Alien Anna
Fish Gatherer
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2002
- Messages
- 2,087
- Reaction score
- 2
Hi Everyone,
just thought I'd pass this tip along. It was something I discovered when I first inherited an aquarium complete with plants. The plants were doing badly but nothing seemed to help. Turned out that my nitrate levels (off the scale, over 75ppm) were actually inhibiting plant growth.
I doubled-checked this with a pond expert at the local garden centre - aquatic plants particularly suffer in very high nitrate levels. This is one reason the Fens wetland plants are suffering from the agro-business (that's farming on a big scale, not football hooliganism). Unfortunately, algae can use as much nitrate as you through at it, with few difficulties
Another factor was "dead spots" in my gravel from inadequate cleaning - that is, anaerobic bacteria had grown in the gravel, producing pockets of sulphur dioxide gas which could escape and kill bottom dwellers and barbs. I can't get confirmation, but I'm pretty sure that the SO2 was also inhibiting plant growth.
The solution in my case was a total strip-down of the tank and new gravel.
Just something I thought might be useful to know, especially if you acquire a complete set-up as I did. If I ever took on someone else's aquarium again, I'd have the hospital/quarantine tank set up already and I'd do a complete strip-down as a matter of course, although I would keep the filter media (saves cycling the tank from scratch).
just thought I'd pass this tip along. It was something I discovered when I first inherited an aquarium complete with plants. The plants were doing badly but nothing seemed to help. Turned out that my nitrate levels (off the scale, over 75ppm) were actually inhibiting plant growth.
I doubled-checked this with a pond expert at the local garden centre - aquatic plants particularly suffer in very high nitrate levels. This is one reason the Fens wetland plants are suffering from the agro-business (that's farming on a big scale, not football hooliganism). Unfortunately, algae can use as much nitrate as you through at it, with few difficulties
Another factor was "dead spots" in my gravel from inadequate cleaning - that is, anaerobic bacteria had grown in the gravel, producing pockets of sulphur dioxide gas which could escape and kill bottom dwellers and barbs. I can't get confirmation, but I'm pretty sure that the SO2 was also inhibiting plant growth.
The solution in my case was a total strip-down of the tank and new gravel.
Just something I thought might be useful to know, especially if you acquire a complete set-up as I did. If I ever took on someone else's aquarium again, I'd have the hospital/quarantine tank set up already and I'd do a complete strip-down as a matter of course, although I would keep the filter media (saves cycling the tank from scratch).
