Quote:
Originally Posted by kevline
Since you mentioned light. How long should they be on for typically?
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10-12 hours a day. Most of us use some type of timer (I like the Coralife power strips with the built-in timers:
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/produc...r%20strip&Np=1). One bit of advice I've seen here and elsewhere is to have the lights on for a few hours, off for an hour or two, then on for the balance of the 10-12 hours. The off period in the middle of the day disrupts the life cycle of the algae, and the fish don't care, since there's usually enough ambient light in the room (to them, the sun went behind a cloud, I guess
).
Just an FYI, but I saw what I thought was some type of hair algae growing on the end of one of the longer leaves on my Java Fern, and I was ready to trim off the leaf to get rid of it, when I realized there were new leaves growing out of that spot. The fern was forming a new rhizome at the end of the leaf, and what I thought was algae was roots reaching down to latch onto something (in this case, a rock near the driftwood). They're almost there, so I'm going to leave it be for a while until they anchor to the rock, and then trim off the rest of the leaf connecting the new rhizome to the mother plant.
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I would also like to point out that Java Fern doesn't like its roots buried in the gravel. It attaches to drift wood really well, and will do fine like that. I also float some in tanks with fry, along with Java moss....It does fine in the lowest of light conditions. Though in any condition I have ever had it, leaves do tend to die, sometimes forming those plantlets on the end, so I wonder about leaving them on. Decaying plant matter does contribute to problems with water condition.