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Melting Val

694 Views 4 Replies 2 Participants Last post by  chi1013, 
C
Hi everyone,

I have Jungle and Italian Vallisnaria in my natural/Walstad tank. It's been doing fine. In the last 2 weeks, I had to treat my tank with meds for possible columnaris. I have a clown pleco with a white patch on his back. I treated with kanaplex and Furan 2. Yesterday, I realized my Val has completely melted. I mean, just brown, goopy mess. Obviously, since this tank is filterless, I'm freaking out. I've added more plant cuttings and floaters from my other tanks and am watching the parameters. Right now, the worst is ammonia at 1.00 ppm. I'm dosing with seachem Safe regularly to neutralize the ammonia. The fish are not showing signs of distress, no flashing, lethargy, gulping for air. I feed the fish every other day so they haven't been fed in 3 days just to decrease some of the bioload.
All of the other plants are fine. I have tons of crypts, some swords, a crinum calamistratum, a aponogeton ulvaceus, 2 dwarf lillies, some anubias, some java fern. I threw in some more dwarf lettuce and elodia to help with ammonia uptake and ordered a bunch of plants that I hope will be coming in soon. I plan to do a water change today or tomorrow to clean up the rest of the dead plants.

So tl;dr, did kanaplex and furan 2 kill my val?

Thanks
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JakeMicallef
I had this problem before but I was never using meds. It was at the setup of my tank which is now over 3 years old but when I asked about val melting on another forum I had someone say make sure the rosette (little white thingy in the middle where the leaves come from) is above the substrate. The val was already melted before I had a chance to try that but I have a decent amount of dwarf sag that is growing with the rosette under gravel and I have never had any issues or heard of anyone having issues with that.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help :/

Jake
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C
The thing is this tank has been established for 2 years now. Unless the mulm layer covered the white part of the plant. But I'm surprised it happened to all of them at the same time.
Thanks for the help!

JakeMicallef said:
I had this problem before but I was never using meds. It was at the setup of my tank which is now over 3 years old but when I asked about val melting on another forum I had someone say make sure the rosette (little white thingy in the middle where the leaves come from) is above the substrate. The val was already melted before I had a chance to try that but I have a decent amount of dwarf sag that is growing with the rosette under gravel and I have never had any issues or heard of anyone having issues with that.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help :/

Jake
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JakeMicallef
chi1013 said:
The thing is this tank has been established for 2 years now. Unless the mulm layer covered the white part of the plant. But I'm surprised it happened to all of them at the same time.
Thanks for the help!
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No worries, I wish you the best of luck!
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C
I asked some local folks I know. Looks like it's the meth blue in the furan that caused my val to melt. My ammonia jumped to 2.0 ppm so I tested my tap water (which was only like .25-.5 ppm). I did a good 50% WC, cleaned out as much of the melted vat as I could, took out some of the rotting red tiger lotus bulb that also succumbed to the medication, and put a bag of activated charcoal to take care of the rest of the remaining meds. I ordered from aquatic arts but unfortunately, due to the weather, I having a feeling they won't be able to ship for awhile. A friend of mine is giving me some floaters so I can at least have more plants to suck up the ammonia until my val (hopefully) grows back and/or my new plants come in. Hopefully I won't lose any other plants!
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