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re:More light = plant bubbles?!



>I have a 55 gal with co2 injection, with only 60 watts of weak
>light (old bulbs)  Today I recieved in the mail a new double strip four 
>foot light.  I immediatly got it over the tank with the old lights and watched	
>my plants "come to life"  The effect was immediate...they all started to send
>a tiny stream of bubbles from various leaves.  I'm not talking just a few
>bubbles, these things were goin' crazy!  Can anyone help me with what 
>exchange is going on here and what the light triggered to do this?  The 
>books I have do not explain this.

I'd like to confirm this by saying that I upped the lighting on my 55 this 
weekend from 80 watts fluorescent to 160 watts fluorescent.  After a couple of 
hours with the lights on, my tank looks like the inside of a glass of Sprite.  

My fish like this too.  My female rams were all in full color last night when I 
got home from work.  I hadn't seen them this pretty since the week after I 
bought them (they were doped with hormones).  My tank was literally fizzing 
with O2 bubbles.  It looked like someone had replaced my water with seltzer 
water.

The chemical reaction you are seeing, minus the intermediate steps, is:

6(CO2) + 6(H2O) = C6H12O6 + 6(O2)

C6H12O6 = glucose.  The bubbles you see are the O2 that is released by the 
photosynthetic process.

David W. Webb
Enterprise Computing Provisioning
Texas Instruments Inc.
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Webb