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23rd Month – (Cucumber Feeding Frenzy) NO filter, NO CO2, NO Ferts 5 Gallon Nano Tank

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A two-year-old fish tank with no filter, no CO2, and no ferts is somehow still thriving.

Foo the Flowerhorn’s ongoing nano tank experiment hits another milestone in “23rd Month – (Cucumber Feeding Frenzy) NO filter, NO CO2, NO Ferts 5 Gallon Nano Tank,” a video that checks in on a five-gallon Walstad-style setup nearing its two-year anniversary. There’s no mechanical filtration, no injected carbon dioxide, and no bottled fertilizer keeping this tank alive — just plants, substrate, and time. This month’s update splits its attention between a suddenly skittish sparkling gourami named Loomster and a cherry shrimp colony that turns a piece of boiled cucumber into an all-out swarm.

• Loomster, the tank’s resident sparkling (pygmy) gourami, grew unusually shy this month, retreating into plant cover any time the creator approached the glass.
• It took Loomster an entire day to finish off a batch of live water fleas introduced into the tank, hunting them in short bursts rather than one continuous feeding.
• A cucumber slice boiled for roughly ten minutes was dropped to the tank bottom, triggering a feeding frenzy that drew dozens of cherry shrimp out to scavenge.

Loomster Goes Quiet

Sparkling gourami are known for being low-key fish to begin with — they’re small, they breathe atmospheric air at the surface, and they don’t dominate a tank the way a betta or a cichlid might. But even by those standards, Loomster’s behavior this month stood out. The creator notes he “became very shy this month” without an obvious trigger, and the footage backs that up: whenever the camera or the creator got near the glass, Loomster bolted for cover in the plant mass rather than sticking around to feed.

That timidity didn’t stop him from eating. Live water fleas were introduced as his food source for the update, and Loomster picked through them gradually, hunting in short stretches throughout the day rather than clearing the batch in one sitting. By the end of the day, the fleas were gone — proof the fish was still active and feeding normally, just doing it on his own schedule and away from prying eyes.

The Cucumber Feeding Frenzy

The second half of the update belongs to the tank’s cherry shrimp, and it’s the segment that gives the video its name. To feed the shrimp, the creator boiled a cucumber slice for about ten minutes — long enough to soften the vegetable to the point where the dwarf shrimp could tear into it without a fight. Once it hit the substrate, the response was immediate.

Dozens of cherry shrimp swarmed the softened cucumber the moment it touched the tank floor, turning a quiet five-gallon setup into a full-blown scavenging frenzy.

That kind of turnout is really the payoff of the whole no-filter, no-CO2, no-ferts approach. In a tank running purely on a Walstad-style balance of plants and substrate, a healthy, visible shrimp population is the clearest sign the ecosystem is holding steady without any of the usual mechanical crutches.

Twenty-Three Months of a Self-Sustaining Setup

What makes this update notable isn’t the cucumber itself — it’s that the tank is still running the same way it has for nearly two years. No filter to cycle debris, no CO2 tank pumping gas into the water column, no fertilizer dosing schedule to maintain plant growth. The plants and bioload are doing all the work, and 23 months in, that balance is still visibly producing a booming shrimp colony and a fish healthy enough to hunt live food on its own terms.

For anyone following along in the broader nano tank and low-tech planted aquarium space — the same crowd that pores over feeding footage the way other corners of the internet obsess over pet-focused challenge videos — this kind of long-term, unfiltered documentation is the real draw. It’s less about any single dramatic moment and more about watching a closed system hold together month after month, which is its own kind of outdoor-hobbyist patience test.

Loomster’s newfound shyness is the one open question heading into month 24 — whether it’s a one-off or the start of a pattern worth watching. Everything else, from the shrimp count to the plant mass, points to a tank that’s still doing exactly what it’s supposed to do without a single piece of equipment helping it along.