Two faced tank

[LMuhlen]

Salutations!

I've been thinking for a good while about starting a journal here for my tank, but always felt like I should organize my thoughts a little better, and get some decent pictures. Since apparently neither of those are gonna happen any time soon, I'll start with what I have.

It is a 1,3 x 0,5 x 0,5m tank, bought in July 2020, when I moved to my new house. Before that I had a 40cm cube that I used to shake the aquarist rust off, after maybe 8 years away from the hobby. I installed the new tank perpendicular to the wall, as a peninsula, and it boldly splits the living room in two. Back then I assumed I had some solid hardware and had high hopes for the layout. The first two years were a long fought war to try and keep the plants happy, then maybe to keep them alive, then maybe to find different plants which would adapt better to my tank. Expectations were decreased every time and in the end all I wanted was to at least understand what was wrong so I could do better next time. I scheduled some vacation time for July 2022, and I planned to use that to change everything and start again, to try and fix what I felt that I did wrong. Long story short, over that time I did dozens of iterations, testing and changing about everything I could think of and when my self established deadline to remake the tank arrived, I had a decent looking tank, with a selection of plants that survived well enough so that it wasn't a complete embarrassment. And I was maybe 70% sure I could do better next time.

These are the last pictures from that time, taken just before I dismantled everything. By then I was in a strict "perform my last tests before the time ends" mode, not trimming anything anymore, putting plants in vases and keeping each half of the tank with a different light.

Just like it happened with this journal, I spent maybe an year thinking how to do this transition to a new layout, how to keep the fishes and the plants alive while cycling the tank, what my new layout would be, how to handle the hardscape and how to implement what I thought that I learned from my previous experience... but when the day arrived I just had half-thought ideas and had to improvise mostly everything.

My lunch break is over, but I'll try and continue the story soon.

 

[LMuhlen]

From old to new...

Back then my setup was as follows:

1.3 x 0.5 x 0.5 tank - 325L, 10mm glass, one center brace at the top. I didn't want braceless because it would be too expensive due to the thicker glass and pointless with a wood cover, and I didn't want euro-braces (if that's what they are called) because it gets in the way of sticking my arm in there for general maintenance and for cleaning the glass. A wood cabinet and cover built completely out of specification by a professional who threw it all up to the air during the pandemic.

Filter - Oase 350 thermal canister with glass lily pipe and inlet surface skimmer. Highly influenced by the 2hr aquarist site, I had to import this through not so legal means. I quickly found that it is severely undersized for my tank.
I later added a 5500 L/h wave maker and then another 6500 L/h wave maker when trying to go full water circulation mode. The stronger wave makers were considerably cheaper than the smaller ones for some reason, so I had to find creative ways to make them less disruptive.

Substrate was a little bit of earthworm casting humus, boiled and washed, covered by a layer of inert fine gravel, almost like a coarse sand. Maybe it is coarse sand. I had the brilliant idea to separate the humus from the sand with a mosquito net. I quickly regretted this and it made me look forward for when I'd reassemble it all, just to throw this damned mosquito net away. I don't know why or how, but it kept the CO2 generated by the immature humus trapped and when I would poke around, the substrate would bubble all around. Also, the roots would get tangled in it and it was a pain to bury the larger roots when moving the plants around. This created some massive insecurity in my mind, never knowing if the substrate was to blame for my failures or not. Probably at first it didn't help. After maybe an year, it stopped producing so much gas and the net was mostly pierced all around. I always used this humus + coarse sand combo and never had so much trouble with it before without the net.
I would eventually boost the substrate with a generic brand of osmocote, allegedly with a high ammonia/nitrate rate and without micros.

Lights... oh the lights... I imported by legal means 2 units of Finnex Planted+ ALC 24". I wanted a 48", but it was impossible to import it, so 2 smaller units should do the trick, right? Also it would work well with the center brace, no need to have LEDs on top of the brace. Aquarium LED fixtures are stupidly expensive here. Importing them made them just regular-expensive. I was really happy with this choice, the light looked great. But then some things became obvious. To make use of the lighting ramps, which are fun and enjoyable, I can't use an external timer, can I? So I have to use the inbuilt 24h fully programmable feature. It is, however, fully programmable for 3 hours intervals. Which makes it impossible to ramp up or down in less than 3 hours, and the plateau needs to be either 6 or 9 hours. That which looked like tons of flexibility to someone used to simple on-off timers, now looked very much rigid. I started with 3 hours ramp up, 9 hours plateau, 3 hours partial ramp down and then 3 hours at low light ramping down to zero for late night viewing purposes. Eventually reduced the plateau to 6 hours, and then at some point I removed the last 3 hours of week light for viewing purposes. To be able to enjoy it at night, it would start at 9am and finish at 9pm. It would receive tons of indirect natural light from 6am to ~11am, when the ramping up would be mostly complete.

Pressurized CO2 from a fire extinguisher and a sketchy Chinese set of valves. Originally used an inline diffuser, eventually changed to an external reactor and this was the single most relevant improvement in plant quality in all my iterations.

Liquid fertilization with mixed dry salts for macros, and a local brand of premixed (highly) diluted micros. I always aimed for something at maybe half EI, but of course I changed my formula many many times.

Original layout was 2 tall islands at the extremes, with a central area of short plants. All the short plants died right away and the slow-growing less demanding plants at the top of the wood pieces would get all kinds of algae. After maybe an year I got rid of the far side island and it was a great improvement, since at this point the fishes were quite large already. At the end, it was a free for all, whichever plant managed to survive would get preference.

Fauna was, for most of the time, 8 angelfishes, 5~8 Congo tetras, 7 denissonii, 10 Sterbay corys, a shoal of serpae tetras and 4 assorted small/medium size plecos. While the plants withered, the fishes had a good time and grew well. But one ungrateful blahblahblahblahblahblahblah ate my anubias and my buces, and nipped at many other plants. At some point I wondered if the reason why the plants were doing poorly was that this little backstabber was eating them. Most likely it was the opposite. The prime suspects were the angelfish, then the congos, then the denisonnii. Since I never discovered who it was, I set as a goal to get rid of all of them when I eventually rebuilt the tank.

At some point, I put it in my head that the light was the main issue. Some low demand plants would grow well when shaded, but would explode in algae when a leaf would eventually break out of cover and get direct light. So I thought maybe the light was too strong. But the smaller plants in the open would all slowly die, which could be due to not enough light? I read all around that excess light was a common issue, so I started testing with reduced power, 50%. No real changes were observed. Eventually I came to the conclusion that my lights were severely undersized. Massively. Two 24" lamps did NOT make a 48" lamp, and even the 48" was kind of weak for a 50cm deep tank. At this point, it was almost reset time, so after some quick tests with cheap brandless Chinese indoor plant lamps, I picked one which didn't die due to humidity right away. I was too stubborn to buy a proper lamp, I had to beat the system. And I stand by this choice. My tank is now very pink and it is impossible to take good pictures with my (also Chinese) phone, but I won.


Having said all that, what did I learn in 2 years of mostly failed experiments? What would be my strategy for my 2.0 version?

• Less wood, more stones. My locally picked wood pieces were a constant question-mark in my head. Were they toxic, slowly killing my plants? Were they decomposing, brewing algae? No more. I also wouldn't buy overpriced imported aquarium stones, so after some tests with a few samples, I bought 50~60kg of stones at a garden store.
• More light! Two Chinese indoor lamps with +300 LEDs each, mostly red and blue. The two Finnex lamps are there to try and fight all the pink with some white and green, and make it look decent.
• A proper tested industrial aquasoil substrate. ADA is too expensive, so I bought JBL, which looked like a copy and paste from ADA Amazonia 2. To save some cash I would strategically add the substrate only where needed. I planned on using 2 9L bags, but in the end only used 1...
• A layout where the center of the tank, shaded by the center brace and with no direct light on top of it, would house low demand plants. My large guayava wood piece, which I like and wanted to keep, would be there and work like a sort of cave for the shy fishes.
• My carpet and low plants died due to lack of light at substrate level? I will raise them close to the light! I will build a plateau at one half of the tank and make a nice carpet up there. And then I will have anubias, which I love, around that, near the bottom. And no anubia eating fishes! (But I already increased the light, isn't this overkill? Well, both plans matured in parallel and in the end I did both, which may have been too much haha).
• I wanted some space for more delicate stem plants, something loosely dutch-inspired. I save one half of the tank for that, but also somewhat elevated. Maybe 50cm was too deep for my cheap lights.
• Lots of surface agitation and even more CO2 to compensate. My filter is undersized, I will at least have plenty of oxygen going around.
• Smaller fishes. No more plecos. Well, I kept my L075, I like it a lot. But the other 3 went bye bye. Red fishes to look brighter in the mostly red light.
• Do a blackout cycle to prevent having a headache at the start. What do I do with the plants and fishes while cycling? When I get there, I'll figure something out. I'll sell most of my fishes anyways, right?
• And to really push myself out of my comfort zone, I wanted a layout which would look different on both sides of the tank.

It is now time to go, so maybe tomorrow I'll finally get to the part where I rebuild the tank.

 

[MichaelJ]

What a nice setup! 👍

Cheers,
Michael

 

[LMuhlen]

And now to the third act of this prelude - destroying everything and starting again.

One month before the big day, I bought the stones from a garden shop, 50 to 60kg. I selected them one by one at the shop, but they are just simple stones and costed 1/40th of the price of a proper aquarium stone. I planned to use that month to create my layout outside of the tank and then just quickly transfer it all inside when the time came. I draw the borders with tape on the floor and started to build a stone puzzle. It quickly became clear that: A) the stones would not stay put without some serious backup infrastructure and/or a massive effort in gluing them; and B) a 50cm wide tank would not support a massive stone structure in its center, considering the tank has 2 front glasses and no back wall (at least not without some serious know-how which I don't possess).

So the plan was to use some Styrofoam blocks and sheets as structural support / space filler, some small pebbles for filling up the gaps in the hardscape, and then aquasoil to top it off in some parts, and my coarse sand everywhere else. I would figure out how to assemble the stones when I had the tank empty. What could go wrong?

I managed to sell all of the fishes that I wanted to get rid of and it was all set for them to be picked-up the same day that I took the tank down. The few remaining fishes, mostly the phantom shrimps, the corydoras and some apistos, would have to wait a few days in my plant farm tank, which would have plenty of space once I used all the plants for the new layout.

I forgot to mention that since my anubias started getting eaten, I took them out to a small improvised plant nursery and started propagating them like crazy, so I had a good amount of them for my layout.

When the day finally arrived, I had everything partially organized to disassemble the tank. The plan was to take it all down and then back up in the same day. Hah! Well, fishing up everyone, even at 10% water level, was a challenge. Carefully placing my plants in a storage for them to survive took much longer than expected. The guy who bought most of my fishes suddenly wanted me to drive across town to bring them to him. The other guy who was supposed to keep 5 adult angelfishes didn't show up as well. I had to improvise a 90L bucket to keep the angelfish for who knows how long if I needed to find a new buyer (he eventually picked up the angelfish 10 days later). Removing the old substrate, all that mix of humus and coarse sand, took forever. I separated some good 20L of mostly clean sand and kept it moist for a facilitated biology transition. When I was ready to start assembling, it was late at night, so I postponed it to the next day.

I do have pictures of the layout creating process! Many pictures.

At this point, tragedy strikes. I started filling up the tank, but halfway through the vertical block of Styrofoam floated and caused a volcanic explosion of stones and aquasoil. In hindsight, that block had too much volume but very little horizontal surface, with not enough weight on top of it to keep it in place. By mere luck, the stones which fell all around didn't shatter the glass, I got away without even a scratch. But the experience was traumatic and I stopped taking pictures. I cut the block at the same height as the other one and reassembled the layout as best as I could, following the pictures I had. Unfortunately, nothing really fit as well as the first time, I lost a lot of aquasoil that entered the crevices left opened... It was just a poor attempt at achieving what was once a tight wall, but I had to go on and that was that.

I then cycled the tank for 12 days without plants, with the lights turned off but exposed to ambient light, with the wavemakers on, but without the filter, which I had to attach to the fish bucket to try and keep the larger than expected fish load alive.

In my last day of vacations, I planted the tank. For some reason I only have pictures of the anubias being planted, but that was 90% of the time spent planting. That flute near substrate level is the outlet for the CO2 reactor. Firstly, they were blessed with the force.

My next set of pictures is from Aug. 31st, one month later.

In the next block, I'll describe how it developed all the way until today, and then I'll be able to just make small updates as things happen, like a normal journal should be.

 

[LMuhlen]

For this last part of my initial block, some information on how things evolved from planting the tank up to today.

I decided back then to try having some massive water flow at the surface to try and ensure great levels of oxygenation. This would be an attempt at reducing the cycling time due to me having to rescue my plants, which were poorly stored in improvised containers during the initial blackout cycling period, and also the fauna, which was crammed together in a large bucket. Even worse, the filter was installed in the fish bucket, so no filter for the tank. With both wave makers positioned near the water surface and aimed slightly upwards, the surface turbulence was wild, and so was the general water movement all around. Realizing that this wouldn't be sustainable long-term if I wanted to have a high CO2 concentration, the plan was to eventually decrease the water flow.

At first, my main issue was keeping plants in place. Having used a lot of anubias, which were just pushed against the nooks between the stones, not glued, it became routine to find anubias swimming around and having to put them back in their place. The same happened with other plants, especially the ones at the top plateau. At some point, I just glued some of the more rebellious anubias and a crypto which for some reason also didn't liked staying where I wanted it to. I don't know if this strategy of high surface turbulence was/is beneficial, but this was the tank with the least amount of algae in my personal history.

Recently I set IOT timers for the wavemakers and have them alternating between one another, and 10 minutes every hour of absolute peace. The timers accept 30 inputs, so I made 15 daily on/off cycles, with hourly cycles during CO2 hours, and longer cycles at night. The fishes don't look bothered by the high flow and there are plenty of regions with gentle flow. But it is interesting to see them enjoy the 10 minutes of peace that they get. I assume it also helps build up some diluted CO2. Finally, having the wavemakers blowing water away from the wall side, where the surface skimmer is, I would get some accumulation of surface scum on the far end. With the pauses, I no longer notice that, I assume the scum gets skimmed during this window.

A second issue, likely due to this excessive water flow, is that my floating plants, which I'm using for the first time, after all the positive marketing I see for them in this forum, are not doing so well. While I don't see clear signs of nutrient deficiency, they end up taking some serious dives, which can't be good for them. Their movements alternate between circling along the surface, being all cramped together at some corner, or diving and acting like some sort of green K1 media. And worse, when they enter the diving mode, they get tangled with the anubias and sometimes just stay down there until I rescue them. This has decreased a bit since I started alternating the wavemakers, but it's not completely fixed yet. Their leaves are overall much smaller than they were originally, and so are their roots. Keeping new tissue culture plants rooted has been a challenge as well, but eventually the plants tire of swimming around.

At first, my plants at the plateau weren't doing so well. There were lots of deficiency signs, the Lilaeopsis all turned black, the Staurogyne looked like a bengal tiger with lots of stripes. By the way, I decided to put all kinds of "carpet" plants on the plateau and let the best plant win. One day, the anubias around the base of the plateau got suddenly covered in GSA, and with that I decided to turn off one of the two channels in the Chinese lamp on top of those plants. That channel had only red lights, so now half the tank is less red than the other half. Meh... Since this change, and after bumping the phosphate does from 3ppm to 4ppm weekly, I haven't noticed any serious GSA increase, but it didn't go away either. The new leaves are clean. The deficiency signs, on the other hand, subsided significantly. I'm now at the point where I can start trimming the Staurogyne, so some of the worse looking leaves are going away.

Right now I have the Staurogyne dominating the plateau and the Marsilias keeping their ground. The Monte Carlo spread all around forming sort of a net just above the substrate, but the leaves don't look great, they are small and don't close the gaps. I improvised a vase of Riccia fluitans up there as well and it did great, it looked really pretty. But it started getting out of control and shading everything else, so I recently moved it to another place, at substrate level. It doesn't pearl nearly as much, but it still looks healthy, and now there is more plateau room for the carpeting wars. A few weeks ago I added some Althernanthera minis up there and this week I tried P. helferi. They both came from tissue cultures and are having a hard time rooting in place, but the Althernanteras are better now. Some helferis went swimming and I kind of lost them... Hopeing that they show up at some point.

I'm really happy with my Nimphaea. In the previous setup, it grew huge dark purple leaves that took over significant volumes of the tank, shading everything around, until I eventually grounded it near a corner. This time, I wanted to keep it small and compact, growing from the side of the stone wall. I didn't know what would make it grow large or small, but I tried anyways and it has been great, it is exactly as I hoped. Maybe it was just a matter of explaining to the plant how I wanted it to grow. Maybe it was some bonsai effect with the roots restricted to a smaller space between the walls. Maybe it was the stronger light.

The balansae suffered the transition, but is now back stronger than before. In the previous setup, the leaves at the surface would get all kinds of algae, but now they are clean. I stuck some C. parvula between the anubias and they seem to be doing better than before as well.

On the stems side of the tank, the rotalas are looking good and I have to trim them every now and then. The blyxas used to be massive in the previous setup, but are now much more delicate. At first, they looked sad, but I think that when the new leaves sprouted, the old ones disappeared and now they all look bright green, albeit a bit small and sparse. Most of the stems that I put there either stunted or are not growing or died, but they weren't looking too good before moving them to the tank either. I want to try some different species, not really sure which ones. I wanted to try toninas, but I can't find them for sale. I had a large Ludwigia which kinda looked like a rose, but it was growing too fast and its leaves were too large, so eventually I removed it.

From the start, I had a moss at the top of the wood piece, right in the center of the tank, just under the glass brace, not directly under any of the lamps. I thought it would like it there, but it is looking very miserable. I have it growing great on a farming tank. I'm not sure what is wrong with it, but I'll give it some time to recover. I wonder if it suffers during water changes, since it is the first plant to be put outside of water and the last one to get immersed again. But I never notice it getting dry, it seems to hold humidity well. Pinnatiffidas, on the other hand, always died at my care and now are looking good and spreading all around. I always wanted to have them in my tanks and always failed for whatever reason, so one more good news. This week I bought some tissue cultured riccardia, split it in many parts and glued some of it all around the tank, in as many different micro-environments as I could. I'm curious to see which will grow better. I hope at least one of them pulls through.

Finally, the bolbitis used to be sad and miserable in the previous setup. Its leaves were darkened and opaque, small and brittle. It would grow ok under the shade of the main wood piece, but when it grew outside of it, it would get instantly filled with all kinds of algae. This time, I planted it under the same wood piece, but at the center, not directly under any light, and it's gotten huge and bright and glorious, even when reaching the direct light. It's getting a little too glorious, though, so I may need to consider putting some limits.

My few buces, which were being farmed far away from plant-eating fishes after the fiasco in the previous setup, suffered a bit during the transition, but are now looking a little better. A few of them had some GSA, but I have high hopes for them. The Althernanteras, on the other hand, have always suffered from curly leaves and stunting. Eventually one plant grows pretty, but when I trim it, it goes bad again. It has been this way since forever, and it didn't change in this setup. I read somewhere that it was better to discard the tops and let the base regrow, when trimming, but I have been doing that in most cases and it doesn't work for me. I'll try to replant the tops from now on and see what happens.

All things considered, on the plant side it has been a huge improvement over the previous setup, but there are still a few things to sort out. I'll now add a bunch of random photos that I dug out from my phone, somewhat in chronological order, but I'll make an effort of updating this journal with recent pictures as things evolve.

A few numbers to conclude this series of posts. Most off the top of my head, since I don't have my spreadsheets here with me.

Ferts are KNO3 (from a dubious source), potassium phosphate and magnesium sulfate 7H2O. Something like 10ppm NO3, 4ppm PO4 and whatever K comes from that, 0.5dGH of magnesium. This is the weekly dose, and I frontload half of that and divide the other half in 2 subsequent doses. I also frontload ~0.05ppm of Fe EDDHA (used to dose 0.1ppm, but it made the water too dark, now it is barely noticeable). I alternate with 3 days where I dose a mix of two local brands of micros. I mix them because I don't really trust either of them, so there's a better chance of having some micros in there this way. I don't have the numbers here, but I think I'm at maybe 2/3 of the dose in the instructions. Recently I tried to up it to 100% of the recommended dose, but I saw some stunting and some extra GSA and reverted back to what I had before.

Other than that, I frontload 2 tea spoons of magnesium sulfate and 2 of calcium chloride. Not calibrated tea spoons, actual spoons. At some point I weighted them, but now I don't remember what it was. But in the end, the GH rises from 3 (which is what I get from my tap water) to 6~7. I assume that the initial 3 are mostly calcium, so there is some extra Mg in the ferts solution.

On that note, I do weekly 50% water changes with tap water, filtered through activated coal. At some point, I was going crazy not knowing what was wrong, so I decided to switch from prime to activated coal, expecting that maybe my water was contaminated with herbicides or something. Nothing really changed, but now I'm gonna use the coal until I run out of it. My tap water is really soft, 0.5dKH and 3dGH. I have absolutely no other information, the water supplier only informs turbidity and some sort of microbial population metric, and I don't have many tests.

The 2 Finnex lamps ramp up from 0 to 100% from 9am to 12pm, then stay up there for 3 hours and ramp down to a low light setting from 3pm to 6pm, and then ramp down to zero from 6pm to 9pm. I don't remember exactly, but the indoor plant lamps turn on maybe at 11am and turn off at 5:30pm. The one on top of the stem plants has both channels on, and the one on top of the stone plateau has only one channel on.

CO2 runs from 8am to 6pm.

Did I miss anything?

 

[Luciën]

The rise in water hardness is probably from the stones, they look like limestone to me.

Fun to read detailed post you made here, and cool to see someone else with the same odd tank dimensions

 

[LMuhlen]

After writing this introduction I went and double checked the timer for the main lights and found that they were starting one hour earlier than I thought, so I fixed it. Now it does work from 10:30AM to 5:30PM. It turns on just half an hour before the full ramp up cycle of the Finnex lamps.

This week I went on a small 3 days trip, so of course the CO2 failed when I was away, despite of it running smoothly for months so far. The pump for the reactor didn't start and eventually it got flooded with CO2 when the solenoid opened. Or maybe the other way around, the pump got flooded with CO2 because the solenoid misbehaved? I don't really trust my CO2 valves.

I'm not sure if related, but I had a significant increase in GSA and/or GDA on some plants and on the hardscape/glass. I was maybe expecting it to decrease with the slightly reduced light, so it was a bit frustrating to see it increase. I'm considering increasing phosphate dosing once more, from 4 to 5ppm weekly. One of the wave makers looks like it is half black, half blue, with a layer of algae paint where the light hits.

Also not sure if related, but I got some black mold in my macros solution. It never happened before. I don't use anything to prevent mold, but it never happened. It decanted, so for now I'm dosing from the top of the bottle. Not sure if it is possible that it consumed phosphates or something else?

My floating plants are not well. They are multiplying and all that, but they are much smaller than they once were and they all have some melting leaves. I was hoping to use them as a reference for fertilization, but with all the diving that they have been making I can't assume it is nutrient related. So I accelerated my plan of reducing my oversized water circulation, at least on the surface. Now one of the wave makers is not aiming at the surface, it is angled slightly downwards. Overall tank agitation increased, because some of the flow used to dissipate when aimed at the surface, but now that's 25 minutes every hour with very minor surface agitation. And there is 10 minutes with both wave makers off, so that's 35 minutes of no surface agitation and 25 minutes of surface agitation. That was the wave maker that seemed to bother the floating plants the most, so now maybe they will remain dry and not trapped under my anubias.

I previously noted how I was satisfied with my nymphaea, which wasn't growing too large. Well, when I came back from my trip, all leaves seemed to have increased 50%. I had this theory that weak light and insufficient CO2 would stimulate the nymphaea to grow larger and taller leaves. The light bit is tricky, because the large leaves shade the new leaves, which end up growing large as well. With the CO2 restored, I trimmed the top leaves and I hope that the small ones will remain small. It also sprouted 2 new plantlets which had nowhere to root amidst the rocks, so they were just hanging there with the roots swaying with the flow. I gave them to a fellow aquarist.

I also did a major trimming of the rotalas, and instead of just cutting the tops off, I removed everything and replanted the tops. The bottom parts were looking frail after a few trimmings. My Riccia block collapsed after I moved it deeper, farther from the light. Maybe a coincidence, probably not. I removed a brick of Riccia and will now wait for it to regrow from scratch.

After all of this writing and musing, I would like some suggestions regarding my major plant problems so far.

Anubias are growing fine, but most of the original leaves are covered in GSA. Any way to reverse it?
Althernantheras are not happy. Some of them look OK but are growing very slowly. Others look like fusilli pasta. I had a couple of nice looking ones which I had to trim. I decided not to replant the top but to let it regrow, and the regrowth looks terrible. The mini version, which are on top of the plateau, are not looking great either, but are not retorted either. Just not lush.
I can't grow Hydrocotyle (tripartita?). The leaves are tiny and sparse and eventually stop growing. It should be an easy plant, I think, but it won't grow.
My one remaining stem of Ludwigia mini red stunted... I trimmed the very top, but it grew stunted still. Most of the leaves melted already.
The moss died, almost all of it. It looks like the stems are there but the leaves died, its weird, usually it all dries out. In my other tank it's growing great.
Montecarlo is growing miserably small leaves and lots of runners. There is one runner now with pretty leaves, so maybe it adapted finally?

Anyway, any help is appreciated.

 

[LMuhlen]

This is one of the Alternanteras that are doing OK, without twisted or curled leaves. Still looking pretty underwhelming. The next one is a mini that is only maybe 1 month old, but also not showing any promising growth. The really damaged ones I trimmed recently, so no pictures.

And some random pictures of the fishes. The apple melanotaenia looks stunning in the morning, but for some reason it loses its colors later in the afternoon. I notice that it likes to court the female early on, so that must be it. The Galaxy rasboras were all really shy in the shrimp tank, and now they simply never hide and are always swimming in open waters. Finally the corydoras, an old picture that I had to filter the hell out of it to remove the purple blur that was what my phone originally captured...

 

[mort]

Nice chunky sterbai cories.

Rainbows are early morning spawners, so tend to look their best then.

 

[LMuhlen]

My bolbitis was looking really healthy, but now a couple of leaves took a turn for the worse. They are both on the higher light side of the tank, but being in the center, they don't get the full wrath of the lamps.

One leaf started to show necrotic patches, while another leaf decided to grow vertically all the way from the bottom straight out of the water, emerging in an unhealthy way...

Considering that the other leaves are looking good, what can I learn from these 2 rebellious sprouts?

 

[Tim Harrison]

Lovely images; a bit Surreal. Looks like the fish are swimming through your living room. Reminds me of Billy the Fish in Viz...😁

 

[Conort2]

All the fish look really healthy. Makes a change to see some celestial pearl danios in top condition, a lot of the ones available these days are really inbred.

Cheers

 

[LMuhlen]

Thanks for the comments!

Yes, having no background makes it tricky to take nice photos. The purple light makes it even worse. But seeing it live, both effects get diminished, maybe by our brain's ability to filter the weird away and focus on the parts we want to see.

Yesterday I found this little fellow under the anubias. It is the first time I get a fish to spawn in my tanks for a decade at least, and the first time I get a cory, so pretty satisfied. One more sterbai for the pack.

Plants are still plagued by GSA. This week I redid my macros mix and I accidentally picked a KCl bottle instead of the Potassium Phosphate. I noticed it before mixing the powders, but it got me thinking that maybe I did this mistake last time... That would explain why the tank took a sudden turn for the worse. Also why the solution got mold, which never happened before.

In any case, I measured phosphates in my tank, with my expired Sera kit I can never read the shades of blue, I don't know if I have to touch the bottle to the scale and have the scale be shaded, or if I just leave the bottle hanging above the scale so that it is not shaded... In any case, for what it's worth, my expired kit measured either 1 or 2ppm. Considering I add 4ppm a week and the max accumulation should be 8ppm... maybe I was not dosing phosphates.

So I just frontloaded 100% of the weekly dose after the water change instead of the 50% I usually do and am now hoping for the best. I actually plan on keep frontdosing 100% from now on, I think it makes sense in my tank that has mostly slow growers, I assume they don't really consume much of the ferts and frontdosing keeps it stable after a water change. Micros I will keep dosing 3x a week. I will also try dosing the Fe EDDHA twice, it seems that to not get the water tainted I need a very small dose that looks insufficient, so a second dose could make sense.

In other news, with the last change to the wave makers, the floating plants seem to be improving, finally. Haven't had a single case of floating plants entangled with the anubias anymore. Problem is that now they are getting entangled with the crypto balansaes, which reached the surface 😖 With both plants teaming up, they are shading the plants underneath a bit too much. Now I'm trying to find the sweet spot for the wave makers that blows the floaters away from the balansae, but doesn't shake them up too much.

 

[LMuhlen]

Another weekend, another water change. I trimmed the C. balansae more intensely this time, removed maybe half of the longer leaves. It seems like the plants directly under the leaves were suffering from lack of light. I trimmed those as well, they were starting to look bad, too tall, not as compact as expected. Now they'll have a new chance to grow with adequate light.

The floating plants are finally looking happy enough, no diving for a while now. Some leaves have signs of damage, but I'm not sure if I should worry about it just yet since they may be the old leaves from before the change in the wave maker positioning. One more week and I'll take some pics to ask for opinions.

The Althernantheras are looking as miserable as they get...

On other news, someone ate a bunch of Staurogyne, all of a sudden... They were looking good too... I can't catch a break with my plants 😖 Prime suspects are the apple rainbows, I often see them nibbling the Staurogyne, but never saw them actually cutting them and eating. Ranked next are the Siamese Algae Eaters, since they are the largest fishes in the tank and could have the appetite to eat so many leaves. I have 3 of them, grown adults, and it looks to me like there are 2 different species. It could also be the Garra flavatras, the ghost shrimps or the snails... But it feels less likely. If this goes on, I'll have to get rid of the accused, which is a shame.

I plan on writing about the micro mixes that I use, they look unorthodox... But I need to be at my home computer where I did the concentration calculations... One of them has a weirdly high concentration of Manganese, at recommended dosage, it's above 1ppm 🤔Anyways, I'll make a post about it soon.

 

[LMuhlen]

So, I have both of these micro mixes available and since I don't much trust any of them, I decided to mix them.

At the recomended dosage, they give as follows:

Powerfert Micro
Fe	0,07​	ppm
Mn	0,05​	ppm
B	0,01​	ppm
Zn	0,01​	ppm
Cu	0,01​	ppm
Mo	0,01​	ppm

Mbreda Micronutri
Fe	0,1​	ppm
Mn	1,1​	ppm
B	0,01​	ppm
Zn	1​	ppm
Cu	0,01​	ppm
Mo	0,05​	ppm

After mixing them, with my current dose, I get the following in weekly values, which I divide in 3 days:

Fe	0,050​	ppm
Mn	0,273​	ppm
B	0,006​	ppm
Zn	0,235​	ppm
Cu	0,006​	ppm
Mo	0,015​	ppm

Not 100% confirmed, but the Powerfert one apparently uses gluconate and the Mbreda uses EDTA. I complement this with Fe EDDHA, something between 0.05 and 0.10 ppm weekly.

My question is, can these micros be causing some of the issues I'm facing, or are they OK?

 

[LMuhlen]

A quick update. The GSA outburst appears to have receded after remaking my macros mix. At least the growth on the glass seems to be what it was before, I have to clean the glass every other week. New leaves also seem unbothered by these algae. Older leaves, on the other hand, are still infested, especially the anubias. Last week I removed one anubia nana and gave it a bath of oxygen peroxide and tried to brush the algae off. Nothing changed. I expected the algae to slowly die the following days, but one week later it looks the same as all the other anubias in the tank. I will probably have to do a massive trim of older leaves at some point...

Staurogyne repens is still being eaten and I still don't know who it is.

The balansae are challenging me. I like them, but they are blocking too much light. I may have to significantly reduce their numbers.

One of these days I saw the baby corydora again, only for a moment, but it is still alive.

I have some new fishes being quarantined, a shoal of pencilfish Nannostomus eques, hatchetfish to make company to my single survivor from the tank rebuilding process, a new female apple rainbow to replace one that didn't survive the previous quarantine, and some more rummynoses to thicken the shoal. Also 3 crystal bloodfin tetras (at least this is what they were labeled). I'm hoping to find more of these bloodfins, but so far there were only 3 available. I also want more rummynoses, but they will have to wait the next quarantine cycle, this one is mostly full.

Pictures from Dec 10th. Really hard to take good pictures, the room is too brightly lit, there are lots of reflexes. At night the lights are too dimmed for pictures... And I don't like messing with the finnex timers, they are annoying to configure, with their 3 hours intervals... I have to do it at 6pm or 9pm, etc., to set it back to the standard configuration.

 

[Tim Harrison]

Looking great on both sides. It's no mean feat as anyone who's tried it will testify @Zeus.

 

[LMuhlen]

We had a rainy day, so I manage some photos with less reflection.

GDA/GSA have reduced significantly. It was probably something wrong with my macro mix.

I got rid of most of the C. balansae, only left one in there. I also trimmed the two largest leaves of the bolbitis. A shame, they were very pretty. I removed a small wood piece that was hidden in the middle of the Microsorum in the bottom corner, on one of the sides. It was not adding anything to the layout and some of the Microsorum were dying. I did a good cleaning at that corner, hopefully it will help. One of the buces which were glued to the main wood piece unglued itself all of a sudden. It wasn't growing as well as the ones stuck to the stones. Just in case, I glued it to stone this time, and since I was able to split it in two, now I have one in each side of the tank.

I performed an odd test to my circulation system. I'm used to adding the Fe EDDHA to the input of the filter, through the surface skimmer, to see the red bloodlike stain spread through the tank. It is entertaining. This time I added it to the input of the CO2 reactor pump. It wasn't easy and required some acrobatics, but what I found out was that the CO2 output was in a nearly dead zone and it took a long time for the EDDHA to spread. My CO2 output was an improvised flute at the bottom of the far side of the tank, but the flow was so low through the reactor that the flute was basically pointless. Now I removed it and aimed the output upwards at 45º. It seems like it pushes the CO2 rich water straight to the main current.

I now put the dropchecker at the opposite side of where it was. Now it is near the wall side, where most of the problematic plants are. But I'm having a hard time reading it, I think it is being shaded by something and the color is very dark. Also the suction cup kept dropping. I cleaned the glass a bit better and now it is standing there, but I postponed picking it up to see the color because of that... I'm afraid it won't stick back in. Which is silly, I'll just do it tonight.

I'm glad to announce that I found 2 baby sterbai, so double the enjoyment. And maybe there are more, since they are very shy.

Quarantine ends tomorrow, so I'll release a new batch of fishes. I'm eager to see how the pencil fish will react.

The rotalas are getting a bit wild, they are next in the line for some trimming.

The moss, which looks mostly dead, is always sprouting small green healthy pointers. So I'm always waiting for it to come back from the dead. But it never happens, so either those pointers are also dying, or they are not growing at all, since this has been going on for a while now. Maybe someone is eating the moss? Argh

I'm also preparing myself psychologically to trim the algae infested leaves of the anubias. I don't think they will clean themselves, the algae are like tattoos at this point.

 

[hypnogogia]

Lovely red lotus plant.

 

[LMuhlen]

Recently arrived from the quarantine