Oh my, it’s been a little while, I’ve made this a bit of a bumper post..!
I did write an update for late May. I had severe melt in my crypts, it didn’t make sense; here is what I was to post:
Well, I didn’t see this coming.
Cryptocoryne is melting at an alarming rate, well, one species is. Last week I removed 6 leaves with “melt” symptoms, this week 15. The more I look, the more I see.
I’ve made three changes, starting around 3 weeks ago:
Light intensity up 10% (Still low)
6ml of TNC a week (up from 3ml a week)
Moved from 12L of RO water a week to around 24L (25%-50%)
I increased RO as I’d like to move entirely to rainwater now I have overflowing waterbutt access.
The water has obviously changed, the lighting has changed and in theory there should be more of everything in the water but I’m deficient somewhere as floaters are still a little pale, but not as pale as they were. Maybe there is more in my tap water than I realise which I’m now removing more of?
I’ve also observed that the leaves from n.Stellata are smaller at surface. Possibly a coincidence, possibly not. However Ceratopteris has taken off. I think, Ceratopteris is hogging all available co2, and certainly having an impact on algae.
I believe my changes are for the best, so I’m just going to keep going with it.
I didn’t post the above, as I never got around to taking a photo
However, I stuck to the above changes. And overall health in the tank certainly improved. I quickly realised that my hunt for algae was damaging leaves, so I stopped turkey basting every surface. Crypts bounced back fine.
You can see the different between the 10/05/21
image, and that below:
The algae has cleared, the moss is very happy, plenty of fresh leaves on the cryptocoryne even though I really cut back. The algae in the floating plants has all disappeared. Somewhere and somehow, the Vallis nana has come back too. It's all good except for the Ceratopteris.
Ceratopteris is struggling, the leaves slowly get dark patches and then I cut them off. If this is a CO2 issue, then I’m not going to solve that. Here’s a close up:
Meh.
My light intensity is at around 50%, and I now have lights on for 9 hours a day (up from 6, 1 hour extra every couple of weeks).
I started adding ADA iron, 2ml at WC, so 4ml a week. That made a huge difference to the floaters; they are the greenest I’ve ever had (
see an image here). A lot of the noticeable improvement I think is down to the Amano shrimp, they’re on it. Three of them also are carrying a lot of eggs/larvae, so puffs are going to get well fed. Algae really did get knocked back. I stuck to the RO plan too. Water is pretty neutral now, and “stable”.
As I say above how stable it is, I’m thinking of slowing down water changes, from twice a week to once a week. The external filter has made a lot of difference to the tank, it just has a good (weak) flow that covers enough area. I just feel like the external filter is doing a lot of good work, I’m just needed to remove the ever decreasing algae - at home - on the glass.
A minor disaster, I noticed this little terror on the glass:
I'm not planning to do much about this now; here’s a video too:
https://youtu.be/NUp_xryd25c
which is kinda cool btw. Annoyingly, when I think the glass is spotless the macro shows otherwise.
The puffs are fine, I have to feed live food as I realised (through a death) that cubelets can slowly release food, and many puffers will bite for one bloodworm. That bite could sink into another fishes lip, which damages that fish so much that it could stop that fish from eating again. That happened, I was sad. Still, I have 5 fish.
Here’s a crap quality video of them eating mosquito larvae:
https://youtu.be/3JpHvfc_CZU
There is some BBA on the glass and and some branches; honestly I don’t care. I’m not sure if I journaled it, but I did drain 90% of the water and then use 2ml of easycarbo dabbing on the worst BBA. 2ml goes along way with a dry sponge, and say 20ml of RO water mixed in. I’ll do that again if I really feel the need, which I don’t think I will. It says a lot when BBA is on glass/twigs but nowhere to be found on plants.
That is a bit of an update. Tank is kinda doing its own thing now, the only thing I have to do is stick to a routine, ish.