thirty-eight update

Most things look good in here. My olive nerite snail died. Took out the subwassertang clumps on sponges- including the 'bridge', and trimmed the rest. Found there's three baby crypt becketti 'petchii' growing! And another new baby crypt wendtii sprouting too.

Crypts willisii and retrospiralis in the grassy corner are coming loose again. Had to peg one back down with a thin plastic strip folded in half. Even though I'm still feeding in the opposite corner, it seems the kuhlis disrupt too much. Worse, I found tiny black tufts of BBA on some willisii leaves and very tip ends of many on the big crypt wendtii. Simply removed those leaves. It really thinned out the clump of wendtii- but all the leaves that had it showing were older, outside ones- some of them came away easily from the base so maybe the plants was getting ready to discard those anyway.

Buce had some black spots on leaves, too- I took off three of the worst ones.

Good news is that the pieces of retrospiralis rhizome are all sprouting- looks like two plants from each segment.

This one is further back, hard to see.

Thinned out many leaves of apono crispus last week (and a few longest leaves of capuroni). Not sure why the aponos didn't look well- none of them had hit the surface in weeks and many had worn looking edges, lots thinning out and loosing color, melting? I added root tabs last week for them.

I did something to 'tame' the spread of my capuroni. I fit a rubber band around the base of the stems- to hold them a bit more upright not so sprawled out. It wasn't easy to do- and I damaged a few leaves a bit. Missed some of the smaller ones, too. Have to think of another object to use to put a ring around that base, if I want to keep it this way...

Found a very simple way to peg hornwort down to substrate, without the annoyance of retying rubber bands each time they need a trim. I slipped the stem end through a glass bead. Left foliage on the node just below the bead, but clipped short- so it's just enough to hold it on. Really tickled with this- why didn't I think of it sooner? It works great.

Brought over some strands of flame moss trimmed out of the tenner- and glued onto the stones where there are a few gaps. Some of the strands I originally glued down don't seem to have recovered well... looking close can see tiny tufts of algae on here, but the shrimps do their job.

Some of my new java ferns have awful looking foliage with blackened areas spreading. But just yesterday I spied the fuzzy roots of a new baby plant sprouting under a leaf- it's in the upper left corner here.

And on the pebble where I fastened a few leftover rhizome bits that didn't have any foliage, there are a few new leaves sprouting- so soon I will have to find a proper place in the tank for those as well.

The flower on my anubias afzelii finally faded. For a while it had a thick yellow part sticking up in the middle- stigma?- with fat yellow shapes on it almost looked like corn kernels. The fishes picked at it for a while. It did not develop into anything, so I finally cut it off.

Is it a problem that I only have two nerite snails now? More coming in a few days- I'm making a trade for some plants. Cleaned the glass well, this week- it took a lot of work with the algae scrubber pad. Especially on short end near window lots of very dark green or black specks hard to get off. I used to have clear plastic over the window on that side blocking part of the light, took it off in winter since blinds are closed most of the day- maybe I will put it back. Hope those dark specks aren't more BBA coming in.