yes. i tried it on a small scale with goldfish, a storage tub and a cat litter tray filled with pearlite. i planned to grow peppers in this, which i started to, but i put some salad seeds in which grew and died, and the resulting dead sprouts decomposed, and filtered back through the water into the fish and killed them all. i used a small aquarium pump as the pump, with clear pipe as the pipe. was very interesting i thought, but to do be done on a serious worthwhile scale, it did smell a bit as well, the electricity cost would be an issue, and not one i think would be overcome with the resulti