djlen

One thing I learned(but there was more than one thing) in the 55 I described above, is that I should never heavily prune out more than 1/3 of the tank at a time. It took me 2 years to find the balance for that tank and 20 mins. to screw it up with a pair of scissors.
My 'jungle' tanks all look great......the ones with less than adequate plant mass for the lighting/fishload etc., are a struggle.

Len

Jeff Kropp

These tanks look rather anemic for how rich your nutrient mix is. Without looking at your stats my first impression is low CO2. Yet you seem to supplement more than enough. How are your plant's respiratory cycles?

Do your plants pearl? Do your crypts stream bubbles? How soon do they start each day?

You seem to have a tendency to plant single stems and then let them grow up to lay over the surface. Have you tried trimming short to grow denser stands from the stumps of your stems? If you use frequent pruning to avoid laying over you will also avoid excessive shading. Both R. indica and L. repens respond very well to radical pruning and in my opinion look their best if they don't layover.

I see your canister intake tubes but wonder about your water returns. I found that some surface movement helps to reduce surface scum. My spray bars are placed about 1 inch below the surface and provide nice surface movement with significant top to bottom turn over.

Steve Pituch

Jeff,

My KH is about 6.5 and I try to keep the pH around 6.8. However it has been going down to about 6.6 in the 125 gallon tank and I have had quite a few fish jump out lately. At the end of the 10 hour light period I have read the pH at about 6.9. I'm thinking that the co2 is about as high as I can safely go. The plants pearl a little but I get a lot of streaming. One thing that I have never noticed is a reductionin NO3. It doesn't seem to get used. I am hoping with more light this will change.

Yes, I think part of my problem is aquascaping. I have had bushels of vegetation growing out of the tank and not enough light at the bottom, I have had a good amount of growth but did not trim them so they floated and blocked light, and I have trimmed out half the plants hoping to get more light at the bottom; all bad things to do to a tank.

I am slowly learning. I have added a lot of stem plants and water sprite. I have started to trim the older ludwigia, bacopa carolina, cabomba stems since they are pretty thickly covered in brown algae at their bottoms. I don't want to do this too fast as I need as much biomass as possible. I added a ton of B. monneri I had been growing emersed.

I am getting green algae on the glass about every two days so I have been cleaning the tank about every three days and doing a 90% water change and readding the nutrients, cleaning out algae on the plants and vacuuming the gravel. I also have my home made UV machine connected to see if it will do anything.

I think that my problem has been light. The two 175W MH pendants now are 5.5 inches above the water, which is what I've seen with other aquascaped tanks. The quality of light looks more like I see with other's nice aquascapes. I also added one 96W AHS light at the center about 4.5 inches off of the water. I don't own glass covers for this tank. I would like to get 4 96W AHS lights for this tank but need to wait.

But now I need to balance trimming the algae infested plants with keeping as much plant load as possible. The tank seems to be doing better.

I appreciate the help.

Steve Pituch

plantbrain

Seems that gardening these tank well will help you a great deal.
Also, note what it is that you do that causes the tanks to pearl vigorously.

Generally after a water change you can add the nutrients back and see this occur. After a few days, this willd decline.

If you add the right amount of nutrients, this trend will not slow down.
I do not care for CMS personally.

I'd not worry much at all about the NO3 levels. These can be linked to test kit errors very often unless you have a good Lamott kit etc. Even then it's tough to measure 1-2ppm differences in NO3.

I do not think you are far off.

For the 75 gal try this:
Trim and prune, remove mulm, clean filter etc etc. Do this first. Then do the water change routine.

Add
1/2 teaspoon of KNO3 every other day.
Try Flourish only, 10-15mls every other day
KH2PO4- 1/16th to 1/8th teaspoon every other day.

Add macro's on the day of the water and continue every other day.
For traces, add the following day and continued routine.
If your GH is low or lacking in Mg etc, try some SeaChem Eq on the water change day, 1/2-3/4 teaspoon.

The rest should be CO2 issues.
You can improve the tank's growth further by using flourite/onyx in place of sand/soil mixes. Besides these issues, I think the rest is just some time and work on your part.

Generally I never have surface scum accumulate unless there is something not quite right in the tank.

Regards,
Tom Barr

Roger Miller

Tom, I think I've noticed this too, but I have a hard time figuring out just what is causing the scum. What sort of problems do you see that cause scum on the surface?


Roger Miller

chrisl

I followed Tom's suggested doses on my 75gal. incl. Seachem Equilibrium and HCO3 per water change. Also dose micros 3x/wk but I upped my KNO3 to 3/4tsp and it seems to have helped w. the green colored plants. I was using 1/8tsp Mono PO4, but incr. to 3/16tsp to see if a higher PO4 will help with my not so red L.Reopens, A.Reineckii and even R. Nanjenshan.
I also dose 10ml of CSM-B and 5ml's or Flourish 3x/wk too.But overall, the tank looks awesome. I can't believe how healthy everything is! Threw away my Seachem tests as they werent accurate.

plantbrain

Now prune often and toss anything that is sub par, remove all the algae, sickly pieces, keep things clean and trimmed. Replace faster growers with slower growers etc but maintain some fast growers. Just do the work and gardening and things will grow along well.
Stay ahead of things now.

Regards,
Tom Barr

Jeff Kropp

This production of O2 is one of the best ways of observing a tank's daily momentum. A hole in a plant that is the source of a bubble stream will last for several days or even weeks. These holes will put out the same size bubble day after day but their rates will change with photosythetic activity. In the morning a hole may provide bubbles spaced 2 inches apart yet by late afternoon the same hole will have bubbles 1/8 inch apart. I believe this change is an accurate indicator of plant momentum. In general I look for my strongest streams to start about 20 min after the lights turn on and then watch for a maximum rate about 5 hours later which is then steady for anouther 4 hours.

Although intense streams can be encouraged with nutrient supplementation, it is important to supplement to a momentum that can be maintained from one day to the next. Over driving the momentum may provide short term gains but also often encourages deficiency problems. By watching the pearling momentum of your tank you should be able to learn how to gage your rates of plant growth. As you become accustomed to anticipating predictable growth rates you will become better at planning your pruning.

Since you have proven that your tanks have enough light to produce bushels of vegetation, I tend to find suspect suggestions that you need more light. As the days get warmer you might consider increasing your day length. Ten hours is on the short side, twelve hours might be better.

Judging from these photos and your AGA biotope entry I would generalize that you have tendancies towards letting plants lay over. Most fish like the darkness this provides and show off iridencense well in such conditions. However, pruning such a tank tends to be infrequent and severe. It tends to result in large changes of plant mass that can produce temporary chemical imbalances.

In the intrest of producing both a steady environment for my fish and an always stunning display, I choose to prune a little bit several times each week. Typically I will spend about one hour every 3 days on pruning. Because I have learned how fast my plants grow I am able to rotate the species trimmed to maintain a very consistant plant mass. With this rotation I am also able to reduce the just hacked look of less frequent prunings.

In my opinion, great aquascapes don't happen until one gets their stem plants under control. The Dutch style of aquascaping is very useful template for learning how to trim different species of plants. Since they are all lined up and attempt a height taper from front to back, they provide gardeners with the combined challenge of growing both short and tall. Most species demand slighty different trimming methods to achieve this look. Additionaly, since the plants grow alongside one anouther comparative rates are easy to observe.
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Jeff

Steve Pituch

Thanks everyone for the input. It just had gotten a little hectic and I had to take a break. I think I am mentally and physically recovered enough to start again. This is what I am doing now for each tank.

75 gallon. I am assuming that this is a low light tank. I have temporarily stopped dosing and co2. With the soil substrate and low light I figured it would not get much worse and I could concentrate on the 125 gallon hi light tank. Tom had mentioned a rather heavy dosing regimen for the 75 gallon tank. Tom, do you realize this tank is rather lo light? Should I restart the co2? I have noticed that the more nutrients I put into this tank the less algae I tend to get, even though it is lo light. In fact the lo light 30 gallon and 7.5 gallon (soil) tanks are doing very well with 50% weekly water changes and 10 ppm no3, 1 ppm po4, and .5 ppm Fe twice per week. So I not sure whether I need to dose the 75 or not if its lo light. I am getting a little more algae in the 75 since I stopped nutrients and co2.

125 gallon. I think I was caught in a death trap with this one. My problem was that I did not have enough healthy plant mass. I had upped the lighting to make it a hi light tank and was pumping in max co2. The plant tips were quite healthy; over the months the ludwigia repens, B. carolina, zosterella dubia, etc were growing and very gradually increasing the size and width of their leaves. The problem was that, with all the previous problems, 90% of the plants were covered in a very thick brown algae. It would be impossible to trim the plants of algae like Tom mentioned was important, without drastically reducing the plant mass again another order of magnitude. I would have had very few plant tips left. I took all the plants out of the 125 gal tank and did a thorough vacuuming, as I also have a blue green algae problem with this tank. I took all the plants outside to try to clean them, bleach, or whatever necessary to save them. But in the 95deg heat and sun, I looked at the mess and realized that it just was not going to work, and ended up dumping the plants in the compost heap.

I'm thinking the scum was biofilm, and related to the blue green algae attack. Just too much bacteria in the tank.

I then kept the light out in this tank for about four days while I rested and tried to regroup and see what I could do. The only plants that I could get for free were Bacopa monnieri in Corpus Christi, and possibly E. berteroi in the next town. The Bacopa was gone from the heat and lack of water, but yesterday I found the berteroi. It had already gone to seed but the plants seemed to be putting out new leaves, so I put on my boots and dug up about 200 plants. Although the leaes have a lot of wear and tear the plants looked like they would still grow in a better environment.

I took them home and cleaned them and covered the bottom of the 125 with the berteroi. Its funny but it looks like my most realistic biotope: with 10 inches of water in the tank it looked exactly like the ditch I took the plants from (except for the mud). I know that I will have to pull plants out as they spread out and grow but it just might be enough plant biomass for now. I took out the fish so I could max the co2 without killing any fish, and I was going to start 10 ppm no3, 1 ppm po4, .5 Fe from flourish twice per week with 90% weekly water changes.

Any advice? Tom, the two 175W MH are about 5 inches from the water and the 96W AHS is about 4 inches away. Tell me (exactly) what to dose. The co2 will be high.

I do realize now that aquascaping (gardening) is important to the health of a tank and will try my best.

And once again, thanks everyone for the advice. You people and this forum are the best place on the planet for this kind of advice.





Regards,
Steve Pituch

Jeff Kropp

I've noticed similar correlations.

I think 10 inches of water in that tank has great potential. If I was starting a new tank today I would set it up only 1/3 full by design.
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Jeff