my fault

and perhaps it is what did in the otos, too. Tank has been not looking quite right- black stuff spreading, leaves on the apono curving downward- one made almost a complete circle. I've never seen that before. But the newer leaves on plants continue to look good, so I thought I just had to wait it out.

Then read something about filter media and bio-cubes. I had added some bio-cubes to my filter recently, thinking it would only do good to house more bacteria. But I put them in the wrong place, in front of the sponge pads, and didn't realize this would be a problem. Here's why: the cubes get clogged with debris that's bad for the bacteria- supposed to have the particles filtered out first- the order of flow should go: through coarse media, fine media, bio housing, back into tank. I had a frustrating morning solving this, because when I started plucking out the bio-cubes accidentally dropped one down into the impeller housing and then couldn't put the filter back together, but couldn't see in there to realize why until I took the entire filter off the tank and emptied it. (Why aren't these made with white insides?) I put the cubes back in where there's a gap under the wheel, on the outflow side of the plastic screen that holds my filter media in place. Don't want to just toss them because I had to cut some of the old filter pads off (crammed some in place to hold the plastic panel off the wheel) and don't want to loose too much bacteria at once. I took out the useless carbon floss (that gets clogged quickly as well I found out) and put in the fine sponge instead. (If this arrangement of media types works well, I will add more bio-cubes in that gap as I phase out the old blue filter floss).

And then since I had some water out of the tank anyway I did a small partial wc (5 gallons) because so much stuff got kicked into the water when I had the filter apart, and since I had my hands in the tank I pulled a bunch of dying leaves off plants, tired of looking at them and want to prompt more of the nice, new growth. The crypts look a lot smaller, now. Purplish leaves here in center of the plant are newer.

The ones on the end look pathetic now with such reduce foliage, but I'm pleased with how the rotala in back corner is growing up.

Another shot of that. You can see my rotala wall coming back!

I also moved the anubias so it is under the big root thing, it prefers shade.

I've probably done too much now stop. Take hands out of the tank. Refill the new, clean water, all the fishes are darting around looking like they feel refreshed. Don't like that I removed some water so soon after dosing ferts so I added back in a half smidgen of potassium (it's harmless to overdose on this), a fourth the dose of micros and a pinch of magnesium. Because that helped my smaller tank so maybe it will be good for this one too, plus I read the leaf curl can be from lack of this element.

An overall shot- you can see two kuhlis wiggling up in the back left corner. I also quit using the filter baffle. Seems the flow doesn't bother anyone in here.