"Plants melting is always indicative of a CO2 deficiency. Nutrient deficiency does not cause this so save yourself time and energy by looking at your CO2 distribution, injection rate, flow. You can also reduce your light intensity to help in the short term"
I relly find this hard to believe ceg.
how do you know his plants have enogh nutrients?
Because nutrient deficiency syndromes do not include melting. They only include discoloration and nutrient deficiency related algae.
The quick answer is in my post
http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/heres-my-issue-with-bba.12101/#post-129052
The long winded version is the thread
http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/what-causes-leaves-to-melt-and-what-to-do-now.20421/
how do you know if plants can cope better or not with low co2 levels if they have plenty of other nutrients and vice versa?
Because coping with low CO2 is a function of light and temperature. There is a relationship between the nutrient load and the CO2 requirements but that relationship is exhibited when the availability of these are on the margin of deficiency.
If you look at a low tech tank where co2 is always aprox the same, you will get melting (or at least I do) when one or more of your nutrients fall too low.
I'm sorry but you must be misdiagnosing the events in your tank. How do you know the CO2 is always the same? Which nutrient goes low and how are you determining too low? Presumably, adding more of that nutrient resolves the melting? It's very difficult to unravel the events and casue/effect scenariosin one person's tank much less unraveling events in multiple tanks. The one constant is that poor CO2 is responsible for a LOT of things, including melting.
I´m gonna out a post right now about Amannia... and forgive me Clive but i do not believe is a Co2 issue... you´ll see... read my post.
Paulo, your tank, if it's the same that I'm thinking about, has a history of poor CO2. It almost became a soap opera it went on for so long mate. And since you have fish in the tank you are very limited in terms of how far you can push your CO2, right? So you can nevr find out exactly how much CO2 is required for THAT plant in order to achieve a seamles transition. Why does everybody automatically assume that no plant should have difficulty with the CO2 limitations of their tank? What if the threshold for survival of a particular species or specimen is beyond what we can currently achieve in our tanks due to specific limitations such as fish. This is exactly the same as those people who use megawatts and assume that a green dropchecker should be OK;
"Well, it's lime green isn't it? The tutorial states specifically lime green."
What if you have so much light in the tank that the required CO2 is beyond the toxicity threshold of the fish? How will you ever discover the threshold if you never remove those limitations? Then you draw conclusions based on a very limited set of conditions.
Again, let me state the Prime Directive: Melting is caused by poor CO2. It's your job to figure out WHY a plant suffers poor CO2. The reasons why can be extremely complicated. 95% of plant health problems in your tank are caused by poor CO2. Even if the cause were some other, more exotic reason, you have a 95% chance of solving the problem if you focus your energy on the "WHY" of poor CO2.
Cheers,
