Been visiting here for advice and ideas for a few days now so thought I'd sign up and join the community



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbolFBuXvpw

This is how my tank was looking a few weeks ago...

Now I'm fairly certain this here is due to excessive phosphates but I'm not 100% sure, in the last few weeks I've attempted to glue most of my plants to driftwood with varying degrees of success. Most of the Anubis plants took fine but about half of the java ferns died that didn't have great rhizomes to attach to the driftwood, was already using a capful of seachem flourish and a 2-3 of flourish excel weekly and I also purchased some stage 2 liquid fertilizers (NPK) to try get some growth happening. But since then a lot of my Anubis has started going brownish (necrosis?) as pictured





From what I've been able to work out it may either be due to excessive phosphates or a deficiency in potassium.

Have I added to much phosphates like a fool? or is something else going on here? At first I thought I may had shocked the plants from gluing them but now I'm not so sure, some plants seem to be going brown and dying, but others are showing real signs of growth. I did think if its the phosphates that are too high that daily water changes for a week days would help but... that would also be counter productive if its not phosphates :/

Best course of action?

Without knowing what size tank and the amount and concentration of liquid fertilizers it is very hard to say if you have too much of one or not. I will say that it appears as if the new leaves are normal and it is quite possible that the older leaves are simply dying from the act of transplanting them. That is pretty common and will correct itself in a few weeks if all the needed nutrients are available. If those plants came from a tank that had co2 injected it will also cause the older leaves to melt/wither.

For what it's worth, I have never seen adverse effects from too much of any macros. And since liquid fertilizers are mostly water anyway I doubt you have too much unless you are tripling the dose listed on the bottle without injected co2. Micros which is what Flourish is are a different story. I have seen them reach toxic levels and there are a couple threads here about that.

Your plants are all slow growers so you may need to give them a couple extra weeks to get over the effects of being transplanted.

Overnight the anubis plant last photo pictured on the right has become pretty tatty, will remove all dead leaves.

Been a total of 3 weeks since transplanting, after a bit more reading overnight i'd say it would have been pretty hard to overdose these plants with fertz, but this may be consistent with either stress from transplanting and/or adding too much flourish excel. Plants have been in this tank for a few years now, no injected co2 but am building a diy system to give it a go. Now off to look at what overdosing on excell may have caused :/

Thanks for the feedback!