Some top view of the rear:
you can see two different growth colors of R macrandra, one orange and another red.
Same plant, same tank, but different coloration.
One was trimmed recently and the other was not, I'll let you guess which is which.
Sorry for the ripples, my tank has those without the hair dryer trick.
Gloss at 35 Days post trim, a real dense mat.
I am NOT liking the Fissidens. I was thinking of making several round wood pieces to act like stones and round moss balls.
Another option is to spread the Erio out more in that section.
I could also add dwarf clover which I have a little bit of sitting here.
I need a better contrast leaf wise against the Erio and the UG though, whatever it is, needs to be short and not HC etc.
Shrimp attacked the Erio setaceum. I'll remove it and add it to another tank tomorrow night. R wallichii also was attacked a fair amount, but they have left it alone the last 2 weeks.
Some fine needle plants do not mind.....others do. Obviously shrimp no#, type and density matter, as well as feedings, I feed them a lot, but there are a lot of shrimp. Every pic has many, I did not wait or feed them to coax them out! There are just that many in the tank.
I think I might try the larger patch of Erios and expand the UG perhaps a bit.
Fissidens might go on a few of the wood branches.
Mermaid weed has colored up and is looking decent in the rear, Hydrothrix continues to a weed that needs trimmed often, same with P stellata.
Measured the light again and reduced the height of the fixture from 16 to 12" above the water .
60umol along the bottom.
Added all bulbs: 120 umol.
I ran 120 umol for a couple of weeks for 8 hours per day.
I ended up with a lot more glass algae whereas I had none prior. Plants grew faster, some colored up better in areas that had shaded lower light/overshadowed prior. Seem mostly a function of evenness of the lighting, rather than intensity, but intensity still plays a role beyond a threshold of good growth.
How much is hard to quantify and different bulb spectra also plays a role if not a more/large role for this. I think this much light(120umol) is asking for more work. I can keep the tank clean etc, and trim, but I'd prefer not to clean the glass much if at all.
At 60umol, I still get very nice overall growth that plenty for most any scaping project.
I guess and suspect a range might be:
Low light: 25-40umol, mid40-60umol, high: 60-120umol for the bottom of the tank. Top levels in the tank at full lighting was 250umol, or about where Troels/Ole's article in tropic set their upping limit for light and CO2.
CO2 is about 50ppm in this tank. Fish eat very aggressively as well as shrimp and so called CO2 sensitive species(some plecos and elephant noses).\
My old 90 Gal tank from 15 years ago had about this same high light PAR range using 350 Watts of metal halide about 12" above the water. Roughly 400umol at the center at the water's surface and about 60-70umol at the bottom over most of the sediment.
This is an estimate since the tank is not running any longer, but I took some measures from an old set up that uses the same Hamilton fixtures on a 90 Gal tank/same bulbs(Iwasaki 6500K).
