ICR Museum Aquarium

I visited the ICR museum and realized that they needed some assistance with their aquarium system. I asked the curator if he would like some help turning the aquarium into an attraction all by itself. He encourage me to follow through with this project.
First we changed the canister filter into a simple biological filter by replacing the amino-chips and charcoal with fiber fill. We then turned it on to uptake most of the detritus into it as we followed the next few steps.
(A note of explanation. The aquarium is built into a wall with an irregular shaped hole through which the aquarium can be viewed. This fits the motif of the room it is in. The pictures that show the whole aquarium will reflect the shape of the window.)
We removed the existing gravel which stirred up the detritus in the tank. We then replaced this with gravel from my established tank and some extra flurite (used for it's iron content and ability to hold iron and sulfur). Next we added plants (as below)
and fish.
After one week we re-visited the aquarium and found we had insufficient light. We trimmed them and the curator replaced the single florescent bulb with a double plant light system and two fifty watt  halogen bulbs.
The next week we could see substantive changes had occurred. The density of the growth heads on the pants increased. Algae decreased. The entire system had adjusted well. It looked like this:

We were now ready to add some topography for interest. This took some rearranging and extra gravel as well as significant amounts of slate rock to divide the tank into levels and areas and to add interest. We added some Red Fox Tail (or Coon Tail) and added a line of Vallisneria on the back wall. I don't recommend the red coontail and have taken it out of all my tanks (11/99) . It has a massive root system and other plants seem to slow down their growth once it is established.
After one week of growth, and to allow the water to clear, it looked like this:

We added long return tubes to return the water deeper into the tank. The return is on the left with pick up on the right. Note the growth of the coontail. After two weeks the aquarium looked like this:
The topography makes the front center area the deepest part of the aquarium. Note the small amount of fern sticking out at the bottom center of the shot. The hole helps to reduce the light to the Java Fern which needs less light than any other plant in the aquarium. This makes longer leaves on the fern because there is less blue light (blue helps promote kiki's, baby plants growing on the leaves). The bottom is actually lower than the bottom of the frame in the picture just above.
After several weeks I returned to see how the Val was doing and we added a CO2 generator to the tank. We used a gallon apple juice container with about 1.5 pounds of sugar and active yeast with a tube which dumped the CO2 into the water uptake for maximum contact with water. Effectively all the CO2 will go into the water.

All the plants and fish are thriving with this biological filter. We later added more light to the tank with a halogen construction lamp and dropped the CO2 generator for simplicity.

It has, at this writing, been years since I have been there so I can't tell you what it is doing now.