[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[APD] fresh water / nitrates / plant growth



Today, two people said:

>The Monsoon trough has dumped much water over Darwin NT in the last 10 days,
>and the aquarium plants out in my ponds have shot ahead with growth that is
>unbelievable.   Apart from pollution dilution, lower light, cooler
>temperatures (ponds are down from 30 to 25 deg C), what causes rainwater to
>make everything grow much faster than anything else you try all year?


>High nitrates (>100 ppm) seem to slow growth to a crawl.  I had two 
>tanks that went way over the top in nitrates (let's not discuss why, 
>OK?).  As soon as I brought the nitrates down to below 40 ppm, plant 
>growth resumed with a vengeance, especially my dwarf hygro which 
>sprouted dozens of side shoots and turned into a shrub.  Fish seemed to 
>appreciate it too.


First, I don't believe high nitrates impair plant growth. Take a healthy
tank, dose the hell out of it with kno3 and watch what happens. You
have a tank with high nitrates and poor growth when you changed a lot
of water. What else was in that water?

As for the fresh water growth syndrome, I've noticed that too. If you dose with
kno3 and change water by themselves, the latter seems to give a slightly bigger
growth spurt than the former. Moreso, you can dose all you want if you don't
change water you don't get that WOW growth rate.

Now, if there was something we're adding when  we infuse new water I figure
sea-chem would have put it in a bottle by now. So it would have to be something
we're diluting, something we're essentially removing, some sort of compound
that inhibits plant growth?

Do we know exactly what the metabolic byproducts of common aquarium plants are?






--

 /"\                         / http://lists.aquaria.net
 \ /  ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN / Killies, Crypts, Aponogetons
  X   AGAINST HTML MAIL    / http://new.killi.net
 / \  AND POSTINGS        / http://images.aquaria.net

_______________________________________________
Aquatic-Plants mailing list
Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
http://www.actwin.com/mailman/listinfo/aquatic-plants