http://forum.aqua-fish.net/ A forum devoted to aquarium fish, plants, techniques and fish keeping as a whole. en http://forum.aqua-fish.net/?topic=plants-not-doing-so-well#1 Hello everyone, I have a 20 gallon tank that has been going for about 2 months now. I have 9 neon tetras, a male and female guppy, an apple snail and 2 bamboo shrimp. I've got bogwood and 3 large rocks in there too. I wish I knew the name of my plants, but I don't. 3 of the 5 plant species seem to be doing poorly. The java fern and an unknown are fine. But the thick bladed grass keeps rotting and has a weird sort of almost invisible stuff around it's blades. Also, a bigger plants with stems and leaves on the end (very bushy) has leaves that look like something is growing on them and so they are discolored. A shorter plant that is dark green with big leaves and think stem has blackness creeping up from the tip of the leaves and the older leaves are slightly curling, but it is not black spots, just a spreading blackness, although it is growing fast with new leaves weekly! I don't have a CO2 system and don't know if this is the cause. I may be overfeeding a bit, b/c at first I wasn't sure if the shrimp were eating enough (as it was a fairly new setup), so maybe this is the cause. More info: I have a 24 inch "shop light" from a hardware store that house 2 flourescent bulbs which i think are 40w and they say "plant and aquarium" bulbs on them. I'm hoping to get by with this light. Also, something is growing on the glass of the aquarium and I think that it's getting dirty faster than it should? Please help! I don't want to go to the store and have them sell me something I don't need. How long should my lights be on? I had them on 12 hours a day, and now changed to 10 hours thinking I was encouraging algae growth. Any suggestions would be super helpful! Thanks jbishop0 2008-06-21 http://forum.aqua-fish.net/?topic=plants-not-doing-so-well#2 Post the pictures, they will make everything easier. Personally I think that the problem is water chemistry. Actually it doesn't have to be a problem as fish live and some plants grow. You probably bought plants which require different conditions. So... measure pH and water hardness, then post the pictures here and I'll help you. BTW, it also seems to me that there could be more Nitrates in your aquarium. So, measure the NO2 and Ammonia level too, please. These things are causing algae to grow very fast. jan 2008-06-22 http://forum.aqua-fish.net/?topic=plants-not-doing-so-well#3 Hi, here are the pictures of my plants. The java looks fine, but it's newer than the others. The small grassy looking one in front of the rock, seems okay, but I don't know. The problems are with the other three. The short dark green one has black on the leaves. The thick tall grass one seems like a lot of it is decaying and has tonnes of hair like algae on it(you can see it on the glass behind the grass in the picture). Then the biggest plant looks okay in the picture, but some of the tops of the leaves seem dirty. I only have test strips for water, and everything seems fine .... ph about 6.5-7.5 (hard to tell) and the nitrates are very close to zero. Further, I noticed sort of blue/green dots on the leaves of 2 of the plants that I'm having trouble with (not the tall grass, the other 2). AND, I don't know if this is normal, but green algae is growing on the filter where the water pours out. Also, the filter medium seems to be getting really dirty really fast. I'm not in good shape! I need to know where to go from here so that I can fix things and prevent it from happening again. Whatever system I need in place, I want to do it. It's hard to diagnose my problem though. Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it! jbishop0 2008-06-22 http://forum.aqua-fish.net/?topic=plants-not-doing-so-well#4 OK, here is a potential solution: There is too much of something in the water. Sometimes, when there is no NO2 and Ammonia, algae grow anyway. Just because of too much light. But... it isn't very easy. Algae can grow with no lighting too. Usually, as the tank gets cycled, these problems disappear naturally. I know it because it happened to me too. The same "symptoms" just like your plants. Exactly the same. Your plants: First two pictures: Anubias Nana. I grow this plant too. And it acted the same way like yours . It was nearly all brown. All new leaves were light-green and all old leaves were dark-green/brown. This was caused by algae. Algae disappeared as soon as the aquarium got cycled. The third picture: Vallisneria Spiralis (or other subspecies of Vallisneria) http://www.aqua-fish.net/show.php?h=vallisneriaspiralis. It was a little difficult to make this plant grow nicely in my aquariums, but when I added some additional watts of lighting, it started to reproduce easily. I also spotted some algae on it, but it just disappeared. It also experienced some hair-algae. Check this URL and images on it: http://www.aqua-fish.net/show.php?h=algaeeaters. All this algae disappeared. Another 3 pictures: I don't know, sorry. http://forum.aqua-fish.net/uploads/DSC00152.JPG: i don't know it's name, but I had it in my aquariums. Unfortunately, this plant seems to require something like medium lighting. Otherwise it gets burnt. It also probably needs a lot of nutriments and probably soft water. I am telling this because my lighting is of very high intensity, my water is hard. This plant died in my aquariums later. But one never knows... maybe you will have no problems growing it . So all in all... I think that the problems will disappear as time goes by. Try to add some JBL fertilizer balls into the tank, they will give plants some nutriments. It helps to stabilise the water, thus you will get rod of algae sooner. And BTW, I understood that I can't keep all plants species in my tanks. I bought maybe 8-10 species of which 4 survived. So I grow them. Plants are more demanding than fish are. jan 2008-06-24 http://forum.aqua-fish.net/?topic=plants-not-doing-so-well#5 definately diatomic algae on the anubias, as Jan has posted part of the cycling.My tank had a spate of it for about a week when I first set it up and it disappeared overnight. With the vallis I have always put root tabs underneath the plant when they are placed in the tank, they are very demanding initially.With a lot of aquatics plants you will get a large initial die back but new shoots should appear to replace the lost leaves. Plus with a new tank set up the substrate has not had time to accumulate a lot of waste from the fish, plants love to feed off the ammonia and nitrates. As regards C02 systems ,don't rush out to buy one, in most cases it just speeds up the growth to fill the tank quicker,I prefer the slower groth as it produces stronger plants.I have now stoppped adding C02 altogether to my tank as I dont need it. If the plants dont absorb the carbon from the C02 it can also induce stress on your fish. mickey 2008-06-25