Article Time--The Many Uses of the 1 Gallon Aquarium
It should not come as a surprise to anyone reading here that anything much under 4 gallons, much less a measly ONE, is not suitable to be any home to a fish of any species. Even bettas, long known and long-abused as the "fish that lives in puddles" (technically yes if multiple-meter long and wide irrigation areas flooded by monsoons are just puddles) generally require 4 gallons at the absolute minimum, and 5 gallons when considering other enrichment and health needs. Occasionally a few surprise fry might live in a 2.5 or a 3 gallon vase or jug until identification and they become too large for the tiny space to be comfortable, but beyond that ethical and educated fish-keepers know better than to be tempted by anything smaller unless for keeping some shrimp, or some single snails.
But, even for the fish keeper, a one gallon "fish" bowl is not entirely a waste of glass. Smaller vases often misused as betta "tanks" are similarly so if they are at least a gallon in volume. Even if you are once one of those who didn't know the nitrogen cycle from your own ass, old hardware you may still have can be put to better use. I know better than ever as I have done so, with the very item of a 1 gallon drum glass fish bowl.
For those who are really ONLY interested in fish, you may ask: Why keep a container so unwieldy and so awful in implication? You can't easily scoop excess plants with it or water with it. It doesn't hold enough to act as a water change bucket in the slightest. Why should we keep a small glass bowl marketed towards cruel keeping?
Well, if you already have it, I can present one very critical use that is of great use to anyone keeping fish:
Brine Shrimp Hatchery.
Unhatched Artemia cysts (or dormant brine shrimp eggs) can be bought by the oz from many places (of varying quality, but most good aquarium suppliers have excellent 90% hatch rates for theirs). It does not actually take much water to trigger a batch to pop out into newly-born brine shrimp--just about a half gallon at minimum, plus a significant enough dose of aquarium salts to bring the water up to Brackish quality. The last element is aeration, easily done with a nano air pump and air stone, and suddenly a useless or cruel glass doo-dah becomes a more than sufficient way to procure a weekly couple hundred tiny hatched brine shrimp as natural food for a huge range of your fish. This is especially useful for those who breed fish--as many species of fish have fry so incredibly small that only a newly-hatched brine shrimp addition is a reliable way to provide protein-dense feed small enough for them to eat. It is also wonderful for the bigger fish breeders--goldfish fry are notoriously fast-growers and equally known for flourishing on newly-hatched brine shrimp. Even if you don't breed fish, if you keep any of the hundreds of kinds of popular micropredator species in the trade--essentially all tetras, barbs, danios, and so many more--then a weekly feeding of a few dozen of these little crustacea will dramatically improve their health and make them more active. And you can make sure to only hatch about as many brine shrimp as you will need for the week in your small 1 gallon hatchery.
This purpose can also perform double-duty for those who would prefer to keep a live culture of Daphnia (aka fairy shrimp), but this requires a bit more upkeep, aeration and potentially space than can be given in a 1 gallon if a significant amount of feeder Daphnia are to be had on a week by week basis. Which is why, ideally, the sad little 1 gallon fish bowl is best reused as a brine shrimp factory in my opinion.
But not everyone who wants aquaria to be a part of their lives is only in it to have a pet fish. Or not exclusively fish. I count myself among the number of aquarium keepers who was first lured by the interest in non-fish animals--specifically by my explorations turning rocks over to look at various creatures in the local creek. Among my favorites to find were animals like crayfish, waterpennies, stonefly larva, and the occasional squiggly cranefly maggot being intimidating but pokey and harmless. I definitely went through a period of finding a strange caterpillar and keeping it in an aerated jar, putting a bunch of different fresh leaves in to see what it would eat, and then brutalizing the nearest tree's lowest limbs once I knew the preferred food to raise it with. Childish behaviors--supervised or not--aside, a lot of us evolved to have an appreciation for those of us Earthlings without a spine to speak of! We are the Shrimpkeepers, those who prescribe Nerite snails over chemicals for algae, and those who tell our less experienced friend to not panic at the sight of a dozen little seed shrimp zooming around in their tank. We are all about how this planet was apparently made ideal for the bugs--not us big hairless homonids who need silly things like internal lungs and thousands of years to become able to eat a new toxic plant!
And those of us familiar with the spineless side of Aquarium Care know of another good use of the 1 gallon:
Microaquarium/Biotope.
Specifically, we are talking about a very small one. The likes of which an invertebrate enthusiast like me would ponder over the best few animals to introduce into for weeks longer than it would take to produce the finished aquascape. Usually, a nano-sized air pump and an air stone is a given, and the answer is a Neocaridina variety--and then the only question is "how many", which is a reason I dearly wish websites like Aqadvisor.com were calibrated to smaller volumes than 2.5 gallons. Generally a biotope is carefully measured based on how much waste any animals might make versus how much the total plant mass could offset--with SEALED biotopes being the far more strict and dangerous kind which need much more expertise to set up correctly. Assuming an open biotope, most of the time a planted 1 gallon should be appropriate for 2 Neocaridina, if not up to 5 if very generously planted and cared for. Of course, knowledge of proper shrimp care is assumed, but similar biotopes for more unusual and hardier invertebrates are also possible. Provided the heat of the place of the 1 gallon setup matches the needs of the species, singular nerite snails can also be pets occupying a planted biotope. Provided the gallon's contents were set up weeks ahead, and never algae cleaned, a Nerite may not need to have any supplementary feeding for over a week into its introduction to the gallon. Calcium-rich snail/shrimp-specific pellets are idea in this case as any excess can be removed. Another lower-effort option is pond slaters, though this is not low-research. These aquatic isopods are often treated as pests when they appear in tanks as hitchhikers, and are fairly hard to find as an addition on purpose. Not to be confused with Scuds/Amphipods, which may consume your mosses unlike Pond Slaters. The main diet of most species known as "pond slaters" is in decay--decaying plants and especially decaying animals. Any old leaves or growths of the biotope's plants can be supplemented easily with small and bi-weekly feedings of a variety of foods intended for other aquatic invertebrates or even community feeds. A single Crab Cuisine or a large community-formula flake or two can feed the Slaters for days! In the meantime, they'll nibble rotting vegetation and pick off the odd detritus worm which turns up.
The value of these tiny little Microaquariums varies. For the shrimp breeder, these can be cost-effective ways of isolating small groups of Neocaridina just until breeding occurs and traits can be seen. For most others, these are just pet projects--literally, to have a few odd invertebrate pets all to their own and in the most manageable spaces possible. It can often crop up as one of the only ways for people living in restrictive dorm spaces or apartments to have any animals at all, even if they do not restrict fish they may end up limiting volumes of tanks to a point that even betta fish are impossible to keep humanely. It's as valuable as having a full-size tank to care for and know the fish from to those people.
There is even one more value to these 1 gallon biotopes--even to those who don't care for invertebrates:
The Plant Grow-out.
A one gallon old drum fish bowl. It's the perfect limitation for an aquascaper, but also the perfect vessel to do something a bit simpler. If you perhaps need more medium-sized pebbles which are seeded with a piece of Java Moss each, it can be much easier in the long run to add a selection of such pebbles to the 1 gallon, then weave in a golf ball sized portion of Java Moss, dose with nutrients, then wait. Tend it every week, see how the moss puffs out under the provided light, and when the whole bowl is a magical puff of green moss, reach in and pull the pebbles apart to see how well the moss colonized each. Mosses are the quick example. For the long-term, home tank keeper it can sometimes be the case that you get a random spare Cryptocorye pup disturbed by gravel-vaccing. A 1 gallon, filled with the home tank's water, can become the starting point of that pup. If successful, it can become five or six cryptocoryne plants in not too many months. And that is, in my opinion, a fantastic problem to have. And it can be a lucrative problem--people within 50 miles do in fact like to buy healthy young popular plants, especially if shipping from anywhere else they know is prohibitively expensive for them!
Plant grow-outs also don't have to be of very simply-kept plants--which, if given the appropriate time and space, will reproduce or enlarge as desired. The grow-out is actually most useful for epiphytic plants which rely entirely on water-borne nutrients and attach easily to surfaces like wood and stone. Bucephalandra species and their farmed cultivars typically arrive small to a buyer--often with only six or seven leaves and an inch or so of healthy rhizome. The small, controlled spaces of 1 gallon bowls offer a way to quarantine the plants as well as to pamper the living daylights out of them. These can temporarily become invert biotopes when delicate algae control is needed--usually needing nerite snail or amano shrimp/shrimps as an assist--but with that and time, the bucephalandra can be coaxed into growing to a size in which it can be split, the new growth moved to a larger tank and branching parts of the old growth to grow out once more after a new fertilizing. Smaller Anubias can also be grown out this way, as well as several other aquatic ferns. Java Ferns are easy to multiply with these small biotopes but the process is messier due to the leaf-tip budding these guys prefer to do. African Water Ferns are much like Buces in both growth period and splitting, though they are more likely to have their roots grip unrelentingly onto substrate even past where you'd prefer to have split them.
Then there is the Final Use. The best use, honestly, for those uninterested in growing out plants, aquascaping, raising invertebrates or raising fresh live feed for sensitive fish:
Big Expensive Vase
Sure does hold a lotta water, got a narrower opening. You may care for plants but maybe not the work that goes into tending aquarium plants. In that case, some daisies, carnations, and roses will do, and since you aren't needing to worry about animals in there you can add about a quarter teaspoon of bleach to reduce bacterial infection in the flower stems and also increase their freshness. You may even get a rose stem to root every few times. All the best to you. May your flowers be enjoyable and your crops be tasty!
This step/use is especially easy if the intended "fish tank" was in fact sold as a vase. If you have the spoons, it could perhaps be useful to point the one wanting to use it for fish to this article, and to also point out yourself that no, this is a vase for a reason. It's a step up from dipshits trying to use liquor bottles, but yes, this article will be happy to inform them of what 1 gallon can actually do when it comes to keeping living things!
