350 gallon EI example and fish health

[dewalltheway]

Tom...How is it that the glosso does not have one speck of algae on the leaves?? Is it flow, CO2 or what is it? It does not matter what I do to my tank, how much filtration I have, what I dose, etc but I always get this brown, green, black crap on my anubius nana petite leaves or any leaves for that matter. Have you ever fought this battle?

Originally Posted by plantbrain

Back to small fish:

6 week stage, I did not have much Gloss so I used a lot of Elatine, so it'll be another 5 weeks or so for the other end to fill in right.
This end is okay.








Tank's been running really well the last 3-4 weeks now.
Got algae bad in the 2nd and 3rd week's, but then cleared up nicely thereafter.

[plantbrain]

Originally Posted by dewalltheway

Tom...How is it that the glosso does not have one speck of algae on the leaves?? Is it flow, CO2 or what is it? It does not matter what I do to my tank, how much filtration I have, what I dose, etc but I always get this brown, green, black crap on my anubius nana petite leaves or any leaves for that matter. Have you ever fought this battle?

Magic dust.



Sometimes I have in the past if I did not do something correctly.
Generally not enough care, enough CO2/ferts, too much light at that point in time.

This tank had GDA algae bad for about 2 weeks, but as you can see, no issues now. That grow in phase is critical and once you get past that, then you get nice growth like this.

I'll trim this rug to to the bone like I do in my 120 Gallon example when I had gloss in there. I showed how to trim it and then took pics of the recovery, then the next post trim and recovery again. You mow just like a lawn. The new growth is always nice, clean, small and tight.

Healthy happy plant leaves are the best defense against algae.

[plantbrain]

The gloss marches on:

[plantbrain]

I just turned the light on, so the tank is sleepy, so are the fish.








Before the trimming:


After trimming:




I will likely remove the weedy Hairgrass and replace with Isoetes or something.
I have some more larger Rock on the way, so I'll redo some of that also.

[Obakemono]

How fast will the glosso come back?

[plantbrain]

Originally Posted by Obakemono

How fast will the glosso come back?

It'll look decent again in a week, then grow in nice after 3-4 weeks.

The roots/lower stems are left so they will regrow rapidly, much faster than if I replanted the tops again(this would take another 8-10 weeks).

It's also much less mess and faster than replanting would be which is a PITA on a large foreground area.

[KenRC51]

Amazing tank!! How many cradinal you have in there? I'm guessing about 200?

How come you only trim the corner of the tank? What about the rest of the glosso I see in the picture?

[plantbrain]

Originally Posted by KenRC51

Amazing tank!! How many cradinal you have in there? I'm guessing about 200?

How come you only trim the corner of the tank? What about the rest of the glosso I see in the picture?

I do not trim all at once, that will lead to large differences in the plant biomass= algae.

500 cardinals actually.

The Gloss was tallest in that spot also, the other areas are not over grown, so they do not get trimmed until they become that way.

[plantbrain]

1 week post mowing trim.
Grew back faster than expected.

[andrewss]

have I mentioned I really love this tank

[tex627]

sweet thread, tom!

[plantbrain]

The Gloss marches on, needs trimmed a fair amount, I decided to reduce the light by 1/2. This should reduce the growth a lot and reduce the CO2 demand.

The NuClerar filter cartridge is clogging pretty fast still, I'm changing it every 1-2 weeks.

Tank looks as good as it ever has.

[plantbrain]