24 February 2016

the aquariums

I forgot to jot down my notes this past friday. The large tank got adjusted dose of ferts without KN03. No algae on the glass, some on the plants. Since I dropped the nitrate dose the new leaves on aponos are growing slower, but staying clear of algae. It's almost time for more root tabs for them, I think. More buces have new leaves emerging in both tanks, very slowly. BBA is all gone from the sponge prefilter- wahoo!
I cut back most of the rotala tops and discarded lower parts of stems, so that corner looks pretty empty now. To my surprise when I tested it, the smaller tank had higher nitrates than usual- almost 40ppm. When I went to clean the tank, found lots and lots of small, short white fibers floating near the surface. Almost looked like white cat hair. Finally I figured out where it came from- the remnants of leaf petioles on the big anubias. I had trimmed leaves off (it's grown a new one now)
but there was still some old stem material near the rhizome and now this was decaying and coming off as dead plant fiber. Siphoned out as much as I could and reduced macro dose on that tank too- but did not leave out the KN03 in this case. Gave 6ml of micros. I think that was a bit much- was better the week before at 5 or less. Wisteria is looking great, and ludwigias getting close to hitting the ceiling. Warped leaf shape much less- you can see the third leaf set down from top on the smaller one in center here, was twisted and newer ones not so much deformity.

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