Wisteria, nitrogen, and algae

I would suspect your lighting. You might try Ceratopteris thalyctroides (the other Watersprite) instead. I've had more luck with it in the lower light than your Hygrophila and it pretty much looks the same. I have some growing in my tank right now with a tad lower lighting than you (2wpg) and it's doing really well. P.S. - I hardly ever fertilize. When I do I also get algae - green rather than brown.

Odd, you can check the link in my sig and see how much my Wisteria has grown, and I have less light than you. I noticed it really took off after I added DIY CO2. I havce since switched to Flourish Excel and haven't seen any drop off.

Hmm, very interesting problem. Like Harlock, my wisteria grows crazy.. http://home.comcast.net/~slardizabal/krib2.html. I have DIY CO2 and keep it around 15 ppm and lighting is 6500K at 2wpg. I would suspect a CO2 issue, but you're dosing excel. So, that kinda rules it out. Do you know what the CO2 level is in the tank?

Also, you're right, wisteria (IME) is a serious nitrogen hog. My tap water comes out around 1ppm NO3, I've got a pair of kribensis and their fry in my 20long that I feed lots of live and frozen food too and my nitrates never test at a readable level. Even the really sensitive NO3 tests dont show anything, and only once did I get a reading near 1ppm (after a big water change). Its at the point now that I notice a slow in growth if I dont dose KNO3 to the tank twice a week.

I'm also wondering about your substrate, my wisteria puts out extensive root systems in profile substrate, and seems to pull most of its needed iron from there. When I was dosing chelated iron in the tank I had a major outbreak of brown algae and some sort of interesting thread algae.

Hmm, honestly the only difference between your tank and mine is a higher temperature in yours (mine runs at 76F) and slightly more light (by 0.4 wpg in yours). Hopefully someone can give a definitive answer about the nitrogen issue with wisteria.

>Sarah

Wow. Maybe the Wisteria isn't oing to make it? When I got my bunches home, I promptly bleach dipped them, then rinsed and then planted. For the first week or two I would find a leaf or few every day and some of the lower leaves would get black spots (almost like a burn, which I assumed was weaker leaves that got chlorine burns from the bleach). After that, it tapered off. Then, they just sort of grew like mad. You seem to be over-fertilzed, in my opinion. You don't need root tabs with Flourite.

As for fertilization: I dose what it says on the Flourish and Flourish Excel bottles. Are you sure you positively ID'd the algae? Take a look at this article from Plant Geek. Before you can treat something, you have to know what you are dealing with.

Check how much root mass your wisteria has? How long have you had it?

My wisteria had been grown emergent (slightly toothed leaves rather than the submergent deeply lobed leaves) and I think this resulted in them taking a while to get going. My wisteria took a long time building up a good root mass, and only now after a month is now getting a few pairs of new leaves at each meristem. During this time, most of the lateral leaves either fell off gradually or those remaining have a fine smudgy layer of brownish algae. Many shoots never got good root growth and I would find floating, others sent out mainly adventitious roots at upper nodes which I pulled up (not much base roots on these, so I didn't really pull), trimmed the stem base off, and replanted. All my other plants, especially my vallis, are doing great. In retrospect, I might have been better off with H. polysperma to start off with, but I'll be patient.

Stem plants tend to focus resources on new leaves at the meristems, and pull resources from the older lateral leaves. It looks like that what the one in the foreground is doing, focusing nutrients in the main meristem and the new basal side shoots. I think dirty-looking older leaves is pretty common with fast growing stem plants and is why people plant midground bushy plants in front of tall background stem plants like wisteria. I would probably let it keep growing for a while more, but once it gets too ugly for you, I would do as you suggested, cut the old stems at the base (leave the new basal side shoots alone), trim the stem off pretty high up, a node or two below the lowest good-looking leaves and replant. But hopefully someone with more wisteria experience will verify if this is correct.

Okay, I just came to this thread and did a lot of skimming, so forgive me if I repeat someone else. I may be able to help you though...

When I first added wisteria to my tank it didn't do so hot. I bleached it, much like I do with most new additions, and trimmed off the weak/sick looking leaves.

For the first 2-3 months it basically just grew new leaves as fast as the old ones were dying. For a long time it looked really bare as I trimmed off all the bad leaves.

I mix my own KNO3 solution following Chuck Gadd's dosing calculator. (www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua), it's in among the articles. So I just add 1mL of solution for every 1ppm I wish to increase NO3.

I've found that when adding new plants they sometimes tend to take a little while to acclimate and get over the shock of transport. Bringing NO3 levels up to about 15ppm helps a great deal. After a few weeks of 15ppm NO3 wisteria was nicely settled in and growing well. Now it grows inches per week.

Do you dose CO2? At your light levels, you should be.

NO3 will not cause algae, most algae lack the cellular goodies to strip the 3 oxygens from the N to use it, higher plants have this covered. Algae thrive on ammonia. I know, your ammonia test kit sais 0ppm. Doesn't matter, test kits just test excess, you have production from fish and uneaten food and consumption by plants, algae and filter bacteria, in that order.

I'll wager that your algal bloom came after you added the root tabs. Root tabs usually use urea (NH3-CO-NH3) as a nitrogen source. Guess what? Urea releases ammonia and can be used by algae. It's too late to remove them, but don't add any more or disturb the substrate over the tabs. Keep up the water changes, you can scale back to 50%, 75% is excessive and I suspect that the low water level stresses the fish.

Cut back your feedings to once every other day. The fish will be fine and if it is diatoms, the Otos will eat it instead of the uneaten food. Plus you'll decrease the ammonia flux, reducing algae's food source.

What are your PO4 levels? What happens to NO3 concentrations over a couple days? Dose NO3, test after a few hours (for mixing) then test again in a few days, are your plants consuming it?

You can also let a stem float at the surface, most stem plants can do quite well like this since they're adapted to take nutrients from the water column. Plus floating brings them closer to the light and closer to the air and a faster source of CO2.

To summarize:
Increase NO3 to 15ppm
No more root tabs
Reduce feedings