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NA Style ADA 60P

Java ferns come from karst run off so need a good hardness to grow best. They like high flow and higher levels of po4 in my experience.

In regards to diatoms, have you used h2o2 in the tank? Also have you checked that the wood isn’t soft? I’ve had persistent diatoms before and the wood id used was mushy, once removed the diatoms went away.

Plant density helps, if I were in your position I’d throw in a load of stems floating for a few weeks to get things a touch more stable.
I know it's difficult to diagnose the plant deficiencies but looking at some leaves, it did feel like the lack of PO4 so I will definitely check that out.

And the wood isn't soft but I am sure it's leeching all sorts of funky stuff in the scape. Unfortunately, I can't get it out now but from now on, I am strictly sticking with Riverwood.
 
No sucker fish in there like Ottos or Garras? They would have taken care of all that diatom and fluffy stuff.
There a few amanos and crystals in here along with some nerite and horned nerite snails. I will be adding some ottos in a week or two. :)
And agreed, they should be able to take care of it but I want to fi the root cause as well.
 
There a few amanos and crystals in here along with some nerite and horned nerite snails. I will be adding some ottos in a week or two. :)
And agreed, they should be able to take care of it but I want to fi the root cause as well.
Definitely, adding fish to take care of an algae problem is not a solution.
 
I know it's difficult to diagnose the plant deficiencies but looking at some leaves, it did feel like the lack of PO4 so I will definitely check that out.

And the wood isn't soft but I am sure it's leeching all sorts of funky stuff in the scape. Unfortunately, I can't get it out now but from now on, I am strictly sticking with Riverwood.
I don’t think that’s necessary, a lot of leaching can be fixed by pre-soaking. Also the volume of the wood to the volume of tank will mean even variable woods like spider etc when in the same ratio would leach sugars just as much.

I wouldn’t be so stressed, diatoms are natural in some setups and are an easier one to fix once the filter/tank are mature.

If you drift onto hobby pages from the opposite side of the world many of the Asian scapers would think nothing of adding 1amano per 2litre in start up to deal with diatoms!
 
Haps haps haps.
It’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut solution. But can’t fault that it works as it is a short term thing. Long term them amanos would go predatory and eat anything you put near um.
 
I don’t think that’s necessary, a lot of leaching can be fixed by pre-soaking. Also the volume of the wood to the volume of tank will mean even variable woods like spider etc when in the same ratio would leach sugars just as much.

I wouldn’t be so stressed, diatoms are natural in some setups and are an easier one to fix once the filter/tank are mature.

If you drift onto hobby pages from the opposite side of the world many of the Asian scapers would think nothing of adding 1amano per 2litre in start up to deal with diatoms!

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Amanos are actually not that popular because they are rather expensive, about a $1.20-$1.50 each and its well known they are bad tempered, bully smaller shrimp, steal fish food and run away with shrimp wafers instead of eating algae, and destroy certain plants 😅
Instead, Its cheaper to just drop in a bag of Malayan shrimp (price as shown on the bag) and let them hoover up everything.
 
Amanos are actually not that popular because they are rather expensive, about a $1.20-$1.50 each and its well known they are bad tempered, bully smaller shrimp, steal fish food and run away with shrimp wafers instead of eating algae, and destroy certain plants 😅
I don't know in Singapore but in Thailand, they are very popular. Shops are persistently out of stock. Here they sell for an even higher price: ~ 2USD a piece, probably due to demand. These shrimps can't easily be bred so they only come from the wild. [Side note, at some point in time I was actually setting things up to breed them but eventually scraped the idea although I had purchased nearly everything I needed, including a refractometer 😓].

For the rest, I have never experienced caridina multidentata being bully or bad tempered. They do indeed like to run away once they get their hands, so to speak, on the stash of food, but that's about it. There is always lots left for other small shrimps. Them being bigger than most tank shrimps, automatically gives them priority. Never have I seen an amano shrimp eat healthy plants though. In my experience, the plant would need to be in poor health or melting for the amano to start feeding off of it.

If I really only want to feed the fish I feed live food like grindal worms. Shrimps don't seem interested in those.
 
Amanos are around £8 for larger adults in this part of the world. Only the very tiny ones are around a £1-2.

I’ve had them go predatory in the past but knowing it’s a lack of protein so I needed supplementary food fixed it.
 
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Our friends from Green Effect discovered that Amanos like AR. And even Xiaozhuang Wong commented.... :eek:
there are a few threads about Amanos in this forum as well.
My experience is that Amanos do not naturally attack plants or shrimp, the way that an Africa Cichlid seems genetically programmed to do so, but one fine day, one of them might just decide to do so.... and after they start, they won't stop.
 

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Our friends from Green Effect discovered that Amanos like AR. And even Xiaozhuang Wong commented.... :eek:
I have had Alternanthera reineckii and never have the amano touched it. In fact never have I seen any amano eat healthy plants even the most delicate ones I have.
Maybe those having issues with their shrimps "attacking" their plants is because they feed their animals once every 3 moon? 😉
 
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Our friends from Green Effect discovered that Amanos like AR. And even Xiaozhuang Wong commented.... :eek:
there are a few threads about Amanos in this forum as well.
My experience is that Amanos do not naturally attack plants or shrimp, the way that an Africa Cichlid seems genetically programmed to do so, but one fine day, one of them might just decide to do so.... and after they start, they won't stop.
Been there! They single handily destroyed my AR mini. And these were not the damaged or weak plants, these were fully healthy plants from my other tank and had no algae or any other issues whatsoever.
 
I have had Alternanthera reineckii and never have the amano touched it. In fact never have I seen any amano eat healthy plants even the most delicate ones I have.
Maybe those having issues with their shrimps "attacking" their plants is because they feed their animals once every 3 moon? 😉
This was probably the case with me, I naturally assumed that the algae in the scape should be enough for them and never fed them anything. Perhaps that was the mistake.
 
Caridina multidentata are omnivors. Like us humans. This seems to me like the same issue with some sucker fish sp. where people think they will just do with biofilm and algae. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Seems we are getting to the bottom of this. This is the second instance (perhaps 3rd with Dennis et al.) where the shrimps are not properly fed with protein source food hence them becoming voracious. If you read closely those screenshots from @erwin123 and specially the last comment from Green Effect, he says that "they added the yamato" in order to basically prove how trash and voracious these shrimps are. To me that sounds like a little skewed experiment where they bought some shrimps from a retailer and added them to the tank or they didn't fed those shrimps enough or properly where they were before. I know for a fact some people here in Thailand that never feed their fish or shrimp expecting them to survive on water, dead leaves and algae.... sigh.

I mean, go without eating or eating poorly for some period of time and you'll find anything palatable.
 
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