dutchy, I use RO water and a GH booster (1/2 tsp) to probably about 15 gallons or so of RO water (at 50% water change), would my GH still be fairly low?
There are so many confounds within a tank it seems difficult to test some of these things. For example, if i reduce my GH booster and GDA reduces, i can't necessarily attribute that to the reduction in GH. At this same time, plant mass is increasing, CO2 and fert consumption is increasing, increased plant mass reduces flow. In my tank, since it is a new scape (some new aquasoil, new filter with old media) there is also the possibility of decreased bio filtration that improves over time, as well as an increase in fauna when I add new fish (that one can be controlled for).
How do you plan to test? what will your tank be like? Do you have something stable you can run the tests on? I wouldn't be willing to play around as I'm not as experienced as you and don't want to really goof up this new scape. its a tight rope for me!
I'm curious how these "test" setups work and how you control for the possible confounds. (I could start a new thread if this is too far off topic)
How would one identify more than one genus in such a small organism? I doubt there are morphological identifiers. I'm assuming you would need to sequence the DNA and compare to a registry of known genotypes. Does such a database exist for algae? Are the enzymes available for such a test? It would be interesting to know if there are a multittude of varying genotypes that are adapted to varied environments. Although, that knowledge would be useless to the common aquarist as they would have no way of determining which strain has infested their home aquarium.
There are so many confounds within a tank it seems difficult to test some of these things. For example, if i reduce my GH booster and GDA reduces, i can't necessarily attribute that to the reduction in GH. At this same time, plant mass is increasing, CO2 and fert consumption is increasing, increased plant mass reduces flow. In my tank, since it is a new scape (some new aquasoil, new filter with old media) there is also the possibility of decreased bio filtration that improves over time, as well as an increase in fauna when I add new fish (that one can be controlled for).
How do you plan to test? what will your tank be like? Do you have something stable you can run the tests on? I wouldn't be willing to play around as I'm not as experienced as you and don't want to really goof up this new scape. its a tight rope for me!
I'm curious how these "test" setups work and how you control for the possible confounds. (I could start a new thread if this is too far off topic)
How would one identify more than one genus in such a small organism? I doubt there are morphological identifiers. I'm assuming you would need to sequence the DNA and compare to a registry of known genotypes. Does such a database exist for algae? Are the enzymes available for such a test? It would be interesting to know if there are a multittude of varying genotypes that are adapted to varied environments. Although, that knowledge would be useless to the common aquarist as they would have no way of determining which strain has infested their home aquarium.