[Prev][Next][Index]

Re: Aquatic Plants Digest V1 #274



Yoadie yo ho !!!

Based on a message from Aquatic-Plants-Owner at actwin_com to All,
Let's talk about: Aquatic Plants Digest V1 #274

 A> Tomasz Nidecki says....

 A> "However, I bought some Echinodorus amasonicus and two other
 A> species for my tanik for young plecos, and discovered that
 A> all the new plants and the old large echinodorus are dying
 A> on me...
 A> The sickness makes the young leaves (not the old ones!) turn
 A> white, lose their filling and become a thin net-like
 A> structure. Some older leaves start getting this, too but
 A> most of the time only partially (not the whole leaf at
 A> once)."

 A> Unless the leaves are first turning yellow (iron deficiency),
 A> pale green (sulfur deficiency), have a reticulated look to them
 A> (manganese deficiency), or have small holes in them (potassium
 A> deficiency), my guess is that the plecos are eating them. Give
 A> them a piece of driftwood on which to chew. If it is a nutrient
 A> problem, you are lacking one of the immobile elements: boron, iron,
 A> manganese, copper, calcium or sulfur. Does that sound right everyone?

Well, the Echinodorus I kept for a year was quite fine in
this same water, changed even less often than it is now (it
used to be with less fish), and nothing ever happened to it.
It seems that a couple of my friends who bought their plants
lately from the same source have the same problem, their
Echinodorus are dying in exactly the same way. Also -
neither my Hygrophila/synnema pnats which i keep with my
goldfish are in any way affected (so it's not tap water),
nor is the Aglaonema simplex which is together with the
Echninodorus. The plecos are young, well-fed on zucchini and
they are seen to stay mostly on larger, older leaves, while
it's the young leaves, still a couple of cm that are dying.
The colour is whitish-transparent, just as if the
cholesterol suddenly disappeared. THis happens as i said to
the young leaves first and overwhelms all of them, now it's
spreading to older leaves, and there it looks like parts of
the leaves are suddenly turning transparent (it's not that
they have holes in them, they look like milk-glass), and
then only a couple of green patches are left here and there
until the leaf is all transparent, and then it loses its
material, since it's dead anyways... So I'm 99% sure it's
not a defficiency of any kind (why would it happen
simultaneously in may tanks where plants were bought from
the same source), and definitely the plecos couldn't do all
that harm either, besides I've had a Royal pleco eat all my
plants before (it's in another tank, with driftwood
only...), and I've seen the holes the guy made in the
leaves, so I can spot the difference... So the only
explanation is a sickness of some kind, and that has been
confirmed by one of my friends who supposively came across
it some time ago and lost all his Echinodorus in a short
time.

           /
          ||/   -=< TONID >=-
     | /| |/   Tomasz Nidecki
     || |//    tonid at falcon_mimuw.edu.pl (FWD to FIDO)
     ||////    Tomasz.Nidecki at f78_n480.z2.fidonet.org
     /  /_
    |', ___
    |  /
     --