Aquarium? Terrarium? Paludarium? Vivarium? Hmm...
A little over a year ago, I decided to set up a tank that had both water and land, plants and fish. It is done now and I would like to share what I learned in doing this. Happy to answer questions and I hope this is helpful to some of you. The picture above was taken just after I completed it.
The Tank
First, I decided on a location in my house to place the tank. That led me to the size of the tank. I went with a 90 gallon standard size. It is 48 inches wide, 18 inches front to back and 25 inches tall. I could not have fit a much wider tank in the space I am using. However, I could have gone with a tank that was larger front to back -- a 120 gallon standard is the same width and height but 24 inches deep, not 18. Had I planned to buy or build my stand, I would have gone with that. But I wanted to use a nice finished piece of furniture to put it on so I stayed with the 18 inch depth. The extra 12 inches of depth would have meant both the land and water sections would have been 12 inches deep, not 9 and that extra space would have been nice. It would also have made the lighting fit better -- more on that later. Below is the tank on its stand before I started working on it.
I bought the tank from glasscages.com. The price was good, it came when they said it would, and it doesn't leak, so I am good with it. The one thing I was a little disappointed with was the fact that they reinforced the bottom seams by placing one inch by 3/8 inch sections of glass around the interior bottom perimeter (see picture below). This caused a bit of a problem when I was ready to install the partition that separates the water in the front from the land in the back -- more about that later.
Here's what the tank looked like the day I brought it home.