Plants dying - please help

[Lila]

Hi, all of the plants in the tank except for the anubias are turning a little translucent and yellow, what is the problem and how do I fix it?

Nitrate: has always been 0, water changes every 3 and 1/2 weeks

I dose with Easy Green twice a week and a bit more than suggested, and there are root tabs in the aquarium also with fluval soil. Still, this tank is less successful than the one I literally do not touch, what's the issue? And how should I fix it? It looks really yellow in the photo but the color in person is more of a super pale brown, some of the leaves are a pale yellow, and the leaves on the left have translucent spots with yellow around it.

I also have flourish and flourish excel on hand if those might help, just never thought they worked.

 

[Aiken Drum]

How long have you had these plants?

If the reading is correct your nitrate is very low for a planted tank. I ask if the reading is correct because easy green contains nitrate, so if you test after dosing you should be seeing some nitrate in the water. I think the recommended dosage should be adding 6ppm of nitrate. What test kit are you using? Are you sure you are doing the test correctly? Can you get a 2nd opinion on your water parameters? A fish store should be able to test your water for you.

Flourish wont help nitrate levels. Easy green should have everything thats in flourish + nitrate and phosphate. Excel could be harmful to your fish and wont help anything. Its gluteraldhyde, which is normally used to sterilse medical equipment and is poisonous to fish. In aquariums it acts as a mild algaecide, and provides zero CO2. You have to be careful not to overdose, its a fine line between no real harm, and killing everything.

It does look like a nitrogen deficiency. Or possibly iron or CO2. If its a new plant it would be a normal stage a lot of plants go through when a plant transitions from emersed growth to submerged growth, in which case new leafs should be good when they come through.

 

[Lila]

OKay, I'll go and test it today, I'm using the API test kit but I've heard those could be a bit dodgy sometimes

It is a new plant, but the store I get it from already has the plants submerged so I didn't think that would be an issue.

Once I get the water tested, how would I fix each possible deficiency? Like if it wasn't nitrate how would I fix nitrogen, co2, or iron?

 

[Aiken Drum]

Commercially grown plants are cultivated “emersed” rather than “submerged”. This way the plants can easily get their carbon requirement from atmospheric CO2. They can be grown quicker which makes the operation much more commercially viable. You take that plant, put it in your aquarium, cut off its source of CO2 and the plant goes into survival mode. It starts to use up its stored carbon and the leafs melt. You may lose all your original growth to melt but new leafs will have a structure more suited to its new environment and get its carbon from the water. Plant melt is a normal stage in aquarium plant growth. To judge the health of a plant look for new growth rather than what might be happening to the original growth, and judge it over extended periods of time.

The aquarium store take those emersed plants and put them in an aquarium to sell. It takes months for plants to transition from emersed to submerged growth. They will not have been in the store long enough to transition.

If you dont see any improvement or new growth in a month or 2, thats the time to start looking for a cause. What you are seeing is normal.