This is what the plants look like in my 80 liter (20 gallon) aquarium. 8 Sterbai cories live here with some cherry shrimp, nerite snails and very many bladder snails, they keep breeding. Most, if not all, plants are covered in algae and mulm, some are decaying. They are planted in aquatic soil.I also have liquid fertilizer but I almost never use it. Should I?
So what could be wrong? Light or filtration too weak? Not enough fertilizer? Bad soil? Overfeeding? Please give advice and thank you.
Posted by BorodacFromLT
4 Comments
You may need more circulation. Amazon swords primarily feed from the roots so some root tabs might help that specimen perk up. As far everything else, I think there may be too much light and not enough nutrients. Try gradually easing in to a dosing regime again and seeing how the plants react.
The Lego technic light stand is cool tho đ
Could be a lot of things. Algae generally speaking is a sign of excess nutrients in the water or too much light.
How much light is the tank getting?
Are you overfeeding?
Otherwise the thing that attracts my attention is the bladder snails. Snails can give off a pretty big bioload and if your tank is really overpopulated then essentially all the snail poop could be fueling the algae bloom. First thing i’d try is getting rid of the snails. Manual removal or maybe some assassin snails?
You don’t need fertilizer at this point. You’d just be fueling the algae growth. Can’t say if lighting is an issue, but if anything i’d say its too much not too little. If you have a normal filter i doubt that’s the problem. Never heard of bad aquatic soil either.
If you have a significant number of bladder snails, then there likely is at least some overfeeding happening, so I would cut back a bit. How many Nerite snails do you have in there?Â
What filtration are you using? I’m guessing it’s a sponge filter as there is no way a HOB filter wouldn’t deal with at least some of that problem. Remember that a sponge filter provides ammonia conversion but no manual removal of detritus, so you still need to clean out gunk sometimes, especially when you have livestock that love to root around in the sand cap.
It’s probably one of the following:
– too much light
– not enough plants
– overfeeding
If you are feeding your cory pellets, try feeding once a day and 1-2 pellets per cory. Also, reduce lights to 6 hours and to the lowest level.
It’s worth posting your water change frequency, water test results, feeding schedule etc to help identify the cause.