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Q U E S T 3/29/01 the monthly bulletin of the Madison Aquatic Gardeners Club LAST MEETING 2/22/02 A splendid time for all! The Dave and Mary Stalowski family welcomed us to their gracious home, and Mary put out a nice spread of Sloppy Joes and a variety of munchies. Thank you! Dave's newly set up aquarium upstairs caught our attention and folks discovered his beautiful aquarium downstairs, as well. Nice to see such fine examples. We had a good plant exchange. Gordon Hartmann brought in some mighty nice Ludwigia. The most robust I've ever seen. I checked out his aquarium and tested the water. Iron of 0.85 mg/L was high. Ideal for Ludwigia . The plants he harvested had grown to the top and had floated along the top, getting a great hit of light and CO2 from the air. The high iron came from a certain variety of Turface, containing a good amount of iron, some of which tends to leach out into the water column. (A week earlier, the water contained 0.55 mg/L iron). He didn't add iron, so it must have come from the substrate. Nitrogen = 0.00 mg/L. Though Gordon has a lot of fish in the tank, the ammonia from fish waste was picked up quickly. Also, the plants seemed to be getting carbon from the water's bicarbonate. KH 7.3 = half of his tap water. He used mainly tap water. GH10 = about half of tap, indicating uptake of calcium from this source. Check with Gordon for additional details. He and I might develop a more complete profile of his aquarium dynamics, a bit later. David Reese reported on an excellent heating pad from Jung Garden Center. The product has an electrical wire embedded in a rubberized mat. Attaching this mat under his tank supplied additional warmth to stimulate plant growth, dramatically. On another note, according to David , the plant he referred to as Cryptocoryne balansae is an Aponogeton, actually. Thanks for this clarification, David. We saw some more of the AGA Conference and completed the section by Neil Frank , "Alternative Ways to Keep Planted Aquaria". I'll develop a review paper on this section, as a handout. Time permitting, we'll continue with this video, on the 29th. Jan Hoffman asked, "How do other aquarium clubs work?" I'm looking into this, and will have some information on the Boston club and the San Francisco one (Appears the San Francisco club has hit a road bump. We do wish them the very best as they focus on the furure). Matt can tell us how the Killi Club works. Matt breeds Killifish and is active in the Wisconsin Club, as well as with regional and national conventions. ITEMS Note on peat in planted tanks: 1. Peat softens water in an uncontrolled manner. While it will lower the KH (bicarbonate, the buffering component), this could happen to the point where the buffer becomes so weak, the pH could drop very fast, and maybe wipe out your fish. 2. Peat colors the water. Light penetration could be cut by 50%. 3.The humic and yeast acids in peat have a negative effect on growth. Reference: The Optimum Aquarium, by Kaspar Horst /Horst E. Kipper. If you have hard water (high KH) and want to make it softer, try a large planting of Egeria densa / Elodea densa / Acharis. This plant efficiently gets carbon from bicarbonate and will lower the KH. This is a much safer way of softening, than using peat. In the process, the fish benefit from the oxygen coming from the plants. In an experiment cited in the Optimum Aquarium, in a test tank, within 28 days a KH14.7 sank to 3.4 with the addition of Egeria densa. Use a KH test kit to monitor things. One should not let the KH get below KH4. If you don't have a KH kit, I'll do some measuring for you. Note: In testing water from heavily planted aquariums, Nitrogen deficiency turns up most frequently. Signs of nitrogen deficiency include: Old leaves turn yellow, or occasionally reddish due to the production of anthocyanin (the reddish pigment is only seen in tanks with very strong light levels Karen Randall). In fuzzy plants like Limnophila and Myriophyllum, one will see the lower parts of the plants become tan and the growth tips remaining green. Here, nitrogen, within the plant is moving up the stem to support the growth tip. One convenient way to give plants a nitrogen boost is with the Kent Pro-Plant liquid. There may be other products out there, but I haven't stumbled into them yet. It is important to think about the Liebig Minimum Law: Growth of plants is greatly influenced by the smallest growth factor. Example: an increase use of plant fertilizer is of no use if at the same time there is too little CO2 or energy (= too little light) Optimum Aquarium.
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