Day 21
This week I had some issues with plant health. There has been significant melting in my Monte Carlo. The older leaves on my AR mini have started to become twisted. Starting to see some hair algae and a little green algae pop up. So far I've kept on top of it with a bit of manual removal of algae and the more melted sections of MC. There's been a lot of white biofilm growing on my driftwood but the shrimp are helping me to keep that in check. I managed to acquire some Rotala Blood Red this week. At least that's what it was sold as - hopefully it's the real deal. It certainly looks the part. I decided to remove my H'Ra and replace it with the blood red.
This feels like a pivotal moment in the development of this tank so hopefully I can keep everything in check until it stabilises. The two things I had changed were that I stopped dosing excel and I started using Seachem Equilibrium to raise my GH from 2dGH to 4-5dGH. My intuition is that the MC melt was caused by stopping the Excel and the AR leaf curl has somehow been triggered by either the Excel or the addition of Equilibrium. I'm going to taper down on the Equilibrium and see if that makes a difference with the AR.
This week I had some issues with plant health. There has been significant melting in my Monte Carlo. The older leaves on my AR mini have started to become twisted. Starting to see some hair algae and a little green algae pop up. So far I've kept on top of it with a bit of manual removal of algae and the more melted sections of MC. There's been a lot of white biofilm growing on my driftwood but the shrimp are helping me to keep that in check. I managed to acquire some Rotala Blood Red this week. At least that's what it was sold as - hopefully it's the real deal. It certainly looks the part. I decided to remove my H'Ra and replace it with the blood red.
This feels like a pivotal moment in the development of this tank so hopefully I can keep everything in check until it stabilises. The two things I had changed were that I stopped dosing excel and I started using Seachem Equilibrium to raise my GH from 2dGH to 4-5dGH. My intuition is that the MC melt was caused by stopping the Excel and the AR leaf curl has somehow been triggered by either the Excel or the addition of Equilibrium. I'm going to taper down on the Equilibrium and see if that makes a difference with the AR.