[CrazyCatPeekin]

I've got a new set up that is looking rather sad right now. It's a 29 gal with marineland double bright LEDs and eco-complete substrate. It was planted on Saturday with Cabomba, wisteria and several other plants.

Some of the plants came from one of my other tanks, but the ones that did not (cabomba & wisteria included) were loaded with snail eggs. So they all got a dip in a light bleach solution (1:20 bleach to water for 2-3 minutes).

By Monday, I was losing leaves...lots of them. I am vacuuming daily to try to get all the little bits out. The cabomba now looks like a bunch of sticks, each with one or, at the most, two leaf plumes. The wisteria is holding on to more leaves than the cabomba, but they are limp and transparent.

HOWEVER, there is new growth on all of them. Every cabomba stick has got several new little budding leaf plumes and the wisteria has some bright light green new growth as well. So, it looks to me like they are both going to come back.

I have a few of questions.

First, is there something that I can be doing to help this process along other than just vacuuming up the dead stuff?

The new growth on the wisteria is at all levels of the bare stalks, but the cabomba only seems to be sprouting in the top third or so of the stalks. Am I going to end up with really leggy cabomba?

Should I remove the limp leaves that are still clinging to the wisteria?

I purchased some Seachem Flourish and started that the other day. Should I be using excel also?

Other plants in the tank are java fern, lace java fern, crypt, amazon sword, an unknown plant and what I think is rotala macranda. Incidentally, the rotala looks really bad, too...but I am thinking there is not enough light for it and I don't have much hope of that coming back.

 

[wetworks]

I have a similar problem with my wisteria. I have two large bunches of it that came from different sources about three weeks apart. The first bunch did exactly what you describe, but after about two weeks it was a nice bright green with very obvious new growth. I added another large bunch on Tuesday of this week, and parts of it have died very quickly just like parts of the first bunch did. Since the first bunch recovered very nicely, I think that my second one will as well. Give your wisteria another week or two, and I think it will recover and grow nicely again. Just trim off the dead/dying leaves as you go.

For getting rid of snails on new plants I use about a cup of aquarium salt in about a gallon of water. Let the salt completely dissolve in the water, then soak the plants in it. The snails will all fall right off. Twenty minutes should do it.

 

[CrazyCatPeekin]

For getting rid of snails on new plants I use about a cup of aquarium salt in about a gallon of water. Let the salt completely dissolve in the water, then soak the plants in it. The snails will all fall right off. Twenty minutes should do it.

Will salt take care of eggs as well? There were only a few actual snails that I saw on the plants and I picked them off easily. But there were TONS of eggs...everywhere.

 

[150EH]

I would let them rebound for a couple of weeks and then trim and replant as needed.

I would think the bleach dip killed the eggs but I'm no snail expert.

 

[wetworks]

Will salt take care of eggs as well? There were only a few actual snails that I saw on the plants and I picked them off easily. But there were TONS of eggs...everywhere.

I have used this method to get rid of snails in plants for my 38g tank, and I do not have snails at all in that tank even though they were swarming in the plant tank at my LFS. I started adding plants about two months ago to this tank, and to this date I do not have a single snail. Based on this, I would think that the salt does kill the eggs as well, but this is just my experience and thus is anecdotal in nature. Because I have not really tried to test this scientifically, there may be an unknown variable that got rid of the snails, but so far this method has worked for me.

I would let them rebound for a couple of weeks and then trim and replant as needed.

I would think the bleach dip killed the eggs but I'm no snail expert.

I have seen/heard of other using the bleach dip to kill snails with great success, so chances are good that this killed the snails and the eggs. I just don't like to put chemicals in my tanks, so I have used the salt method instead. You know the solution is strong enough when the aquarium salt will not dissolve any further in the water; probably about a cup of salt to about a gallon of water is the ratio I use.

150EH has good advice here- let the plant recover for a few weeks, and it should be just fine. If your water parameters are much different than those at your LFS, then only a bit of time will stabilize your plants.

 

[jmartin66509]

I have a similar problem with my wisteria. I have two large bunches of it that came from different sources about three weeks apart. The first bunch did exactly what you describe, but after about two weeks it was a nice bright green with very obvious new growth. I added another large bunch on Tuesday of this week, and parts of it have died very quickly just like parts of the first bunch did. Since the first bunch recovered very nicely, I think that my second one will as well. Give your wisteria another week or two, and I think it will recover and grow nicely again. Just trim off the dead/dying leaves as you go.

For getting rid of snails on new plants I use about a cup of aquarium salt in about a gallon of water. Let the salt completely dissolve in the water, then soak the plants in it. The snails will all fall right off. Twenty minutes should do it.

Get assassin snails, they don't take over and mine have been in the tank less than 10 minutes and they all are going to work already... they eat the snails you don't want plus they get big and cool looking