What is happening to my plants??

[WyldFya]

You have to have a balance of the three nutrients. Using a good macro doser will help with this. If you add too much potassium, but not enough N or P, then you will have an imbalance. In planted tanks it is very important to monitor N, P and K, and in some cases more.

 

[AmazonAngel]

Are my new lights suitable?
i got 3 Phillips t8 32watt "imitates natural full spectrum" 5000k
Im just curious because once I installed them i noticed the red in my plants turned to white

 

[velanarris]

Are my new lights suitable?
i got 3 Phillips t8 32watt "imitates natural full spectrum" 5000k
Im just curious because once I installed them i noticed the red in my plants turned to white

5000k is a fairly soft color for some plants. Which plants are turning white and have you made any other changes aside from the bulbs? What temp bulbs where you running before?

 

[AmazonAngel]

I dont know what kind of bulbs I had before because they were already installed one I purchased it. The plants that used to be red are now bright green where they used to be red. Expecially my rotala plant. Its okay with me as long as the plant can survive with that type of light. As for the holes in my sword, could it possibly be a manganese deficientcy?

 

[chonhzilla]

I dont know what kind of bulbs I had before because they were already installed one I purchased it. The plants that used to be red are now bright green where they used to be red. Expecially my rotala plant. Its okay with me as long as the plant can survive with that type of light. As for the holes in my sword, could it possibly be a manganese deficientcy?

What he said...

You have to have a balance of the three nutrients. Using a good macro doser will help with this. If you add too much potassium, but not enough N or P, then you will have an imbalance. In planted tanks it is very important to monitor N, P and K, and in some cases more.

 

[velanarris]

The color change will depend on what type of bulbs and what type of plants. If the light fixture is one of the packaged ones that comes with the petco/petsmart tanks it's probably an actinic/10,000k bulb of low quality. Poor quality bulbs will make even the best fixture just about worthless.

As for the holes in your plants, as Wyldfya said, check your macronutrients, micro deficiency won't lead to a rapid "hole punching" of your leaves like that. If anything you'd see the leaves slowly change color (course of a week for most species) and most likely become brown or yellow.

Since you changed your bulbs to another brand and color your nutrient needs could have also changed, leading you to deficiency in a macro as well. With the fancier rotala's one of the most common reasons for color change are either Nitrate or Iron uptake. Iron is not involved in producing the "red" color of Rotala, but iron aids the plant in Nitrate uptake. If your Nitrate is high your rotala will lose the red and start to green out. This is not harmful to the plant and is actually a sign that the Nitrate is at a good level for the plant, but, you get the fancier colors by starving Nitrogen and halting chlorophyll production as rotala's use more N than most other plants.

Looking at both issues you've described, your water parameters must be out of wack. It explains both the greening of the rotalas and the holes you're finding in other plants.

 

[AmazonAngel]

I know my water parameters are wrong but I cant figure out what it is. I add nitrogen, iron, and potassium as indicated on the bottles. How do I tesk the micronutrients? I also give the swords plant tab fertilizer. the holes started apppearing on my sword long before I changed the lights. I did not get the lights with the fixture, I bought them from home depot. They are phillips 32 watt t8 "natural sunshine" 5000K 2950 lumens. My old bulbs were phillips F32T8/DX alto collection, thats all they say on them.

 

[velanarris]

What's your dosing schedule and how many gallons are we talking about?

I'm especially curious as to what your ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels are. Nitrite will also burn holes in your plants, but typically kill your fish before the plants are affected.

Also, what are you using to churn your substrate? Any snails or other filter feeders in there? Maybe you have a toxic gas buildup, but this will also typically kill your fish.

 

[Kogo]

The nutrient comments are good especialy considering the recent bulb change.

However, dont rule out allealpathy. If you have recently added any aggressivly growing plants (or just let things get overgrown) like hygro or another species of sword they may be fighting chemically. It seems in my experiance that once two plants start fighting, everything else in the tank goes crazy as well. You see it first in things like crypts and then latter in the swords. You remove the most leathal or competitive plants and then things stabalize.

Also, if plants are melting, they are releasing all the nutrients they have stored in their leaves and you paramaters will not be a true representation of your dosing scedule. I always remove dying leaves as quickly as possible for this reason.

So, what I'm saying is, once you remove any dying/melting leaves if their is no problems with your parameters I would look more closely into the plants themselves.

Kogo

 

[AmazonAngel]

I dose about every 2 weeks and get the swords a few plant tabs in the gravel once a month. It is my 75 gallon discus tank and all fish appear healthy. The plants have all been in there for a year and were all doing wonderful until now. Most are fine the swords are the only suffering. I have trumpet snails. Ph 7.0 nitrite 0 nitrate 50 and ammonia .5. I was suprised by the ammonia and nitrate reading because I did a water change a few days ago.