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Wondering if plants do prefer blues and red light or does any white light (which I think is high in blue?) will do? And just up the power/energy output?
Just wondering if a really good light specifically for growing plants does make a difference?
My educated guess at this point would be that plants probably do have a preference and that will probably dictate the species and location of where it grows.
There is an interesting section in Diana walstad's book Ecology of the planted tank where she tests a number of plants species with different combination of lighting colour temps and wavelengths. In her experiment, a generic 'cool white' tube in conjunction with a 'colour' tube yielded the best results. Second best was 2 x cool whites. This tube was predominately in the yellow spectru. While the previous experiment provided the best growth because of the full colour spectrum provided she hypothesised that in the wild water absorbs much of the red light whereas most of the blue is absorbed by dissolved organic carbon. What's left is mainly green and yellow and that may explain the decent performance of the cool whites. The plants evolutionary response so to speak.
That's pretty interesting! I had wondered why what looks like white light to me seems to be growing plants. Although maybe not very well.
I suspect the BBA is slightly worse in the centre of the tank where there is high light and lots of red light but it grows pretty much anywhere curses.
