Real plants with clowns

[joitoy]

so far anubias fern and java fern are the only thing that lasts more than a month with my loach. they tear up everything and make beds out of it. then it makes more for me to clean especially in the filter. i have a bamboo tree in my tank and it doesn't get torn up. the bamboo leaves are a bit thicker than most of the plants you can get at the store.

On another forum I asked a question about a driftwood + bamboo set sold at petsmart's plant tank for 8.99

someone said bamboo shouldn't be kept underwater.

O_O I was actually pretty tempted to get it but held off until I could ask questions about it in my tank. Does it so well, cause trouble? grow slowly under water?

[Dave_2133]

They have started to knock holes in the plants i've got already. but just the lilys to creat some cover and also to look nice. thinking of some others plants but have't decided yet.

Does anyone use www.plantsalive.co.uk they're based in Crewe. Thats where i've the ones i'm getting. They're pretty cheap too

[wasserscheu]

Hi Crazy Loaches,

... took the liberty to add this pic of your page here... hope that´s allright... it looks fabulous. Are you aware, fish swim and don´t climb... - I just envy you for that plant growth... with that great variety...



Wolfram

P.S.: I went back to your page ... you apologize for that picture, I was wondering why? A tank is not a livingroom, for me it looks perfect ( you mentioned you are adding swimming space anyway...) ... many fish-lovers I know, exert themselfs to get such a tank ...

[crazy loaches]

Thats fine... just wish it was a better pic, it looks so much better now (a lot less algea and much greener plants) but right now its kind of a jungle, litterally. Some times the fish have to turn around since they cant push through the leaves lol!


Edit> ok, since I havent updated my website in a while and not taken many pics, I just snapped a couple pics of the tank so you can see what it looks like now with higher co2 levels, daily ferts, and brighter lights...

I am just waiting to get my 2 new bigger tanks up or I would have thinned the plants out alot... I am trying to grow as many as I can stuff in there since I need to populate a 240G and 150G tank soon! So there really isnt any 'aqua scaping' in the tank right now, its just crammed full of plants.


This one did come out a bit overexposed but o well. It was 1/6 sec shutter speed.

I know, I know, those are some dojos down at the lower right corner in my tropical tank... thats whats the 150g is going to be for (coolwater) juts dont have it up yet.

And I actually just pulled out 3 large sword plants out of that! And a few bunches of dwarf sag, thats why you can now see some bare gravel in the front. BTW there is actually a large piece of driftoowd on the right that is completely enveloped in java fern.

[wasserscheu]

... wow ... took me a while to close my mouth again ... I LOVE it.

... looks like in that case, it´s rather the clowns waiving the white flag

... I´m keeping the CO2 by 20mg/liter, I have digged quit deep into that subject and to avoid longterm issues I´ll stay at that conservative but save level.

I need to check your page again for your water readings, regarding hardness´s, CO2 content, Iron etc...

Thanks for the recent picture - its a pleasure, I looked at it for quit a while...

Wolfram

[loachmom]

I really enjoyed looking at your tank pictures. Hopefully, someday I'll have such lovely plants. Thanks

[crazy loaches]

... I´m keeping the CO2 by 20mg/liter, I have digged quit deep into that subject and to avoid longterm issues I´ll stay at that conservative but save level.

I need to check your page again for your water readings, regarding hardness´s, CO2 content, Iron etc...

Thanks for the compliments wasser and mom! I just wanted to respond to the above though. I am not an expert but I have learned alot in the couple years I have been on other forums (http://www.plantedtank.net/forums is a good plant site for plant related info). I had a few co2 mishaps early on. I was running moderate co2 levels around 20-25ppm. I had turned my spraybar downward to avoid all surface agitation. At night I had a powerhead kick on to agitate the surface to boost o2 levels at night. A few times I woke up to fish all gasping at the surface. One time the powerheads suction cups came loose and it pointed down. I awoke to half my fish dead and floating luckily the only loaches I lost were a horseface and printed loach (sorry dont know the scientifcs off hand). The clowns were not gasping at all, but the zebras and yoyo's were and colors were all faded - but they made full recoveries. Fish that werent so lucky were just about all my rainbowfish, sae's, and redfin leapord pleco (and a few others). After doing some discussing online and upgrading my setup everything is much better now. I run double the co2 as I did back when I had problems (~30-40ppm), increased my lighting, started dosing ferts daily, and upped my waterchange scedule. With more co2 my plants now pearl, many releasing continous streams of bubbles into the tank. From what I have learned pearling happens when O2 levels becomes saturated. Since the oxygen will absorb into the water before saturation you dont really see it, but once the water is saturated the oxygen forms bubbles that cling onto the plants. So after increasing co2 I actually increased o2 as a side effect, kinda wierd to come to that realization. I havent had any problem with gasping fish since. It seems to be the current beleif that CO2 levels usually dont cause problems with fish until they get really high. Its lack of O2 that usually causes problems.

The road can be bumpy for those starting out with heavily planted tanks, but once everything is balanced then your golden. And I am not implying this is the best idea for anyone to do, but my experience was better with higher co2 levels (ofcourse other thing changed too), but there is always a chance of disaster.

Oh and wasserscheu, I dont have much details on the specifics of the tank really. I dont measure nearly as much as most, only once in a while. Alot of folks have adopted the 'read the tank' method meaning you look at plants and fish and algea to look for signs of deficiencies, etc. Many test kits can be very innacurate and misleading anyhow. Not that I completely given up testing but I dont do it on a regular basis. Nutrients are dosed based on Tom Barr's 'Estimative Index' which relies on slightly overdosing all nutrients to make sure plants arent deffecient in anything, then every week doing a 50% water change to 'reset' the levels. On the big tank I am setting up I am going to attempt to automate fertilizer dosing since its a pain doing it daily and I am lazy and often miss a day or two here or there. Anything I can do to maintain the tank better that is less work and allows more time for enjoyment is worth the extra cost in my book.

Sorry this turned into a book lol!

[loachmom]

Hi,
You said in your above post that you are lazy----Well, I went to your page, and I think that you are not lazy just BUSY!!
I also registered at plantedtank.net as" tightwad." I'm looking forward to learning lots...and yes, I am a tightwad. One income, growing family---have to be a tightwad!! Thankfully, my husband generously supports my "fish addiction."

[wasserscheu]

... It seems to be the current belief that CO2 levels usually dont cause problems with fish until they get really high. Its lack of O2 that usually causes problems...

… I´d be carefull, taking on O2 is one thing - getting rid of the CO2 in the blood the other, suffocation results also on the inability to get CO2 out of the blood…for details look here “Has their environment changed these fish in other ways?” in Martin´s article:
http://www.loaches.com/articles/hillstr ... -fast-lane

... nice book must be “rewarded” with another "book" perhaps someone has trouble falling asleep... just read my following text a couple of times ... don´t forget the pillow...

I´m short on time, therefore please excuse my telegramm style... thanks.
I dont mean to influence, as you have the nicer tank, you obviously doing things right here...

I helped a boy setting up a 300liter tank, he has similar water than me, he uses no CO2 and HE is harvesting plants biweekly like cracy - however it´s certain plants that go well, others don´t ... so every tank has it´s own rules. If I stop CO2 my plants get a calcium layer on their leaves, which is very annoying, the plants take out the calcium to set free the CO2.

... following, just some perspectives of a very large community here in central Europe, that I have collected ... not my brains... but I followed it and worked great, ... so far. You probably know all this - so it´s considered as a contribution to this posting in general...

- amount of light is highly influencing the plants producing O2.

- max. CO2 content with no risk for fish is considered 20mg/Liter. Thats pretty strongly recommended (however no scientific proof).

- CO2-gas used with the main purpose of bringing down the ph-value, is NOT recommended. There are recommendations to look into other ways to influence waterchemistry...

- CO2 is used as a carbon source, which plants need to grow.

- Carbonate hardness and CO2 influence directly and mutual the ph-reading.

in the following link to Olaf Deters page, the first 3 online-calculators, show the correlation between KH (=carbonate hardness in German Degrees "d°") CO2 content (mg/Liter) and ph reading, just enter your values and click the "=" button:

http://www.deters-ing.de/Berechnungen/B ... ausPHundKH

The following are charts from JBL. You will notice, that the values online calculator/ JBL chart are not identical - JBL is even more on the moderate side... however, both give you ideas...






… sleep well, hehe…

Wolfram

[crazy loaches]

I dont know what the actual limit is on co2 concentration, or if for example loaches may be more sensative to it, the common rule of thumb for high tech tanks is 30ppm... I do beleive like I said almost all claimed co2 incidents are caused by lack of o2 that I have seen, like my own. Excuse my lazy American ignorance but is mg/l the same as ppm? I am not sure since mg is a measure of weight and liters is volume... but it looks like the chart matches what I have seen labeled under ppm roughly. I warn against using those charts though, they can be very innacurate. For one, they rely on two test kits - ph and KH, both of which arent accurate unless you spend lots of money. Then you have to 'read' them, more innacuracies, as some shades of color are tough to differentiate plus the incremements are pretty wide already. Also other buffers in the water will skew the readings, especially KH. There are some other methods of determining co2 concentration like the 'DIY drop-checker' method but I dont have a link off hand. And alot of those charts I see dont even cover some of the ranges a lot of planted tank enthusiasts use, like KH<2 and pH<6.4

I helped a boy setting up a 300liter tank, he has similar water than me, he uses no CO2 and HE is harvesting plants biweekly like cracy - however it´s certain plants that go well, others don´t ... so every tank has it´s own rules. If I stop CO2 my plants get a calcium layer on their leaves, which is very annoying, the plants take out the calcium to set free the CO2.

Yes of course... it all depends on what you want. There are some plants much better adapted to low tech, no co2, low light, and some plants that will only grow under very high light and heavy co2 and ferts. I have had up to 4 plant tanks going and only 1 has ever recieved co2 so far. One was even less than 1 watt of light per gallon. I have used Flourish Excel also as a carbon suppliment on a couple tanks. You must be carefull about that calium layer on the leaves - biogenic decalcification as I am sure you know happens when plants cant get enough carbon and extract it from bicarbonates. This is ok in some situations but has the potentail to be very bad! Your pH can skyrocket (like to 10 or more) causing CaCO3 to percipate out and there have been cases were not only did fish die to the huge pH swing but the entire tank and expensive eheim canister had to be thrown out since calcium scale covered everything and ruined the filter. This is a bit extreme but usually biogenic decalcification does more harm than good.

To be quite honest I do not now my co2 concentration. I had co2 test kit that didnt work and gave ppm a lot higher than the pH/KH method, and I dont trust the chart either, though I think the last time I used it I was in the ballpark of 25-30ppm. There are a few different things you can read in the tank, obviously fish gasping means too much co2 (assuming there is plenty of o2) and black brush algae is one good indicator co2 levels are too low. I had this bad and raised co2 levels until it began to diminish. As I get closer to my tank upgrade I will be doing lots more testing so I can try and setup the new tank with as close of parameters that I can get to the old one. So I will soon be using the DIY drop checker method I mentioned earlier, just havent got around to doing it yet.

[shari2]

is mg/l the same as ppm

yes, don't ask me to explain it...

[wasserscheu]

Hi,

... quit an interesting discussion ... you are right ... measuring exactly is hard to do, especially the CO2 inidicaters are almost useless (at least the ones I had).

PartsPerMillion are not compatible to Milligrams/Liter, but I´m overwhelmed with trying to convert... one is counting particles, the other using weight... hmmm... eitherway, for the kh/ph method it´s not necessary to know - except perhaps convert english-degree or ppm-CaCo3 into KH via chart above...

btw, kh/ph (= chart above) works only if there are absolutely no other ph-influencing things in the water (some use HCL to bring ph down. When Iwas a youngster I tried Phsopric acid, today I´m staying away from that)

... DIY Drop checker sounds very interesting... I´ll be bugging you once in while.

I´m looking forward to a pic of your new tank, I´m also having such a projekt, but its draging, as I need to make space first...

Cheers Wolfram

[shari2]

To convert from grams to ML you take the weight in grams of the (dry) amount of your substance and divide by the specific gravity (the mass 1g of a substance will occupy per 1ml of volume. For instance: the specific gravity of gold is 19.3 (ie. 19.3gms of gold occupy 1ml of volume)) ...I think.

[crazy loaches]

Hi,
You said in your above post that you are lazy----Well, I went to your page, and I think that you are not lazy just BUSY!!
I also registered at plantedtank.net as" tightwad." I'm looking forward to learning lots...and yes, I am a tightwad. One income, growing family---have to be a tightwad!! Thankfully, my husband generously supports my "fish addiction."

Busy, yeah... but also still lazy! Thats a double negative when it comes to hobby time right?!? Truth is I probably have a lifetime of projects already started and unifished, and another lifetime of projects not started yet, and another lifetime of projects I'd like to do but probably will never. Plus I currently have an 11-month old, and a very tired wife My current job also involves rotating shift work and its hard on the body but I enjoy the job and it pays decent so I put up with the downsides.
So I'll be looking out for 'tightwad' lol! Dont forget about the 'search' function there as many will remind you if you dont ...there is lots of info already archived. BTW my nickname is the same there.

Ok, I did some searching and it seems most the talk on the drop checker method all points back to this thread on Aquatic Plant Central check it out here http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/foru ... ecker.html

Shari... I am sorry I am going to have to block out your last post, my head hurts to much tonight lol! I'll revisit the ppm vs mg/l later though, as I would like to know for sure.

[loachmom]

I'm headed to plantedtank.net right now. Thanks for telling me about SEARCH, I'll be sure to use it.