Perfection is Elusive

I should have learned this lesson long ago and become more comfortable with "good". On the other hand, if I didn't have perfection to aspire to, I might be done with the 30 gallon and felt the need to do something else.

The tank is going well enough, green spot algae is becoming a rarer occurence, the amazon swords are kicking butt, and the rotala indica has made a recent resurgence. As an aside, it's still groing a little too horizontal for my taste. In the past, I blamed this on the stong current produced by the spray bar, but now that that problem has been remedied, I'm suspicious that the severe water changes are conditioning the stems to bend over.

So I can't really complain. All right, I can complain, but I shouldn't. I don't care; here it goes.

A lot of my new growth, specifically the temple and bushy rotala whatever, has some very twisted, crinkly, stunted leaves coming in. The difficulty in diagnosing it is complicated by the fact that some of those plants have perfectly healthy shoots, too. I can't decide why. There does not appear to be any consistent environmental conditions that would lead me to draw any conclusions. Both kinds of shoots are subject to the same water conditions, both sides of the tank, varying levels of light.

Speaking of light levels, after I was feeling good about the progress of the red lotus, I was discouraged to see it was extremely pale today, bordering on brown; the two leaves even looked a little wilted. As far as I can tell, this is either due to disturbing its roots during the water change on Monday night, or diminishing light levels. I can't undo any root damage, but I did peel back the rotala shoots that had shadowed it in hopes of correcting the problem.