Pumping Iron

I made my way to Fintique today in seach of the elusive iron test. They didn't have an Aquarium Pharmaceuticals tester, but they did have one under the Red Sea brand. It was odd in that there was a liquid and powder component to the test. This isn't really to my liking, but it's certainly better than nothing. So I mixed everything into the over-sized test tube and after 10 minutes found to my mild surprise that I had very low iron (definitely less than 0.1 ppm, approaching zero). So that's one thing I'll have to be taking care of -- bumping up the iron dosing.

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised, then, that the nitrates are still fairly high (at least 40 ppm) if there's not enough iron to utilize them. I still can't make heads or tails of it dropping below 5 ppm a week or so ago, though.

While I was at Fintique, I also got three mystery snails -- one for each of my aquatic habitats. The two gold and one blackish-purplish snails seem to be taking to their surroundings pretty well and moving around quite a bit. Apparently they don't sell apple snails anymore because it's illegal, but that's great for me, since they devour plants (probably why they're not sold anymore, due to their potential to disrupt habitats). They're more fun to watch then you'd think, and I'm really excited to see how they do.

Finally, I think the new CO2 batch is finally kicking into full gear, because the pH is now 7.4 when measured early in the day or at night. That bodes well for the amount of dissolved CO2 available for plants, so let's hope they make good use of it.

BGA Bums

Doing a little more research on blue-green algae (BGA), I found out it's very important to manually remove what you can. Because I had been burying it in soild every day up to this point, I decided to try removing it even though some substrate came out with it. I was very happy to see the BGA had been severely limited in how well it had re-surfaced the substrate, although, of course, that meant there were far less fun little bubbles for me to free.

Since I finally made it to the store to get more sugar, I also replaced the half-batch of CO2 mix I made with a new, full batch that will hopefully last 3 or so weeks. Let's hope this brings the pH down from the rather lofty 7.8-8.0 that it's been hovering at. Also, the nitrates have dipped pretty significantly from whatever high they were at (maybe carbon filter induced), so I'll go ahead and supplement with nitrate liquid ferts as long as they appear below 5 ppm.