Special attraction and maximum similarity to the natural water body of home aquariums are attached to real snags and stones . So why not decorate your underwater world with a beautiful snag? Moreover, it is not necessary to buy it in the store.
Finding the right driftwood
You can go ashore clean and not littered with industrial waste pond and look for ashore or slightly protoplennye roots and branches of trees. After some time spent in the water, they become ideal contenders for the role of decorating your aquarium.
Despite the great interest in the question of how to prepare an oak snag for an aquarium (many consider the oak to be the most durable and suitable), one should not take snags from this tree, because they contain a lot of tannic substances. The best "suppliers" of snags are alder, maple, willow, beech, ash.
How to prepare a snag for the aquarium with your own hands?
So, being on the nature at the pond, choose the snags most suitable for the size and shape. They should not have bark, and they should be "dead", that is, long broken from the tree.
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Bringing home, you need to wash the driftwood well. If possible, you can do this under a lot of water. So you remove all unwanted dirt, moss growths, etc.
After that it was time to learn how to prepare a snag for the aquarium, so that it drowned and did not float to the surface of the water. The most reliable way is to weld it in a steep saline solution. To do this, put hot water into a large container and pour a pound of salt. It takes a few hours to cook snags.
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Cooking in salt will not only save the snag from buoyancy, but also disinfect it properly. After that, the snag needs to be soaked in fresh water for a day, periodically replacing it.
Some tree species do not need such thorough preparation. For example, there is a way how to prepare a mangrove snag for an aquarium. It is simple enough to fill with hot salt solution and after an hour rinse under running water or simply pour hot water for a day.