Plant holes query

[Carlyh569]

Hi

So I have a 45l tank which had just 2 plants in that were doing very nicely, a couple of brown spots on new growth leaves but other than that they have been doing well since August last year when we got the tank. I put microne-lift fertiliser in every week with a water change.

My brother recently gave me a couple of his floating plants which frankly are spawning at the same rate as my guppies but over the course of this week one of the plants has developed very uniform holes over quite a handful of it's leaves.

My query is - have the floating plants somehow upset the balance? I'm assuming my potassium levels haven't changed just in the last week so wondering if the very oxygen producing floating plants are sucking the CO2 out?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

 

[Aiken Drum]

Could they be reducing light getting to the bottom of the tank?

Floating plants will be getting their CO2 from the atmosphere. They could be taking up other nutrients. Have you noticed a drop in nitrate in the tank?

 

[Carlyh569]

Hi

Nitrate is currently at 10 ppm which I think is pretty standard for the tank and they seem to be getting enough light. I will snip the affected leaves off when I do the water change and see what happens from there!

Have added a pic just in case you can see anything glaringly obvious ?

 

[Aiken Drum]

Yes. That looks like potassium deficiency. Or possibly manganese.

The only time ive personally seen leafs like that is when i removed the plant and it was out of the water for a few hours before returning it the tank (i got distracted and forgot about it) and i read that drying out can cause that look. I ended up removing that plant altogether. It never really recovered.

 

[Carlyh569]

I did exactly that a couple of weeks ago!! I took it out as my son wanted to change things around so I thought I would give the gravel a good clean and put it all back in again!!

Didn't even give that a second thought ��

Oh well, lesson learnt!

Thanks as always

 

[Caliban07]

Looks like a melting leaf to me. Usually a co2 deficiency or fluctuation that causes leaves to do this.

Because the vast majority of our plants can use carbonates in the water and convert this to co2 inside the plant, if you have hard water replaced frequently you may never see this once they are established.