trying to maintain planted aquarium!

I think it varies. I know certain species of the apple (mystery) snails will destroy tank vegetation. See here:
http://www.applesnail.net/
Under "Care" it talks about how some of them will eat aquarium plants. Again, this depends on species. My snails are Pomacea bridgesii and they don't touch my live plants
 
I decided to test out some bulbs from petco for like 6 bux..... They have bulbs of random plants... like 7 in a pack...
 
ok, i'm pulling all my plants out and starting over... they are definitely dead, both my bushy nose LOVE to hang out on the bigger leaves (which are covered in holes for rotting away)!

i think my problem is lighting. i bought a used tank and the previous owner had successfully maintained a heavily planted tank for 6 years. he had 4 lights going and i thought that was a little too bright so i was only using one...obviously one is not enough!!!

are there plants that live with minimum light? we have one light on for 12hrs a day.

the light i'm using just says "coralife" on it, so i have no idea what kind it is exactly, but the previous owner used 4 of them for his tank.

thanks for all the input so far!
 
well it matters it does matter but plants need a certain amount of light to live and even more to thrive. what type of lights are thay (power compact, T5 T8 or such) how powerful (how many watts) and what spectrum are thay in (the K rating thay have). these are the main questions when dealing with lighting for tanks.
 
Cat:

The manufact is Coralife, but need to know the K-rating and the watts. Also one bulb of any kind is too little for plants (unless it is a PC and then low light plants maybe OK).
 
Looks like you need to brighten things up . More lighting to start.
 
Hello Cat,

First things first...check what your wattage to water ratio is, usualy for planted aquariums is 2 to 3 watts per gallon of water, the bigger the tank the farther the light has to travel to the plants. Second when you moved your plants from your 30 gallon tank did you trimmed the roots a little?, doing this stimulates the growth of them ensuring the plant assimilates all the nutrients it needs to grow and be healthy. Also you have to look into your local water supply, e-mail your local water company and asked them for a chamistry report, it should break down all the nice info such as, what concentration of chlorine and chloramines it has, potassium, zinc, iron things like that. Also you want to look into your Carbonate Hardness which is display as Kh. The softer your Kh degree is the easier it will be for you to maintain your PH stable in your tank. I notice before I added the live plants my PH in my tank ran at around 7.5, but once I started CO2 fertilization it lowered the PH in the tank to 7.0 which is neutral, I did noticed some of the fish had a hard time with this. Anotherthing yo want to be careful with is overdozing trace elements into your water column. Pay close attention to this, beacuase if you don't you will be figthing alge always.

Hope everything works out, and good luck.
 
The softer your Kh degree is the easier it will be for you to maintain your PH stable in your tank
Click to expand...

Aquario - it's high KH levels (i.e. hard) which stabalise pH, not low ones. It wouldn't have been pH which troubled your fish (fish don't care as long as it's between around 5 and 9) but too high levels of CO2 can inhibit oxygen uptake. Many aquaria are run at pHs far lower than 7.0.
 
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