Hi all,
The problem is I don't want to dose much fertilizer or have a tank where everything revolves around plant's health, because that's not how I keep up with fish''s health. I keep plants as a redundancy mechanism, not as the sole purpose of a tank. One needs to find a happy medium. If it turns out one can't support the volume of plants...so be it...If I need more plants...I get more plants...Or at least that's the conclusion I've come to...Floaters are good for polluted tanks where CO2 isn't injected..
I think the more "polluted" your tank water is the more useful floaters are. I do the same as
@sciencefiction with plant mass, I just let it grow until it reaches peak plant.
I've found that both
Salvinia "auriculata" & Limnobium laevigatum will persist at very low nutrient levels. I don't know what those levels are, but I only have ~100 microS conductivity, so there can't be much of anything. That is why I prefer Amazon Frogbit (
Limnobium) to Duckweed (
Lemna minor) for the Duckweed Index,
Lemna isn't persistent under low nutrients, or low pH. I think that unless you have very low nutrient water light is going to be the factor that controls the eventual plant mass. <"
Hygroryza aristata"> was never happy with me and dwindled away over a couple of months.
If there isn't much nitrogen to support them, there surely isn't much need for them at this point of time.
Yes I would agree with that, they are very much there
as a visual indicator of changes in nutrient levels, they are your Canary. Because they aren't CO2 limited if they suddenly green and start growing, nutrients have been added.
Their other role is as a nutrient sponge, meaning that if you have chloramine added to your water, or an undiscovered dead fish etc, they will being reducing ammonia levels straight away, and hopefully they will keep your fish alive until a change in their growth alerts you to the fact that something has gone wrong.
cheers Darrel