120x40x50 - Day 15

Days fly by and it is now already day number 15 for my tank. On day 11 I had to do trimming on Hygrophila Polysperma as it already reached the water surface. Today I will have to do some more cutting. Yesterday I checked the water condition and both ammonia and nitrite is untraceable. This allowed me to put some shimps (Caridina japonica - so called Amano Shrimp), also my four Harlequin rasboras and few new Ottocinclus. Right now everything looks really promising, the cleaning crew (shimps and ottos) made the standard diatoms grow under control and no algae is visible at the moment. Plants grow pretty nicely. Below are pictures from today.

Soil and hardscape preparation

I setup my 240L aquarium over a week ago. During the setup I made few photos of the preparation process. I started with soil, I used ADA Tourmaline BC, ADA Power Sand Special and ADA Aquasoil. First I spread Tourmaline BC on the bottom. Tourmaline is a mineral compound that looks like a black dust. It is released slowly and is electrostatic which invigorates bacteria that leaves close to the bottom in the soil. I did choose for a small path in 2/3 of the width of the aquarium, so I made sure to not put any soil there. I'll fill it later with sand. On the Tourmaline I did put around 5L of ADA Power Sand Special. I made a thicker layer where plants will be planted and almost nothing in front where it will be mostly covered by stones and wood. Power Sand Special is nutrient rich soil, kind of a garden soil, with small stones. There are different sizes of Power Sand: small, medium and large.You use it according to the size of your aquarium. In my 120cm tank I could use large or medium. In my case I had medium size. The size corresponds to the size of the stones. The stones allow for better water flow and it allows for making sure that anaerobic conditions will not easily occur. Here is the look after puting a small layer of aquasoil amazonia (new) on top of power sand. Power Sand is visible on the right hand side, left side has a cover of aquasoil on it.  

I scaped a little road, the front of the aquarium will also be filled with decorative sand. The Aquasoil should be kept moist, and it should not be left there to dry so I was watering it a bit, you can see the dark patches on it, this is the color it will have in water: very dark brown. 

When I did put the first layer of the soil in the tank, it was time for hardscape, I started with roots, as they are the skeleton also for plants. I did not plan to put many big stones, only some to make the transition between sand and planted parts more natural. I kept the proportions like 1/3 to 2/3 for the wood. I used branch wood, it is very usefull if you plan to put lots of plants attached to wood like Microsorium or Anubias. Here is the left hand side view after looking for good composition (3 different roots combined). 

And here is the right hand side. - three roots combined as well. the bottom part will be used as a skeleton for Anubias. The exposed cuttings of the wood, will be covered by plants and stones, so will be invisible for the viewer after some time.

Here is how the setup looked like when I finished setting up wood. 

When it was done I started the lengthy planting process. I had to attach around 50 plants to wood and rocks, moss to wood and plant the background. When I had all the plants attached to wood, I put the wood once again inside, this always imposes some changes in the initial design. I did put additional Aquasoil to fill in the gaps and scape a slope on the back side to expose the stem plants a bit higher behind the wood. During this process I found some other way to arrange the wood, so you can see on the picture below that the end product looked a bit different than initial scape, but the general framework is same.

Small stones cover the wood as well to keep it from getting to the surface. Branch wood will need some time to make it soaked enough to not have the willing to fly away. After some time I will remove those stones. After setup was ready I attached my two filters, one of them has full biological setup, other one contains active carbon as well to clear the water from all the chemicals etc. that could be present in wood and on the plants. It will also help to reduce colorization of water by the wood in the initial stage. This carbon will be removed after 3-4 weeks and will be replaced by biological media. CO2 was started with 2 bubbles per second. I will not fertilize the water for the next two-three weeks because if you are using Aquasoil and Power Sand a lot of nutrients will be released initially to the water column. Also what is expected in that setup is that NH3/NH4 will rise in the initial week or two, so I was making water changes every day, than every second day. Finally after three weeks the schedule should change to changing water once a week. On day 9th I had NH3/NH4 level around 1mg/l, NO2 already is balanced to 0mg/l and NO3 went down to 10mg/l. (After two days levels were: NH3/NH4: 8mg/l, NO2: 5mg/l, NO3: 120mg/l).

Algae prevention part 1 - Plants biology

There is a lot of material on the web which treats about the algae prevention in one way or another. Anyone who own an aquarium has had this problem one or more times. Algae occurrence has made many of us stop their hobby forever. I decided to put on my blog all the information I could find and learn about this topic, both to organise my knowledge and to share it with anyone interested. This will be divided into several posts. First one is about plant biology, so what do we need to know to understand what is going on in aquarium.

When you start keeping aquarium as a hobby you will soon find out where the life as a whole began. All the life you see around you is only possible due to the smallest creatures you can find: bacteria. They were the first life forms, they made our atmosphere as it is right now and so on. Without them you would not have oxygen to breath. Yes, there would be no plants as we know them if not cyanobacteria known for aquarists more as blue-green algae. Yep, that one made the big oxygen crisis as they call it and wiped out most of the life present on earth from life beginning: anaerobic bacteria. That's the past. For any aquarist cyanobacteria is a big issue mostly due to the fact that it is not an algae but bacteria, what means that killing it may kill all the beneficial bacteria as well. Back to the topic. Bacteria is very important for aquarium and its inhabitants. You have all different types of them, I covered some in the post about the nitrogen cycle. The beneficial bacteria for any planted aquarium will be one that allows our plants to have healthy growth. This includes bacteria that bound different micro elements to make them available for plants (nitrogen is one example). So what does water plant need to grow? As they say picture is worth thousand words so here is one:

As one can see there is significant part of periodic table there. So where are those bacteria in this picture? Generally plants are not able to get nitrogen as a gas from atmosphere, bacteria is used to bound nitrogen into digestible form. Same thing goes for many other molecules. Plants are using leaves and roots to retrieve nutrients from the environment. The plants in aquarium are divided into two groups: real water plants and "fake" water plants. The real water plants will get most of the nutrients from the water column through the leaves, they have small root systems and grow pretty fast under water i.e. stem plants like hygrophilia or rotala. "Fake" plants will take most through the roots, they have big root systems and grow pretty slow under water i.e. echinodorus family. Knowing the plants you have will help you identifying best way to provide the required nutrients for your plants. On the picture you can see that the nutrients are divided into four groups: structural, macro, secondary and micro elements.

1. Structural elements
Most of the plant mass is build from structural elements: carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.
Those elements are required to build the main plant structure and energy deposits: sugars. Carbon is the most important component and represents about 60% of whole dry mass and it is consumed from CO2.  Hydrogen comes from water, oxygen from one of two sources depending on availability of light. When light is provided and photosynthesis occurs, it comes from water molecules. A side effect of this process is oxygenation of water. When light is off, plants "breath" by consuming oxygen diluted in water. Fortunately plants consume less oxygen than they produce in photosynthesis, that's why we have enough of it to breath. When light is turned off and you have fish, shrimps and other inhabitants in your aquarium, it is worth to aerate water. In this way you provide enough oxygen for plants and animals.

2. Macro elements 
Another ingredients required for plant growth are macro elements. Those are nitrogen, phosphor and potassium. Macro elements are used in all metabolic processes occurring in plant.
In water environment nitrogen exists in several forms: as a diluted gas, as ammonia (NH3/NH4), nitrite (NO2), and nitrate (NO3). Plants are not able to consume nitrogen in a gas form and ammonia and nitrite are toxic. These parameters should be kept as low as possible.  The most useful form of nitrogen in aquarium is nitrate. It is produced by bacteria in nitrogen cycle.
Phosphor also can not be consumed in raw form, plants get it from phosphate (PO4). PO4 is present in most fish food as well as is produced by dying leaves etc.
Potassium  can be consumed in its raw K+ form and can be provided in several forms i.e. as a liquid fertilizer.

3. Secondary elements and micro elements
Secondary and micro elements are required as a trace elements. Those are usually available in the soil or/and may be provided with a fertilizer.
In high concentration micro elements are toxic to fish, so make sure you follow the dosing instructions provided with fertilizer.


4. Light
That is the most important element, that a plant requires to grow. Without light and structural elements photosynthesis would be impossible.

Plant growth limits
A growth of plants can be limited by any of elements described above. That makes balancing an environment very challenging. If you have high-tech tank with lots of light, CO2 fertilization etc. but your iron level is too small, plants growth will be affected, leaves will loose colour etc. The same amount of iron in low-tech tank can be more than enough as light is already limiting factor. The outcome of this complexity is a fact that till now there is no one answer about how to fertilise plants and make environment algae free. There are multiple approaches for this and those I will pick up in next posts. This means that there is either too many elements available or at least one is limiting the growth.
Main thing to know about limit growth is that in most cases if one element has to limit growth it is best to choose PO4 for it. In environments where CO2 is limited or NO3 is limiting factor, algae growth is inevitable. Cyanobacteria is in most cases related to NO3 deprivation, CO2 is responsible for may types of algae and its supply is the most tricky to set up correctly. In the next post I will explain different methods that specify how much which element should be provided in aquarium to maximise plant growth and minimise algae.

120x40x50 - Day 4

Four days after the setup. Hygrophilia is growing nicely already. The ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels are sky high (kind of usual for Amazonia) so right now changing 50% of water second day in a row.

New setup 120x40x50

Today I finished a new setup for my 120x40x50 cm aquarium. It is based mostly on epiphytic plants like Anubias barteri (barteri and nana), Bolbitis heudelotii, Microsorum sp. I went for the Jungle look and feel. The main parameters for this tank are:

• KH = 3 (50% tap water, 50% RO + minerals)
• GH = 5
• Temp (C) = 25
• PH = 6.8
• CO2 = 1 bubble per sec. using ADA Pollen Glass Beetle 50D 

 In the background there is set of different stem plants like Hygrophilia polysperma, Rotala rotundifolia green and few other species to make it more interesting. I used Taiwan moss on wood for the first time so I hope it will look good. I used Power Sand Special and Aquasoil Amazonia NEW from ADA as a substrate plus a bit of decorative sand in the front part. The hardscape consist of branch wood and manten stones.

Aquarium started on 7th April 2012.

240L setup - Day 9

It is over week and yesterday I did another 20% water change. The level of ammonium is going down on its own, it is around 0.2-0.3 level back from 0.5 two days ago. Nitrite can be barely seen, the value is maybe a little above 0 and nitrate is almost not traceable. This leads after a week to few issues, one of them is actually Nitrogen deficiency in my plants, I can easily see that the leaves are getting more yellow than green, especially visible on my larger leaves. This can by the way be other deficiency like Potassium. Potassium is important for plants and highly overlooked. I'll monitor the nitrate level and will try to add some potassium (K) to check if this will help with nutrients transport in plants. In the pictures you can also see a visible sign of diatoms having some good time. Also some other type of algae is popping out, which in same cases in normal in some shows some improper balance.At this stage I'll not worry much and wait to see where it will go. Removal of diatoms is actually important as they feed on silica which is hard to remove other than with water changes and removal of diatoms. Even if you have fish that eat diatoms, they will not digest silica and will put it back to the task with their waste so that new diatoms will have more to eat. I plan to add some hardy algae eaters for some time until water will be good enough for shrimps.

Glossostigma has a lot of runners going in all directions, some of them will have to be trimmed. I have some issues with other plants, especially Blyxa Japonica, but will se if potassium can solve some issues.

How to control algae - Redfield ratio in aquarium

In my post about the nitrogen cycle I wrote that the nitrate is used by plants. Of course there are a lot of different elements in water that are used by plants. Those are divided into macro and micro nutrients (by amount of them required). The main macro nutrients that we are interested in are: CO2, NO3, PO4. Those are providing plants with carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.The micro nutrients like Fe (iron), K (potassium) etc. are usually taken from the soil, Fe and K is usually added with some plants fertilizers. Lets go back to the main pack, C, N and P. People were doing a lot of research in the area of the actual ratio of those three in oceans and living things. Redfield started this research in 1934. What he found is that this ratio is actually quite constant in the oceans, whatever deep you go to. The ratio C:N:P was calculated to be 105:16:1. Other research has gone to find out how the algae blooms happen, and how to control this process. Here findings were very nice for aquarists, actually this whole thing can be controlled. What actually determines type of algae to grow is ratio between nitrogen and phosphorus in your tank. If this ratio is low, you will get blue-green algae, if it is high, you will get green algae.

Calculating amount of the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water can be somewhat tricky. By making few assumptions like the fact that ammonium and nitrite levels should be close to 0 and actually nitrate is the main nitrogen source, the whole calculation can be made very simple. See above the diagram prepared by Charles Buddendorf (check his blog here). Find out the level of PO4 and NO2 in your water by using some test kit (I use Sera). Check in the table above what is your ratio. Add some more nitrate or phosphate if necessary (I use Easy Life Nitrat and Phospho).

The main thing is that this works well in open nature, not in your aquarium. Generally from the table you could think that with 20 mq/l of nitrate you can have 2mg/l of phosphate and everything will be ok. Unfortunately it is not true. The issue is that in aquarium any excess amount of phosphate or nitrate will be used by algae, the table will only tell you if it is more blue-green or green type algae you will have. Generally plants should be able to use all the nitrate and phosphate that you have in your aquarium, when you do test for it you should see almost 0mg/l of both. The weekly water change is necessary to keep those levels down.  For me the Redfiled ratio is only valuable to find out what should be the ratio of Nitrate and Phosphate in the fertilizers I add when plants use more that in produced in aquarium. 

The chemistry of your aquarium looks complex but by controlling only few elements you can have a nice setup. Make sure that you do your weekly 25-30% water changes and keep your Nitrate and Phosphate levels low. Use the Redfield ratio to dose additional N and P if your plants are needing it. 

Cheers,

Marcin