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16 gallon Rescape Journal

Things not looking so good so far. The plants are growing way slower than I anticipated despite the high light, EI dosing and adequate stable CO2. Algae has been growing at a rate that I can't cope with. this is the first time I'm having problem with this kinda algae. So far no other algae problem besides what's in the picture.

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Can anyone help me id this algae and how to correct it? I'm using EI and adding fert according to chuck calculator. Dosing macro on sunday, tuesday, and thursday and micro every alternate days. Water change 50% on sunday.

I did checked out james algae guide and was hoping that it would be diatom or brown algae but then I have 7 otos in the tank and they don't seemed to be touching these algae.

If it's hair algae or rhizoclonium then I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. regular water change and high nutrient dosing with stable CO2 and tank was matured from previous tank setup.

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the green is actually of a lighter shade as I forgot to adjust the brightness when I took that photograph.

Any idea or advice?
 
Have you got any Excel or EasyCarbo? Dosing some of that around the algae will soon knock it on it's head. I'd do another water change tomorrow and syphon off as much algae as possible then dose after the W/C. What are you adding to remineralise the RO water?
 
haven't started using remineralised water as yet. they are filling my storage tank as we speak. but I'm going just remineralised them with salt i.e. CaSO4, MgSO4, trace mix, KH2SO4 etc. I can't siphon that algae off. it's stuck so much to the plant that if I siphon it the whole plant just came off root. I'm dosing 3 x the recommended dose of excel now. Will see how it goes. just don't understand what went wrong. Never had this algae ever since i started keeping planted tank.
 
I'd still up the water changes to help remove any organics that may be encouraging the algae. I'm sure it will only be a short lived thing while the plants get going. Do you have plenty of fast growing plants in there to soak up all the nutrients?
 
well I've got so called fast growing plants but I don't them being fast growing plants at all... Most of the plant came from my previous tank and they are pretty much submerged.

Didiplis diandra, pogostemon stellatus, HC, UG, Crypt balansae, limnophila aromatica, rotal rotundifolia and Blyxa Japonica.

Didiples diandra, P. stellatus and Limnophila seemed to be growing at the same speed. Rotala is the fastest one but even then only grew about 1cm since a week ago....

Will probably take out of the tube tomorrow of that the tank will have only 72w rather than 96w. Or shall I just half it to 48w?
 
daniel19831123 said:
Will be thinking of getting some SAE in my tank and probably some cherries shrimp. Has anyone kept dwarf shrimp and SAE together? Any idea if they will snack on the shrimplets?

Yes. I have kept cherry shrimp and SAE together successfully. No luck with breeding though, so can't say if baby shrimp would survive or not.

I also had a striped doradid (AKA chocolate catfish) and a large angelfish in the tank as well! I did not see the cherries within minutes of putting them in the tank. I asumed they had been eaten by the angel. 6 months later I removed the angelfish and the cherries reappeared!
 
beeky said:
If it were me, I'd halve it. Do you see any pearling?

Well I never see pearling in my tank for some reason. don't know what's gone wrong here. I will only get pearling if I put the CO2 diffuser away from the filter inlet. If it's under the filter inlet, it get suck up into the filter and dissolve but no pearling. I don't think the previous method is any better actually because those pearling bubbles looks as if they are CO2 that just got stuck to the plants.
 
Dan you seem to be forgetting that your tank has not yet developed the proper population of bacteria yet. Also, how have you determined that your CO2 is sufficient, just because the drop checker is green? How do you know that 100 watts of light on a 16 gallon doesn't require that you drive the dropchecker into the yellow? You don't have nearly enough plant biomass and it not clear how many times a week you are doing a water change. Having fast growing plants is completely meaningless if all these other factors are ignored mate. :(

Cheers,
 
But surely if the plant is using all the CO2 there will be less Co2 in the water and the drop checker should have indicated that shouldn't it? My drop checker is always on the verge of Green/yellow even when the lights are off and that should mean that there is plenty of Co2 in the tank right? I've used the 4kH solution instead of tank water.

The filter has been running for 4 months now, it should be pretty matured right? and there is not much fish load in my tank. Just 6 otocinclus.
 
No, I think you might be missing the key which is that the amount of light that you have drives the demand for CO2 even higher. If this is T5 lighting you have basically unlimited lighting. If you have unlimited lighting you must supply unlimited CO2. Due to inefficiency of our injection as well as inefficiency of our flow, a green dropchecker does not necessarily indicate an unlimited concentration of CO2 available for uptake. If you are only seeing a limited amount of pearling this is one indication that your CO2 is poor.

Somewhere along the line many have assumed that a green dropchecker automatically means that the CO2 is fine. This might be true if CO2 never escaped the water. "Plenty of CO2" does not imply unlimited CO2. The CO2 uptake mechanism is not that simple. You can only determine this by continuing to add more CO2 until the growth rate is such that additional CO2 does not increase the growth rate. You have way too much light so you are beyond any margin of error. The wiser course of action is to drop the light significantly. 20-25 watts T5 would be plenty on this tank. You simply don't need that much light and it is killing you. :(

Cheers,
 
The plant has started to grow quite quickly within the last few days and I think it will start growing very rapidly soon. Possibly now that the roots seems to be growing out of everywhere from the stems.

Thanks for your explanation clive but I seemed to get more and more confused over the CO2 issue. Assuming that this lighting is unlimited and I need to supply unlimited CO2, if I do so I should see pearling right? And if I'm not upping my Co2, I should lower down my lighting and the uptake of Co2 would be balance by the amount of photosynthesis and hence I should also see pearling? But I never see pearling in my tank unless I don't inject the Co2 in to the filter inlet and those gas bubbles looks more like Co2 that couldn't be dissolved rather than oxygen. I know that Co2 do escape easily from the water surface. I was checking out my drop checker the whole night to see if it changes colour once the light is off and Co2 is off. Surprisingly it remains greenish yellow throughout the night.

Yes this is T5 lighting and I was attempting to have a high light and high co2 tank with not much fauna in it. I will half the lighting on the tank while keeping the Co2 the same for the meantime and see how the plants and algae grow. I've seen mark improvement since I've been starting the excel doses. Probably as the plants biomass increases, I will up the lighting again and increase the CO2 drive.

Nutrient wise I'm supplying the tank with approximately

25ppm of NO3
30ppm of K
9ppm of PO4
10ppm of Mg
15ppm of Ca
0.5ppm of Fe

everyweek. (Calculation done using Aquaticplantcentral fertilator)Those are just basis estimation and chances is that I added more in the tank rather than less.
 
Hi Dan,
Yes, if you supply unlimited lighting and unlimited CO2 you will see pearling. If you have lower light you can see pearling with less CO2. The problem is that the plant decides whether the CO2 content is sufficient, not the drop checker. The fact that you get improved growth by using Excel is evidence that you have not been supplying sufficient CO2 (since Excel provides CO2.) You can lower the light but this alone does not guarantee that they will pearl with the amount of CO2 you are currently injecting. You may still need to add more CO2, but at least you will have a better chance of matching the Co2 requirement because of the lower CO2 demand.

It's really difficult to judge the dosing when given in weekly ppm because it's impossible to determine what quantity of nutrients you added to the tank to obtain those ppm values. The ppms look right, but did you prepare the solutions correctly or have you added the right amount of teaspoons/grams of powder? Are you even using powders? This is always ambiguous unless supported by mass/volume data. It's not that I doubt the validity of your dosing, it's just that the data can't be verified.

At the end of the day you must choose what actions to perform but the available evidence suggests that you need to increase your injection rate. Excel cures the symptoms but does not solve the problem of poor CO2 unless you intend to continue to substitute Excel for a higher CO2 injection rate.

Cheers,
 
I'm measuring the dry powder using electronic scales to make up solution and using chuck calculator and aquaticplantcentral fertilator, I dose the tank and it comes up with those figures. So drop checker is only valid if you have low-moderate lighting tank? I've tweak my lighting down by half and turn up the Co2 level. Now the drop checker is yellow. I'll update this journal in a weeks time to see if I get any pearling or if the algae is getting any better. It's kinda scary to see the drop checker being in the yellow region. I don't think I will even dare to add my new high grade CRS into this tank. Will see how the otos react to the CO2 level if I tweak it higher
 
As stated in the opening paragraph of the Measurement article, CO2 is the most difficult parameter to apply, to measure and to get right in a planted tank. Have a read of the article =>http://ukaps.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=467

A Drop checker cannot tell you what the specific needs of a given plant is. It cannot tell you what is physically going on inside the reaction chambers of the plant's photosystems. It cannot tell you what osmotic forces are being generated at the leaf surface, how quickly the CO2 is diffused through the leaf or how efficiently the enzyme reactions and transport mechanisms are working. It can only give you a rough estimate of what the CO2 value is at a specific location in the tank. Based on this limited capacity the data from the checker is just as valid whether you have high, low or medium lighting.

I think where you might be getting stuck is that you assume that a green drop checker should be valid regardless of lighting level. This is not really the best way to think about it. At lower light levels the low energy of the light throttles down the demand for CO2 and nutrients. The speed at which the enzymes capture and transport the CO2 molecules does not have to be very high and so a marginal CO2 concentration in the water column can work. We see this behavior in low tech tanks that do not even have CO2 injection. You could therefore get by with minimal injection and a near blue drop checker indication. As you increase the light, the speeds of the reactions increase because more light energy particles per second are making contact with the chloroplasts. In order to satisfy the increased number of reactions caused by the increased light energy a high concentration of CO2 is required so the injection rate must be high enough to drive the pH in the drop checker to green. As you increase the light further the rapidity and volume of the photosynthetic reactions require an even higher availability of CO2 so the injection rate has to increase to the point where the acidity drives the dropchecker into the yellow. Therefore a single injection rate and a single drop checker coulor does not satisfy all possible lighting levels. The higher the light, the higher the injection rate needs to be which is reflected as a brighter color in the drop checker. Higher concentrations are necessary to "force feed" CO2 across the leaf surface to keep up with the sheer volume of photosynthetic reactions occurring within the chloroplasts.

Terrestial plants, or aquatic plants in emmersed mode have breathing holes called Stomata which allow air inside the leaf. The CO2 concentration in air can be on the order of 150ppm so they are more likely to be nutrient limited than CO2 limited. In water the solubility and availability of CO2 is much lower. Other factors such as water flow and temperature have a much greater effect on this limited availability. The only way to overcome these difficulties is to increase the concentration to compensate. Te green dropchecker color is just a rule of thumb which more or less indicates an average concentration of 30ppm. In most cases this is sufficient but using extreme lighting pushes you completely out of the "norm" envelope. In fact 48 watts T5 on this size tank may still be over the top but it's a lot closer to normal than 96 watts.

Hope this helps clarify.

Cheers,
 
yeah I've moved it near the diffuser, opposite the diffuser, under bushes close to substrate. It's still yellow. The moment I change to the other tank I have with no Co2 injection, it turn blue
 
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