on going lean

Here's my thirty-eight after two weeks of no attention (minimal feeding is all). Seems like the plants hardly noticed. A few crypts and aponogetons bleached out a leaf or two is all. Hornwort grew like crazy, I had to trim every single stem of that, by more than half. Put a lot into the window tank as floaters. One plant that did deteriorate a lot was the watersprite. It looks terrible. Worse than when I first started and didn't know about dosing ferts. I guess when there was competition at the surface with few nutrients, hornwort won out. Back on schedule today. A benefit of feeding less, is the shrimps appear to work harder! Usually my flame moss and subwassertang have had tiny tufts of algae hairs (very pale, almost clear) but now that is almost all gone. I am really liking these two amano shrimp. They are very bold. They come right to the front of the tank and grab for food amongst the kuhli loaches. I often see them in the daytime scaling plants right out in the middle of things, and one of them likes to get up to the surface and scavenge among the hornwort needles. It's funny to see him scurrying around upside-down there. The serpae tetras are getting more responsive to my presence- they come out pretty quickly to see if there's food now. But still, only the younger (smaller) ones will eat frozen bugs - aphids mostly- from my garden. The bigger fish spit it out. Kuhlis, shrimps, and in the other tank, the swordtail and catfishes, aren't as picky. Samblu won't touch them. He'll eat frozen moths and caterpillars, but doesn't seem to like aphids unless they're fresh. Hm.