Summer Cleaning

This morning, I hacked up quite a bit of leafy rotala indica that was a gorgeous rose color, but it all ended up in the trash. I had to be careul not to cut any golden kuhlis, and in fact I was able to count all six later.

While I had my hands in there, I noticed that there was no water coming out of the spray bar, and sure enough, when I unplugged the motor, I didn't notice any gas bubble up from the reactor. That's because it had all been bubbling back to the motor; it was not pumping any water at all!

I have no idea how long it had been like that, but once I took it out, opened it up and gave it a good cleaning, it had no trouble pumping water once it was put back in. I might note that the pump's sponges smelled like a nice clump of damp, fertile soil.

I was concerned that there was no CO2 in the tank, but it must have been diffusing at the motor sponge because I measured the pH at 7.0 or 7.2. So not running the motor didn't kill me too much. I makes me think that I'm bubbling even more CO2 than needed. I already moved the turn-off time to be earlier in the afternoon, but I will have to watch it closely, because I think I did that when the pump was not operating.

I took the excised temple and water sprite as well as the melon swords to Alamo Aquatics (I learned there, that the big broad leafed plant was called a (red) melon sword or perhaps ozelot sword). One of the melons had been growing in the substrate for a while and looked quite nice; the other two were babies I brought in from the emergent shoot.

Aside from the temple and rotala indica growing very stongly, the foxtail has been really taking off as of late as well. I snipped a couple of the longer stems that had developed a root system at their base, and I moved them over behind the melon sword, as I'd like to de-clutter the left side a bit. There are still a few pieces of glosso among the substrate, but it is not creeping back across the floor as quick as I'd expected.

I've still got all dozen rasboras alive and well, but I haven't figured out how much, if at all, they enjoy the new curent generated by the spray bar. Here's hoping they continue to thrive.