Translucent Spots on Leaves

Lansirill · Oct 25, 2007

I have a melon sword which does a fine job of sprouting out new leaves on a regular basis. However, the leaves tend to develop translucent spots on them fairly quickly. Eventually they'll brown and die.

I dose the recommended levels of Seachem ferts (macros and regular flourish)& Excel, and have around 2WPG (I'm currently using clip-lamps so it's a rough guess) of light over a 33G tank. I have an amazon sword, ambulia, hornwort, moneywort, and red leaf ludwigia that are all doing just fine in the tank. Any ideas what I might be missing? I'm hoping this simply sounds like a sign of a particular nutrient deficiency, which would be easy enough to fix.

jemanser · Oct 25, 2007

Melon swords are usually undemanding and thrive if planted in a good substrate. Mine grew like crazy in a 5 G Hex w/o co2 using ECO-COMLETE substrate. It sounds like you're dosing the fertilzers as recommended; perhaps use a different approach and try a root-tab fertilzer in the substrate under the plant. Sometimes stunted new growth can reflect a calcium /iron deficeincies. Are there any healthy established leaves on the plant? What type of bulbs(K) are you using? Good luck-jeff

mellowvision · Oct 26, 2007

could be the excel

Lansirill · Oct 26, 2007

The bulbs are 6500K I believe. The sword is planted in plain old gravel, although I attempted to replant the sword in a small patch of Onyx sand (I think I failed.) Root tabs might help out.

The sword has, eh, I'll take a few pictures. Then you can see exactly what the sword has.