Water lettuce and hyacinth are used in sewage treatment plants for final treatment to remove nutrients before discharging to receiving water body. No wonder your nitrate is so low despite heavy feeding of live food. Do you catch your own night crawlers. They have dirt in their gut to pollute your water yet replenish essential minerals your plants need. No wonder you don’t need frequent fert dosing. Have you considered introducing Hornwort which is an easy and pretty floater. Many pond keepers use Hornwort as an algae suppresser which is said to release an allelopathy agent. I don’t know if guppy grass can function the same as my guppy grass tank has never encountered algae.
I've tried hornwort many times before. Its a fine plant and always grew really good for me. But it always seems to shed needles like crazy no matter what I did. Nowadays I just toss a few moss balls in the tank to help suppress algae. If algae gets going ill dose excel moderately until the algae dies back.
Ever since adding hyacinth, I haven't had alot of algae. Hyacinth grows at an insane rate. I only had 2 in my 180 at first. After a month I had probably 20. Same with water lettuce. The reason you stated about being used in sewage treatment was why I went with hyacinth and water lettuce.
There's a study article published that tested the efficacy of floating plants and their ability to reduce nitrates. Hyacinth was best followed by water lettuce and then amazon frogbit. So that was what inspired me to go so heavy on those three plants. I live in ky, which has super hard water and high nitrates in the water. Its almost like having already fertilized water lol
I work 3rd shift. On my nights off after or during a heavy rain ive went outside and easily found 100s of earthworms and nightcrawlers. During those rains at night i can find them on my patios, driveway, etc. Ive also looked under objects on my property to find plenty of earthworms.
Nowadays I keep a worm bin insisde my basement mechanical room and outside I keep a compost pile for easy access to feeders. But now that my eels have grown so big, I need to get a nightcrawler bin going. They can eat 10 plus regular worms per feeding PER eel lol. But nightcrawlers seems to fill them up after 2 or 3 max.
I've noticed what u said about the dirt filled guts. Whenever the eels eat nightcrawlers I can literally see clouds of black dust spewing out of their gills as they force the nightcrawler down their mouths. Good fertilizer for the plants lol
