Wassup. So here is how the tank was looking Sunday:
Typically this is how my maintenance goes for those who are interested:
1) Squeeze out pre filter sponges from my Oase into a bucket of dechlorinated tap water.
2) Prime the filter and purge the reactor of any air. Typically this will cause a good amount of biofilm gunk from the filter tubes to fly into the tank, so that is why I do this before I do the water change and pruning so I can get as much of that gunk out as possible.
4) Clean the glass with a razor blade if I need to. When things are good, I don't need to do this often. Lately I have had a bit of GSA on the glass because I was running too high of light without a high enough level of biomass I believe. I will also take a white laminated card and scrape the front of the glass in between the substrate and the glass.
3) Prune all the plants. I try to top and replant as much as possible because that maintains more healthy biomass in the tank than topping would and typically looks better. I will go from the tallest plants/background to the shortest/foreground, making sure to skim each area I uproot plants from with my gravel vacuum.
4) I do 50-60 percent water changes. While vacuuming around the tank, I use my hands and a turkey baster to fluff the plants and get any gunk off the top part of the soil and the plants. I keep the filter running to get any gunk in the water column for as long as possible until the water gets too low.
5) Refill the tank, and while it's refilling I will empty/clean out the skimmer. I typically will then empty it out one more time the next day to clear any plant leaves and gunk it picked out from the water column after the water change/trimming.
Up until the June, I was doing two weekly water changes. The second weekly water change is always a lot quicker because it requires no trimming. I noticed my tank looks/does significantly better with two weekly water changes as opposed to one, in part I bet because I have a large fish load. Also, I uproot a lot, and larger/more water changes are always better in a high tank when that is the case. In June, I switched two once week because of a change/increase in my work hours, but I decided last week to go back to twice a week, so this was my second week doing two water changes. Before June, I would normally do the second water change a couple days later, but since last week I've just decided to do the second water change the next day, so I did my second water change on Monday.
Here's a nifty water change shot from yesterday's (Monday) water change/the second one:
So here is exactly what has been happening to at least one of my mermaid weed stems for the last several months. The more colorful stem that I showed in the last picture didn't make it. This is what it looked like before the water change on Sunday:
As promised, no roots and black lower stem (starting to rot?):
The other two tops and the new stems coming off the stems look really good, so we'll see what happens to them.
There are two other plants I want to show off. The first is buce brownie blue 2011, which I got off a facebook auction a bit over a week ago. My first really rare buce, looking forward to propagating it.
The bit of green you see on two of the leaves is just iridescence, not algae
. Although the driftwood behind it does have algae lol.
The second is what was sold to me as hygrophila sp. brown:
After doing some research, I believe it is actually hygrophila polysperma 'tropica sunset'/ rosanervig. Pretty sweet plant. It can lean a bit/creep, but so far it has been manageable with good trimming.
Here is how the tank looks now. I switched the light spectrum a bit because the substrate was looking a bit overly purple. Curious on anyone's opinion regarding the two light spectrums:
Also did a little bit of some trimming and a 40-50% water change on my shrimp tank. This tank was set up at the end of February and has been the smoothest first couple of months I've had on a tank so far. This was my 6th tank/time since starting the hobby in 2019:
Here is how it looked when I flooded it for reference (I moved that large buce on the wood shortly after and replaced it with fissidens moss:
This is my first shrimp tank. I started with 12 bloody mary shrimp, and I have at least 20 now. It took them at least 2 or 3 months to start breeding, but once they started it doesn't seem like they've stopped
. I get about 50 par on the bottom of the tank. I dose this tank once a week with APT Complete that I already had from before I switched to dry ferts on my high tech tank. I'm planning to just use dry ferts on it and my other low tech tanks too once I run out though.
On the topic of nutrients, for my high tech tank this is the latest. I'm going to lower my potassium down from 30 K to 22 K. Also, I'm going to go with at least a double dose of macros after my water change to introduce a bit more stability to the water column/move closer to more traditional EI rather than the daily EI I did for the last two weeks. I'm also going to switch my micro dosing a bit. I was daily dosing, but I have a sneaking suspicion my tank might do better with at least one higher dose, so I'm going to do at least a double dose after each of my water changes for them too. I might then do 2 more double doses during the rest of the week for a total of 3 doses daily like traditional EI or wait a day after the double dose and then dose daily. I'm leaning towards the former. I'll stick with whatever changes I make for at least three weeks this time to fully observe how all the plants do before changing anything else and make sure that I give them time to adjust before jumping to any conclusions.
New plants coming too. I ordered some rotala macrandra mini to replace the bacopa salzmanii sg, some downoi, and some variegated water wisteria/hygrophila difformis. I tried to grow downoi like a year ago when I had a good amount of amano shrimp, and they devoured it before it could convert. I figured I would try again now that I don't have amano shrimp with some that is already grown submersed to give myself an even higher chance of success.
