Hello Helene and Peter,
Peter, you are very welcome to use my images to illustrate the ‘sentang’ page, I will try to get some still images of flaring and courtship, showing the mature male colouration.
Helene, I really hope that the paros manage to breed in here. I am not taking great care of my water paramaters – I know my tap water is fairly soft and probably acidic from humics in the tank, but have never measured pH or hardness. If there are no successful spawns I will think about switching to RO water. I live in a city so am not too keen on using rain water.
With regard to your other comments, there is almost no algae in this tank, except a small amount of green spot algae (noticeable in the video) on the glass. The whole system is very ‘lean’ in nutrients, and the emergent plants seem to do a good job of keeping the levels stable, hence no algae. The only time algae was a problem was in the first month, while the soil was releasing ammonia and the plants were adapting to hydoculture conditions.
I do not bother removing dead leaves or other dirt from the bottom of the tank, as seems to provide a good home for many of the small invertebrates and the breakdown will produce CO2 for the plants. So far water quality does not seem to be an issue.
I am lucky with the video making because I recently rearranged the tank a little and introduced some floating plants around the front edges. The male paros, which were very shy to begin with, are now happy to be out in the open and have established new territories right where I can see them easily (before this I mainly just saw the females). My new camera seems to be very good for video, and has the useful feature that you can lower the framerate below the normal 25 or 50 frames per second, to let in more light; I shot this footage mainly at 10fps, which makes it a little jerky with fast moving subjects, but fine for capturing courtship etc.