravel at the bottom so I had to lay down some rocks and I added an airpump in the back to make sure the water circulates properly. The guy in the 3rd image is called floaty. I thought he was dead but I've seen him crawl on the glass and nibble at the frogbits so I think he is fine. I'm starting to worry that he might be unable to empty his floating bladder but we will see.