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Re: The red color thing



I had an odd thing happen recently. Bought a couple of bunches of giant 
hygro and red hygro (sorry, forgot to grab my list with the true names when 
I left the house this morning, but you get the idea...) and put them in my 
25g tall tank with 60w of light, ph 7.8, gh 5, kh 30. The new shoots on the 
red hygro are all green, and the new shoots on the giant hygro (which was 
green) are now red.

I've had to rearrange my tank to put the red growth where I wanted it. LoL 

In this same tank I put two red tiger lillies. One melted and died. The 
other shot out 4 new leaves in a week. These plants were from the same batch 
at the same store, bought on the same day. Sigh. 

Don T 

______________________________________
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 07:03:26 -0800
From: "Michael" <Michael at Rubinworld_com>
Subject: The red color thing 

Tom Barr wrote: 

> Well the red color thing we started on a few years ago surely 
> shows some trends there.  Higher NO3 more green and faster 
> growth in many(most) species.  Lower NO3 redder colors.
> PO4 stress also can produce redder colors.  Higher P to lower 
> N ratio helps also in many species.

Tom, at the risk of opening this thread again (and you know it's been
running on the Sfbaaps list for years), I thought we found that red
coloration was stimulated by stressing, limiting **either** N or P in
the presense of an adaquate supply of K and the other nutrient. 

In other words, running relatively high NO3 and strict limitation of P
with the occasional PO4 "pulse" produced large, luscius red leaves in R.
macrandra (I should note here that IME macrandra is sensitive to N and
doesn't thrive in environments with more than about 10ppm or less than
3ppm). 

Reversing the proportions had a similar effect: relatively high PO4
(above 2.0ppm!) and less than 1ppm of NO3 forced just about everything
else in my aquarium that could turn red to do so.  In fact, the
macrandra went blood-red, but of course the leaf size was stunted from
lack of NO3. 

Michael Rubin in San Francisco, where it looks like a good day for a
middle-aged run ~