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.