A long time has passed since the last update, this is about par for the course for me and my hobbies.
The interest comes and goes in waves, and its for the slow periods that I want to have an as simple to maintain tank as possible.
I havent become a good plantkeeper this time either.. (what a surprise!)
Tank has been pretty neglected unfortunately, its gotten a water change every two months in this time. And when im not changing water often, I dont feel comfortable adding much fertilizer.
Plants have not been very happy with this to say the least, but fish have seemed happy throughout and are breeding as usual.
Its not entirely easy to gauge the wellness status of a fish, what does a happy fish look like, really?
Can any of us say for sure? Their whiskers and fins are good looking and the fish are displaying natural behavior, and I guess this may be as close as we get.
Breeding doesnt really mean much as many fish will breed even in pretty shoddy conditions. Anyway back on topic 🙃
Ive found myself wanting to backtrack a little bit through my journal, to that stage where I was growing plants well-ish and also algae. It seems slightly better than growing plants poorly and algae well 😅😁
I think my main issue is being able to stay consistent. I can have the best most well planned out fertilizing and water change regime in the world, but if I cant stick to it for more than two weeks then its not gonna give me any good results.
My tendency to uproot plants and move them around every now and then probably doesnt help any struggling plants either.
Its not the water, its me
So im giving -consistency- another go, for the 50th time or something. Try, fail, get back up, try again. I should be able to learn this skill some day, even if it takes me 60 years. I shall persevere!
My apologies for the cheesyness.
This is the second time I have been able to basically kill plants with what I think maybe is a severe nitrate and/or iron deficiency.
Im thinking of calling it "Fertilizer staying in bottle disease".
Its especially visible with Pogostemon helferi, the poor "canary in the mines" plant.
Im not entirely sure its just iron deficiency, as I recognized the symptoms from last time and started adding iron about twice a week to fix it. But it still continued.
Growth gets paler and paler in the top as it gradually slows down to a halt, and then the bottom of the stem melts.
I saw the same thing with Hygrophila difformis and Hygrophila costata, although with less paling of new growth.
Limnophila sessiliflora, Heteranthera zosterifolia, Myriophyllum mattogrossense, and Hydrocotyle tripartita stopped growing but didnt show much stunting of tops or melting at the bottom.
And Rotala H'ra, Ludwigia Super Red, Nesaea Crassicaulis and Ammania senegalensis all stunted spectacularly but didnt melt.
I find it interesting, if nothing else, that the plants react so differently to poor conditions.
So I think Ive mentioned before that I am a fishkeeper first and a plantkeeper second.
This is still true, and a few weeks ago I got some rare thermometer knifefish (Gymnorhamphichthys rondoni)
To accomodate these wonderful weirdos, the temperature was raised from 22 to 26 degrees celcius and more sandy space was made in the tank.
These like to bury themselves completely in the sand, sometimes with their little noses sticking out.
They feed at night and are not aggressive feeders, so to allow the food to sit on the sand and not get immediately blown into the filter intake, the spray bar was taken out and I swapped to a simple spade shaped outlet pointed at the driftwood.
I threw out almost all of the dying stem plants, and all but one stem of P. helferi. This one stem escaped, and found its way to the intake strainer, shaded by driftwood and plants. Here it stopped melting and started growing fresh green top leaves once I started fertilizing again. I got around to fishing it out a week later and threw it away, because im cruel like that. But I was impressed by its ability to recover from such a sorry state.
I dont have any pictures of the bad times but I snapped some pictures now to show you the status per today. I always feel bad for writing too much and not having enough pictures.
After my partial stem-o-cide I went out and got more pots of Bolbitis heudelotii 💞, some more Trident Java Fern and I would have gotten more Windelow but the store had another round of the mysterious java fern disease and their Windelow was all gnarly.
Got a new pot of Hygrophila difformis and Ludwigia Super Red as well.
Nesaea crassicaulis unstunting with new tips. Not -that- bad looking growth for non CO2 imo.
Difformis behind behaving like its normal difformis-y self again.
New stems of Super Red adjusting to my conditions. Time will tell if it can survive long term in my tank.
Hydrocotyle growing again and sending out new runners and leaves.
Some BBA from the bad times. In my experience so far this algae loves low to zero nutrients, flow, and the more light the better.
Snapped a really crappy picture of one of my detritus worms photobombing my pictures
I like these little critters, Im always very happy to see small white flea things in the plants and these worms are a super useful indicator.
The detritus worms mainly live in the bottom of my external filter, but when they start coming out the outflow I know theres a population boom and that its time to clean the filter. Lately with the knifefishes, feeding has been at an all time high and the need to clean the filter has increased.
I hope more of them will settle in the sand bottom, maybe they are trying to but get eaten by the corys before being able to get a good population going.
Having some sort of critter population in the sand would be super useful for feeding the knives.
To finish off heres a picture of todays production from the corys. Theyve been laying eggs 2-3 times a week for some months now.
Unfortunately they are quite bad at getting them properly fertilized, and also very happy to turn right around and eat the eggs as soon as they are laid.
Poor stupid things.
Of course also before the pictures were taken 
But I hope things grow back quickly.
I was thinking i could rehome the female snails.
. So is the Bolbitis growing OK without CO2? I thought I heard it was a CO2 junkie (so is Blaxia Japonica, but you mentioned that is struggling)...
Maybe I will be able to get them to feed from my hand? Now that would be asking a lot. But they are eating bloodworms out of the tweezers already so I guess never say never.
