Melting HC and Dying Fauna

[PlAnTaNoOb]

Hi bros, need some help here.

My HC's are melting away, and my otos and yamatos are dying one by one.
I wonder whats wrong.

My tank's 2x1x1.5ft.
Dosing EI method:
3 times a week for below doses Saturday (after WC), Monday, Wednesday
Seachem Flourish Nitrogen – 20ml  24ppm NO3
KH2PO4 – 0.02 teaspoon  1.42ppm PO4
K2SO4 – 0.3 teaspoon  22.34ppm K+
LushGro Micro  5 drops

All these are done 3 times a week. Meaning 60ml of nitrogen a week, etc.

Lights: 2 X24w T5HO; 4 hours + 4 hours break + another 4 hours
Compressed CO2 injection, Drop checker's between dark and light green.
Temp constant at 25°C.

BBA s slowly dying, but so are my HC and critters!

[PlAnTaNoOb]

Can someone help me out pls?

[Shadow]

how old is the setup?

[PlAnTaNoOb]

Hi Robert, its 2 weeks and 4 days old.

[Shadow]

2 weeks and 4 days old, your tank cycle probably not long enough. Do you use old filter media?

HC is one of the hard plant, especially when you bought emerse version from LFS. Need very high light to convert it to emerse.

[alechim]

Did you measure your nitrate,ammonia level?

[barmby]

HC is hard plant to keep. Start with easy ones first.

[PlAnTaNoOb]

2 weeks and 4 days old, your tank cycle probably not long enough. Do you use old filter media?

HC is one of the hard plant, especially when you bought emerse version from LFS. Need very high light to convert it to emerse.

Oops... wrong info given. It's an old tank. More than 4 years old. I just rescaped it entirely 3 weeks ago. Everything in the filter remained the same. There's quite a bit of Eheim substrate pro inside. The tank's soil and 25% of water remained the same too. Even driftwood remained the same. So I doubt its due to cycling insufficiently.

Hmm... Maybe my lights are not enough. It seems equally bright though. But no space on top of tank to add another lightset already.
Maybe I should simply stick with the glosso and throw out the HC if its not improving.

[alechim]

If thats the case, look out for some sorts of poisoning due to excess of ammonia,nitrate etc. Look out for diseases symtoms too. This happens to me once and found out an internal baterial is infecting my tanks. my faunas were wiped out before I know what happened and reacte to it

[PlAnTaNoOb]

Thanks alechim. I think probably nitrate levels too high. Maybe 20ml of Flourish Nitrogen 3 times a week is too much for my yamatos and otos to take. Guess I'll half the dose and see what happens.

But can anyone adice if my lights are sufficient?

[alechim]

your lights should be more than enough

[taz]

It's great that your temperature is consistent. There's no problem converting HC emmerse to submerge. All you need is patience. HC need good CO2 and moderate lighting will be sufficient. Plant them deep in the size around 20 cent. Let only the leaves appear on the substrate. Nevermind if you cover some of the leaves. You need to monitor the plant growth. If your plant is not doing well, reduce the EI. The tank will go haywire if you continue to dose the same amount. If you don't mind, you can try Tropica (Plant Nutrition+ liquid). It's an all in one liquid fertiliser. Simple to use. Just follow instruction. Good luck!

[PlAnTaNoOb]

Thanks Taz, I think I know where I went wrong for the dying HC. The light wasn't enough. I added another 2 X24W T5HO, so now I've got 2 of these light sets. The HC started bubbling one day afterwards, and 3 days after adding lights, new green leaves started appearing.

Though now, I've got the problem of algae. Lol.

Btw, all but one of my yamatos died. Otos are ok now.

[Quincy]

Think that you should reduce your lighting to maybe 2 x 24w as your algae problem looks quite bad. HC can grow in moderate lighting too as Im using 24w pl light for my 1.5x1x1 feet tank and the HC is showing signs of creeping. For planting HC, patience is really needed.

[PlAnTaNoOb]

Hi Quincy,

I've read about HC being able to propagate under moderate light conditions, but in my case, my nice patches of HC, which were growing healthily previously, started melting away when I changed my 36W X2 PL lights to 24WX2 T5HO. And when I added another of the T5HO set, the HC patches started budding new leaves again. That's pretty convincing anecdotal evidence for a lack of light. As for algae... I guess I'll switch the driftwood of java fern to a new one, and retie new moss to the other DW. Sigh. Hope the AlgenMaster does what it does and stops the formation of algae spores.

[alechim]

for me my HC were growing and suddenly came to a stand still. Wondering why? my tank had a thread algae boom 2 weeks ago and I introduced SAE + yamato, cleared up within a week but now green spotted algae, green algae and staghorn algae boom. My HC is not pearling and some are showing signs of browning, but my HG are growing.

Tank size - 2 x 1.5 x 1
Lights - 3 x 24w T5
Filter - Hydor prime10
Substrate - ADA amazonia + Gex(light green) + red bee

I am dosing the following:

Lushgro aqua - 2ml x 3 times weekly
KH2PO4 - 1ml x 3 times weekly (10 teaspoon diluted with 600ml water) PO4 - 0.93ppm

.LushGro - Aqua
Nitrogen - 5.02530ppm
NO3 Nitrates - 22.25494ppm
Potassium - 36.19770ppm
Sulphur - 11.66690ppm
Magnesium - 2.05940ppm
Iron EDTA - 1.17810ppm
Manganese - 0.42840ppm
Boron - 0.21980ppm
Zinc - 0.06440ppm
Copper - 0.01750ppm
Molybdenum - 0.01120ppm



What could be happening?

[taz]

Check your water circulation. Staghorns usually cause by dirty water. Increase your CO2 bubble count. Your proportion of nitrate and phosphate need to be balance. Your nitrate seems to be on the high side. Lower your nitrate and leave the phosphate as it is. As you dose LushGro, reduce to twice per week with same amount. See hows the outcome in 2 weeks time.

[alechim]

my bubble count is 2bps and drop check is dark green.
Circulation wise, how to see whether it is enough? I do see some of my HC flowing. But I was enquiring in another thread, how much is enough?

To make things clearer, my scape slope from left to right. both my inflow (front of tank) and outflow (back of tank) are on the left and I also have a boyu installed on the right to give an extra "push" to the water current.

The signs in the tank is such when i tested the flow with debris. the debris will flow from the along the tank (back), then to the front and ended up circulating again, but never will the debris reach the inflow.

[Shadow]

Thrust your drop checker (assuming install correctly) instead of bubble counter. 2bps can mean nothing depending on how you introduce it into your tank, diffusior or reactor, etc. What is the flow rate of your Hydor prime10, it may not be enough depending on how dense you tank is. My 2ft tank filter is 2215 (620lph), it is also power the external inline CO2 reactor thus reduce the flow quite a bit.

[alechim]

Thrust your drop checker (assuming install correctly) instead of bubble counter. 2bps can mean nothing depending on how you introduce it into your tank, diffusior or reactor, etc. What is the flow rate of your Hydor prime10, it may not be enough depending on how dense you tank is. My 2ft tank filter is 2215 (620lph), it is also power the external inline CO2 reactor thus reduce the flow quite a bit.

I am using a diffuser, a boyu canister is "sucking" in the CO2 and diffusing it further. The boyu canister flowrate is 200L/hr and my hydor is 300L/hr, assuming I only get half the flowrate each i still have 250L/hr. My tank is not densly planted, only HG and HC