Libba's 30cm Cube

[Libba]

Day 21

This week I had some issues with plant health. There has been significant melting in my Monte Carlo. The older leaves on my AR mini have started to become twisted. Starting to see some hair algae and a little green algae pop up. So far I've kept on top of it with a bit of manual removal of algae and the more melted sections of MC. There's been a lot of white biofilm growing on my driftwood but the shrimp are helping me to keep that in check. I managed to acquire some Rotala Blood Red this week. At least that's what it was sold as - hopefully it's the real deal. It certainly looks the part. I decided to remove my H'Ra and replace it with the blood red.

This feels like a pivotal moment in the development of this tank so hopefully I can keep everything in check until it stabilises. The two things I had changed were that I stopped dosing excel and I started using Seachem Equilibrium to raise my GH from 2dGH to 4-5dGH. My intuition is that the MC melt was caused by stopping the Excel and the AR leaf curl has somehow been triggered by either the Excel or the addition of Equilibrium. I'm going to taper down on the Equilibrium and see if that makes a difference with the AR.

 

[Libba]

Plant health continued to deteriorate after my last update and I started to get a lot of algae growing on the melted Monte Carlo. The AR mini leaves continued to curl up and began to turn brown. These also started to be overcome with algae. I decided to remove the plants rather than hoping to get them to stabilise. Partly from impatience, partly because I didn't want to reach a critical mass of algae.

I've thought a lot about what causes the sudden drop off in plant health. CO2 and light levels remained stable. Fertilising remained pretty stable. What changed is that I abruptly stopped dosing Excel. My initial plan was to use Excel on startup to try to give my plants extra help in establishing themselves. I was then going to taper off before adding livestock. I just don't love the idea of exposing my livestock to a chemical when I don't really understand what it does or how it works. But I ended up buying the shrimp because they became available at my LFS for a good price and didn't want to miss out so I cut the Excel abruptly. At around the same time I started adding Seachem Equilibrium to being up my calcium levels for the shrimp. This was adding something like 40ppm of K to my water. The ferts I'm using add 20ppm per week. So was the curling leaves of the AR mini a result of excess potassium interfering with calcium uptake? I know that it's a fairly controversial topic and I also know Clive has dosed 100ppm of K without issue. It might be that the combination of excess K and the Excel withdrawals was behind it. Or the K might have had nothing to do with it.

I'm still using the Equilibrium so I've replaced the AR mini with some new, submersed grown, healthy specimens. This will help me to test whether the high levels of K are problematic for this plant. I've also replaced the MC with some Staurogyne Repens. I decided I didn't love the way the MC looked in this tank so didn't want to try it again. After I ripped out the MC I left it in a bucket in the backyard with some water and then forgot to dispose of it. I finally got around to doing that today to find that MC now growing happily there. I'll leave it and let it grow out in case I want to try it again in the future.

The good news is that the plants seem to be doing well again. The algae seems to be contained for now with the help of the NQ Algae Shrimp. I'm dosing Excel again and it doesn't seem to bother them too much. I've also changed the position of my diffuser to try to get more even distribution. It's currently hanging from the spray bar and looks awful but for now I'm more concerned with function than aesthetics.

 

[Libba]

Been struggling with this one. Battling diatoms then spyrogyra. Down to three species: Rotala Blood Red, Rotala Green and Staurogyne Repens. The Staurogyne has taken about a month to establish itself and start growing new leaves. I was pretty close to ripping it out because for the first few weeks it was just an algae farm. Will update with a FTS once everything is grown in. It does feel like I've turned a corner with it since doing a three day blackout. Algae has slowed down and plant health coming good. Rotala Blood Red looking pretty nice despite only running the lights at 50%.

 

[Andy Pierce]

What changed is that I abruptly stopped dosing Excel. [...] I just don't love the idea of exposing my livestock to a chemical when I don't really understand what it does or how it works.

You started with: The goal of this tank will be the experiment and learn about how to grow healthy plants and to avoid algae.
That's a good goal, so why not keep experimenting try restoring the Excel dosing to see if that sorts out your algae issues? It's reasonably well understood that it functions as an algaecide (rather than as a carbon source). I'd be interested in whether you notice any obvious changes after putting the Excel back. I use EasyCarbo and periodically wonder whether to stop using it. Recently I've had algae seem to get more aggressive and increasing the EasyCarbo didn't seem to help so now I'm trying reducing light levels: Green spot algae in the summer | Fireplace aquarium. Have you tried decreasing the light levels?

 

[Courtneybst]

Been struggling with this one. Battling diatoms then spyrogyra. Down to three species: Rotala Blood Red, Rotala Green and Staurogyne Repens. The Staurogyne has taken about a month to establish itself and start growing new leaves. I was pretty close to ripping it out because for the first few weeks it was just an algae farm. Will update with a FTS once everything is grown in. It does feel like I've turned a corner with it since doing a three day blackout. Algae has slowed down and plant health coming good. Rotala Blood Red looking pretty nice despite only running the lights at 50%.

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Nice! Do you have low nitrates at the moment? I wanted to get some Rotala Blood Red as it supposedly doesn't need as much nitrate limitation but only see one seller shipping to the UK and it's £30 for 3 stems, I'll pass lol.

 

[Libba]

You started with: The goal of this tank will be the experiment and learn about how to grow healthy plants and to avoid algae.
That's a good goal, so why not keep experimenting try restoring the Excel dosing to see if that sorts out your algae issues? It's reasonably well understood that it functions as an algaecide (rather than as a carbon source). I'd be interested in whether you notice any obvious changes after putting the Excel back. I use EasyCarbo and periodically wonder whether to stop using it. Recently I've had algae seem to get more aggressive and increasing the EasyCarbo didn't seem to help so now I'm trying reducing light levels: Green spot algae in the summer | Fireplace aquarium. Have you tried decreasing the light levels?

Thanks for your response. Yeah I actually did go back to using the Excel and to be honest I haven't noticed any difference in terms of algae growth. The spyrogyra seems completely unaffected even after a 5x dose. The only way I've been able to keep on top of it is by a lot of manual removal. I have tried reducing light but that just slows the speed at which it grows. I'm going to experiment with more blackouts because the 3 day one seemed to help without hurting my plants much if at all. I might try a 5 day blackout next.

 

[Libba]

Nice! Do you have low nitrates at the moment? I wanted to get some Rotala Blood Red as it supposedly doesn't need as much nitrate limitation but only see one seller shipping to the UK and it's £30 for 3 stems, I'll pass lol.

I'm dosing APT complete which I think gives me 6ppm of nitrate per week. So I guess that's low but it's not zero. Yeah I paid a ridiculous amount for the 5 stems I started with. I justified the purchase by telling myself that I'll be able to make that money back once I can sell some. Knowing my luck the market will be saturated by then and it'll be fairly worthless.

 

[Libba]

The tank is finally stable. I lost a few species along the way and the tank turned out nothing like my initial vision. But the plant health is good, the shrimp are healthy and algae is minimal. The green thread algae is slowly disappearing after a second three day blackout and subsequently lowering the light intensity to 40% for 6 hours. I think this tanks new purpose will be to grow out the current plants to be replanted in my 60P and then I might rescape this one.

I had a lot of moments along the way in which the whole thing felt like an uphill battle and the amount of maintenance I was doing felt excessive. But now that I'm on the other side of it, it feels like it was worth the work. I've learned a lot and the experience of getting a tank to a stable point will be something I can draw from when things get hard next time.