Jinxing Myself

Well, I don't know if I was overly optimistic before, or the resumption of my normal routine was a mistake, but it's time to stop declaring victory over the algae. I was not happy at what I saw upon my return from Thanksgiving. Besides the fact that the green algae is gowing on everything including thick sheets on the glass and equipment, the beard algae is not simply annoying covering the fringes of my broad-leaved plants, it's growing on surfaces of leaves, stems, grass, and grount cover. It's gotten so bad in the high-growth areas, that the algae is gowing across leaves and needles to almost form a coherent structure.

It was time to hack off all the growth decimated by algae. So many leaves and stems were completely overwhelmed by either green hair or brush algae, that I decided they had to go. This way, the viable parts of the plants below them might actually get some light, and I could more easily track how well I was doing by observing how long the less overwhelmed growth held off the algae. This was emotionally difficult to do, seeing as most of the trimmings had to be thrown away instead of cultivated. A few that were borderline were replanted, but most of them were beyond saving.

A lot of the research I did indicated that phosphate was a limiting factor for algae, so that even when everything else was present in abundance, if there was not enough phosphate available, the algae would not thrive. Phosphate beads ran a little high at the LFS, so I settled for a product called Phos-X I found at PetCo. It is a packet of something or other that is supposed to remove phosphates (and nitrates) from water, so I dropped it in the filter with the hope that it will deprive my algae of much-needed phosphates. I'll keep up with the (phosphate-free) liquid fertilizers to replace the nitrates it may take out of the water, and also give the plants something to eat and encourage them to compete with the algae for the remaining phosphates.

Wordsmith

My camera is down, so I'll have to rely on my colorful naratives to accurately record the tanks' recent goings-ons.

First, the algae seems to have tailed off a bit. New growth looks relatively algae-free -- I can actually see the plant underneath the hair algae! Over the past week, I've added some liquid fertilizers (the nitrates were maybe a little greater than 10 ppm) and increased light to 11 hours/day. I'm a bit frustrated, because I don't really know what has changed to cause it to taper off which means I don't know what to do to keep it gone.

I don't know if it's a type of algae, but the gray/dark blue tentacle growths have also manifested themselves as somewhat coherent plants on the driftwood and rotala. They are very well anchored, so I've had to basically rip off the tips of leaves where they've taken up residence. I don't know if their appearance is due to the same problems that are causing algae. I hope so, in that trying to solve one will take care of the other.

CO2 production recently died off, so it was a good time to try my homemade CO2 recipe. I poured the sugar up to the normal mark inside the cylinder, added a 1/2 tsp of Fleischmann's yeast and topped it off with lukewarm tap water as usual. The only difference from the packaged recipe should be the lack of a stabilizer, whatever that is. Well, that was obviously too much yeast, because almost immediately it started bubbling like crazy so that there was at least one bubble on every rung of the diffusor ladder. It has since tapered off, and I expect it will need replacing quite soon, as most of the sugar has probably been used up.