What Is The Problem With My Plants?

[tata]

Hi,
 
I have a 300L tank running for one month now.
It's a planted tank, with aquasoil amazonia, 150W light and CO2.
 
All my plants are struggling, poor growth, and covered with a dark dust.
 
What do you think is the problem?
Thanks!
 
 
Tenellus:

 
Bleheri:

 
Anubia:

 

[MBOU]

That.. is called algae
 
Means that your levels are out of sync! whilst you are doing everything right in terms of what to add or not add... its getting the amounts of each in relation to each other and your tank that is the difficult bit
 
I will move this over to the plant section for you and someone will be along to quiz you a bit more and try and help but it will be helpful to know a lot more about your tank like:
 
-how long its been set up
-what live stock
-hours of lighting
-type of lighting
-plant food?
-levels of co2?
-temperature
-tank in a bright room or near/opposite window?
-water stats (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate etc)
 
Algae can be caused by so many different things that it requires a lot of questions to be answered first

 

[tata]

Thanks for your quick reply.
Answering your questions:
 
-how long its been set up : 1 month
-what live stock: 5 neritine snails and 2 amano shrimps
-hours of lighting : 10 hours of 150W
-type of lighting: 3x54w
-plant food : EI 
-levels of co2 : JBL CO2 indicator is light green
-temperature: 25 ºC
-tank in a bright room or near/opposite window : no direct sun exposition
-water stats (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate etc) : No2=0, NO3 = 15 ppm, KH=2, GH=5
- substrate: Aquasoil Amazonia
 
 
What kind of algae is this?

 

[frapadoodle]

Looks like diatoms.
Is it brown? If so, it's diatoms. They are common in new setups.
You can clean it off as best you can, but they will run thier course in a few weeks and die off.

 

[tata]

Looks like diatoms.
Is it brown? If so, it's diatoms. They are common in new setups.
You can clean it off as best you can, but they will run thier course in a few weeks and die off.

 
Yeah, it's dark brown.
Cleaning does not help all that much.
I already have them for 1 or 2 weeks. I guess I need to wait some more time.
 
Thanks for the reply!

 

[theking]

i had the same problem, got myself an otto and its been doing a good job for over a month now, i originally bought two of them as you dont know what they went through in the petstore, one died after a few weeks(was expected, seems to be very difficult for many people to keep them alive for long) and this one is still running strong. also if you dose your aquarium with liquid plant food and all that i suggest you stop, cause when you overdose the plant fertilizer algae starts to bloom happened to me before as well when i added too much of that API liquid fertilizer.
 
the algae isn't that much of a big deal by the way but i assume that you, much like me do not like to look of it.
i would also recommend a red tail shark the shark ate all of my diatoms that i had on my driftwood as well as hair algae that was all over the plants.
 
good luck

 

[taffia1]

If you have Ada substrate as I suspect you should have been doing 80 -90% water changes each week before planting for about 4-5 weeks. It has an ammonia spike built into the substrate so you may have started planting with high ammonia. No worries though it looks like brown algea which will clear up do a eater change and keep an eye on amonia levels

 

[frapadoodle]

Diatoms can take 6-8 weeks to run thier course.
Ottos do better in mature set ups.
Red tail sharks get huge, aggresive and eat anything that will fit in thier mouth.
Diatoms usually show up with silica in the sand and nitrite.
Also how is the flow?
What plants do you have?

 

[tata]

Hello,
 
Just want to give a quick update.
Diatoms vanished after 2 weeks.
Meanwhile I also sent to garbage my Jebo lights, and bought a decent 3x54W lightning system.
 
Plants seems much better now!

 

[snazy]

It was the Amazonia leaching ammonia more than likely. Glad it's over for you. Diatoms always disappear for me too with no additional input unless the low is too low, light is too much and there's still ammonia spikes.