whetu

Very useful articles on the Plant Geek site. Thanks for referring me there, Alan. Here's the link for anyone else interested: http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_nutrient.htm After looking at the chart I'm pretty sure the likely culprits are potassium and/or calcium. The symptoms fit with what I'm seeing in my swords, and neither of them is mentioned as being present in the Plant Gro liquid fert I'm using (and as I said, there is no analysis on the JBL clay balls... bit of a shame really and a bit of an oversight if they want serious plant geeks to use them!) Thanks to everyone who made suggestions. Looks like you were on the right track. Ok so what do I do about it? What would happen if I buried a bit of egg shell under the substrate, next to the roots of each of the sword plants? (I would clean the shell up first of course to make sure there was no egg that would rot and pollute the tank). How about potassium? Give the fish bananas for breakfast? :lol: More realistically, does anyone have some PMDD for sale? (There is none on TradeMe at the moment.)

OMG! You just made me lose all hope in humankind!

Welcome! I'm also a huge fan of Mr Amano (aren't we all?) I could sit and look at one of his tanks for hours. Days. Weeks. Years! Ont he other hand I also know my limitations (and love my clown loaches too much) so I tend to aim for the dutch-style look in my own tank. But that won't stop me drooling every time I see a pic of an Amano tank. :bounce: :bounce: Now Phoenix, was that story about the goldfish really true?! If so, I will have to revise my estimation of how truely stupid people can be. Please tell me you made it up.

Fascinating! I have never experienced this myself but I'm glad I read this thread and now know what it's likely to be, if I ever do see it/hear of it again.

Hmm, that's an interesting one. I have never heard of leaving your lights off while cycling. I would suggest that you do whatever is best for your plants - in this case turn your lights on just as you plan to do after the cycling has finished. My reasoning is that if you want to limit algae growth long term, one of the best things you can do is to have healthy, thriving plants. They will then out-compete the algae for available nutrients from the water and keep the algae levels low. That's just my thoughts on the matter, and someone else who has heard the recommendation about not uising lights might be able to clarify the reasoning behind it better. I'm always open to learning new things!

Ah now - rocks fizzing might be a different thing! It would certainly be worth testing the pH if you're putting fizzing rocks in your tank! I'm glad to hear the consensus is still that terracotta won't affect your pH because that is what I always believed (and what my experience supported) but Southerrrngirrl's experience had me doubting myself!

I didn't think it did either (I have never had a problem with it) but I did a search for the recent thread where someone had an issue and here it is: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=35529&start=15 About half way down page 2:

Thanks, Alan. I will look at the plant geek article and see if it sheds any light on the matter. Maybe I should also feed my fish more and stop doing gravel vacs!

If it's a dry terracotta pot then you're just forcing the tiny air bubbles out of it to make it fizz. I always thought terracotta didn't change the pH of water, but just recently someone on here found theirs raised their pH! Might be worth taking a look for that thread... and then it might be worth doing a pH test on your water and checking on the pot before you decide to leave it in the tank.

And phosphates are usually present in fish food, right? So there should be enough being delivered by the food that I shouldn't have to add it as a fert? Or maybe a pinch of food a couple of times a day doesn't deliver enough? :-?

Hmmm.. All food for thought! I do a gravel vac maybe every 3 - 4 weeks when I start to see a bit of gunk building up on the surface. When I do vacuum the gravel I just do the front part of the tank that has no plants. I should do a nitrate test and see if there's enough nitrogen in there. And there's that Potassium clue again. (Do aquatic plants need phosphorus? The N-P-K ferts for terrestrial plants would make me think they should...)

Ooooh interesting! Potassium and calcium are both not mentioned on the Plant Gro label so I wonder if one of them is the missing link! *Waits impatiently for Alanmin to show up* :bounce: :bounce:

LOL nice try! :lol: Next time I ake my tank apart and re-do it from scratch I would love to install all those lovely high-tech gadgets! When I win lotto and get a huge tank with all the bells and whistles I will be sure to let you know.

The Nutrafin Plant Gro says "Iron Enriched" on the label, but when I used the recommended dose I only got green water algae blooms :evil: and saw no improvement in the swords. I wonder how long I would need to use it for, to see a difference in the swords? From memory I think I used it every couple of days for a week or two, stopped when the green water became too much, then after I cleared up the green water I tried again with the same result. Then a few weeks later I tried it at half the recommended dose and got another bloom and gave up. I don't have any carbon in my filter, so I would have thought that the iron would have hung around long enough to have made a difference to the swords if that was what they were looking for. Whaddaya reckon?

I was using flourish Excel for a while (trying to get rid of BBA) and I have some left so I could use it again. But I think my sword's symptoms are a result of missing trace elements... so with low light and low nutrient I think it would probably be a waste to add carbon. Maybe someone can correct me if my reasoning is flawed?

I take your point about overdoing it, but I certainly don't think they're getting too much nutrient. When they first started showing signs of malnutrition they were just planted in plain gravel with no added ferts at all. Then there was no change when I added the JBL balls. Hmmm... the JBL balls are described on the box as "clay balls, loaded with nutrients" but there is no analysis to tell me what nutrients they have, or in what concentrations. The Plant Gro liquid fert has a whole lot of ingredients listed, but notably includes no potassium. I wonder how I can work out which trace elements are missing.

Yep, the key thing here is the light. The majority of low-growing carpet plants need high light to be successful. What lighting do you have in your tank? And what depth is it? (In a deep tank the light can have trouble penetrating the water.) Also what kind of substrate do you have? Your answers to these questions will help to decide on an appropriate carpet plant.

In my tank I have three amazon sword plants. One is rather large (more than 30cm across & 30cm tall) the other two are more like 20cm each. They are all probably a year old. The problem is, they are all showing signs of malnutrition: brown tips on leaves leaves thinning in some places and getting holes in them leaves of the smaller two plants are kind of wavy, instead of smooth & wide like the larger plant. A couple of months ago I put JBL balls under the substrate at the base of the plants to try to feed them, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. I was also using Nutrafin Plant Gro* liquid fert but again it didn't seem to help the plants - and each time I used it I ended up with green, cloudy water so I stopped using it. :evil: What do I need to feed my swords on to make them happy & healthy? The substrate in the tank is just pebbles - no added nutrients apart from the JBL balls. The other plants in the tank are java fern and ambulia (the java ferns have recently started getting tiny holes in the leaves too). I have 110 watts of lighting (3 x Phillips "cool daylight" tubes). I don't add CO2 to the tank (I have all the stuff for DIY CO2 but quite frankly haven't been bothered with it for years!) *Plant Gro contains nitrogen, boron, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum & zinc. Any help or advice much appreciated! :bounce:

Good on you, wagonman. As for getting rid of the old filter,do you have test kits? It might pay to keep an eye on the ammonia and nitrite in the tank, but generally I think a couple of weeks should be fine for getting your new filter seeded and working well. Is there no wayt you can keep both filters running permanently on the tank? More filters = always better :bounce:

I agree. But even though this one's a hoax, it must be possible in theory, right? As one of the commenters pointed out, the 'plume' of gas should be the same temperature as the person's body so it should be visible on the camera. How about that TV ad for heat pumps where they are supposedly using a thermal imaging camera to prove their point. Did anyone else notice the fish bowl with an angel fish in it? It shows the fish glowing warmer than the water. But a cold-blooded animal will just be the same temperature of the water around it. Is that a hoax too? (Well I suppose the ad people would call it "special effects")

Ooooh take a look at this... http://media.photobucket.com/image/disc ... de2009.jpg

LOL! :lol: Who's having a bad day then? Just to take the contrary view, I think there's nothing more beautiful than a shimmering golden fish in front of a dark green, leafy backdrop.

Yeah like swimming togs. :roll: Don't you love it when you buy a pair of togs and read the label and it says something like, "Do not expose to chlorine. Dry flat in shade." :roll: So yes, I think Caryl did mean to keep your heater out of water and sunlight. Best of all, never take it out of the box and store it in a hermetically sealed container.

That's one of the reasons I chose to go with eheims. I'm not one of these people who changes/upgrades stuff regularly, and I've been keeping fish for enough years now to know that this is a hobby I will have for the rest of my life. So I will probably be running the same two eheims (possibly on the same tank) 20 years from now. I will also have the same clown loaches! :lol:

mmmmm! Fresh eggs! I saw a video on Youtube the other day of a guy demonstrating the easy way to shell a hard-boiled egg. He made a hole in each end of the shell, then blew in one end and the whole egg popped out the other end. I haven't tried this myself so don't blame me if it goes horribly wrong! :lol: We recently joined a local organic food co-op. Normally I get my eggs at the farmers' market and thought they were fresh but the co-op eggs are incredibly fresh! I wouldn't be surprised if they were being laid in one end of the carton while I was picking them out of the other end! Lovely! :bounce: