Tropical Aquarium Plants Need Proper Care from Schmeg.com

   

Maintaining Health of Aquarium Plants:

Why do the beautiful plants you receive sometimes end up slowly degenerating rather than flourishing? There can be several reasons of course, some of the more common are these:

Lack of essential nutrients including fertilizer and CO2
Lack of light. This can be “not bright enough” or it can be not enough red or not enough blue or green or other portion of the light spectrum.
Too much light. Some plants do better under subdued light.
The plant was never designed to live its life out underwater. Many aquarium plants in nature grow and develop while in a bog, leaves above the water line. When the water rises, they use stored up energy to survive under water. Since they were never designed to flourish during the time of year that they are underwater, they either slowly die, or just slowly grow while in an aquarium.
Too hot or Too cold. Some plants are used in an aquarium knowing that the temperature is wrong, but they look nice and fit in until they lose their internal reserves of energy.
Your fish like to eat them.
The type of water is no good for the plant.
Lack of nutrients can be solved by watching the nutrient levels and adding plant food (not land plant fertilizer) as needed.

If the problem is too little or too much light, and you are willing to change the brightness of the light, and the fish are OK by that as well, then this can be solved.

If the problem is that your fish like to eat them, you can sometimes solve this by giving your fish a preferred food, for example, Pleco's will generally eat zuchinni & cucumber instead of plants if it is offered to them. Some fish will avoid the plants if they are given enough other food with enough plant content. But some plants are just so tasty to your fish that they are going to eat them as long as you have them. If this is the case you get to decide whether to continue to provide these tasty treats for your fish or pick different plants that the fish may not want to eat.

If the problem is the type of water, then we first have to look at the other inhabitants. For example, very few so called complex plants (algae are simple plants, Amazon sword & most others people consider "plants" are complex plants) grow in brackish water and almost no suitable plants grow in Salt water. Also some of the complex plants like very hard water, some only want medium hardness and some demand very soft water. Obviously your expensive lionfish is not going to survive if you put it into fresh water, so look to other non-fish animals, like anemones, to serve the role that plants play in a salt water aquarium. In the case of brackish water aquariums, most of these fish can go back and forth between very salty water and very fresh water. Some can take fairly quick changes in salt levels, others must have the change very slowly. Still others it depends on their genetic makeup - 2 fish that look the same may have different tolerances to the salt levels. In general we think it is better to provide the fish with their preferred enviornment, and choose the applicable plants for that environment.

The other problems are a little harder to deal with – as it is if you or your fish don’t want the light levels tampered with. In these situations there are a couple solutions we can use.

The first is to acknowledge the problem, and simply replace the plants as the need arises, possibly replacing them with plants that are more suitable, or with the same plants and just accept the situation of periodical replacement.

The second solution is to have 2 or more sets of plants and do a plant swap. In this case, we take back the plants to revitalize them – by giving the appropriate light, by growing them above the water if that is how they grow and/or by growing them at their preferred temperature. Meanwhile, you are enjoying the replacement plants. When the replacement plants come back to be revitalized (think of it as a holiday for the plants), your revitalized plants come back to the show tank. Essentially they live a dual life, growing and strengthening out of the public eye, and the performing in the public eye until its time to regroup and revitalize.

Excess growth:

If your problem is excess plant growth, when we come to do maintenance, we will have our plant shears with us to combat that problem.

What about going plastic?

There are times when plastic is a great choice. Some that come to mind are:

In a breeding tank where the babies need lots of room to hide from the parents and they and the parents don't care if they are plastic or not.
In tanks where you want a constant, very low light level, low enough that no plants survive long enough to be worth while.
In a hospital tank where you want to provide the fish with a feeling of safety, but you need to use chemicals or other treatment regemens that would kill the plants anyway.
In both these cases, you should expect to do more frequent water changes because ...

But there are lots of reasons to normally use real plants. These lots of reasons are summed up as "plants consume lots of things that need to be consumed". The Nitrates that are naturally created when bacteria take the highly poisionus ammonia and nitrites and convert them into Nitrates. The phosphates which, if real plants don't consume them, you will likely have a bigger problem/more frequent problem with algae. In Salt water, there are invertebrates and other creatures that fulfill the role that plants fulfill in fresh water. In either case, switching to artificial plants means that you will need to resort to much more frequent water changes or more equipment and/or chemicals and/or filter medium to artificially handle the role that these plants and creatures handle for you normally.

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