Only the good die young!

I've got some good news, and some bad news. Let's start with the bad ones. There was a casualty in the tank - one of the Gymnocorymbus ternetzi now swims in the heavenly pond. I don't really know the reason for its demise, it had no visible marks of disease or anything, it was just floating around in the tank lifeless. The fish in question was a lot smaller than the rest of the school, so I'm thinking it had some defect from the get-go which lead to this. Label this under "such is life" for now.

The good news is that after tweaking my fertilizer dosing rate, I'm seeing positive results in the plants. I've been puzzled a bit by the lack of plant growth, as well as the appearance of the brownish algae. The light is there, as well as the CO2, so I decided to increase the amount of fertilizer to see if that was the limiting factor. I'm using Easy Life ProFito as my choice of liquid fertilizer. I was dosing 10ml twice a week, now I'm adding 10ml 4 times a week. I'll try to stick with this regimen for a few weeks and see what the long term effects are.

Usually, when plants do poorly and algae thrives, there's a deficiency of some sort which inhibits plant growth and thus leaves the algae to suck up the nutrients. The tank is still rather new, so that is also a factor which I have to keep in mind. What ever the reason is, there was a significant change in plant growth, so maybe this will be a break for better things!