Apologies for the continued lack of photos... I snapped a few this past weekend, but I've been holding off on posting them til I've got some more. I've been waiting on some developments in the plants to take the rest of the photos... the calathea has been sending up a half a dozen huge new leaves, but I'm still waiting for them to finish unfurling, and the new butterwort is flowering but hasn't opened yet. Hopefully in the next day or two.
This being the first time I've attempted something like this, I find I'm learning something new every day. Some observations...
A 20 gallon high is really too small for a paludarium. If you devote enough room to the water feature to really take advantage of it, you give up too much of the land portion. If you devote enough room to the land portion to really take advantage of it, you short change the water portion. Much as I love small tanks I have to admit something with a footprint more like 36"x18" would be far, far more suited to this sort of display. Not that I'm going to take this one down, I'm enjoying it too much, but something I'll definitely take into account if I do one of these again.
Also if I did another of these I'd steal a page from coprolite's book and have an acrylic cover plate made up with ventilation fans mounted into it. I'm trying to rig something up with a muffin fan and those magclip magnets, but it would have been a lot more straightforward doing it his way. The humid-aire and air pump I mentioned in the above posts is making a difference, but I suspect more circulation would be helpful. Some of the ferns especially would appreciate better airflow, I'm sure.
I'd also skip the aquasoil, probably in favor of peat bricks. The aquasoil works, but it'd be easier to build land formations to shape by molding/cutting the peat bricks. Especially for adding more of a vertical component to the tank's layout.
The riccia and the HC are holding on, but not doing much else besides that. Really, I think they just aren't wet enough. As damp as the top layers of the aquasoil are, it just doesn't seem to be enough. I think using aquatic plants as ground cover terrestrially really would require automated misting several times a day at minimum. I'm going to phase them both out of the tank and replace them, but I haven't quite decided with what yet. Terrestrial moss is one possibility, utricularia is another. Might be a good role for utricularia graminifolia, come to think of it.
The cryptocorynes are doing phenomenal. These should be considered the poster boy for aquatic plants in a marginal tank.
