# Plants melting or natural die off?



## agentho (Jan 14, 2007)

Hi Folks,
Just planted up my 7g tank this week and noticed the next day that all the leaves of my H. Polysperma 'sunset' are translucent and look close to disappearing. They looked ok the day before. Some of the other plants might have a little bit of this, but nowhere near as much as the H. polysperma sunset.

Is this normal die off of the leaves or is my tank really unhealthy? Should I be pruning these off proactively? If I do, do I just leave the stems leafless and hope that they recover?

Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Here's some history (sorry if there's extraneous info, just not sure if any of this might be a factor).

7g tank
14 watts flourescent

Monday: 
- Got the plant package and soaked in Alum solution for snail, etc
- Put new cherry red shrimp in tank (I added tank water to the shrimp bag incrementally but couldn't figure out how to net the shrimp out of the bag when I was done acclimating them. I ended up pouring the entire contents out into my tank)

Wednesday:
50% water change

Thursday: 
Took plants out of Alum solution and planted in substrate
Dose with Flourish Excel (dosed according to bottle directions)
Plants looking OK, water looks a little cloudy

Friday:
Plants looking not so good.
Sorry haven't taken any water parameters yet.


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## trenac (Jul 16, 2004)

Welcome to APC :-D 

It could be that the plant was grown emerged or if the plant was stressed from being shipped the Alum dip could have had a negative effect on the plant. 

I would remove any dieing leaves and new leaves should grow back if they died from emerged growth. 

Also Hygro sunset is a medium light plant and might not do as well in your lighting which is considered low light for a small tank.

As for the shrimp the easiest way to net them is to pour them into a bowl and net them out of the bowl. You can also aclimate them in the bowl. You should never pour water from someone else's tank into your tank.


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## agentho (Jan 14, 2007)

trenac said:


> Welcome to APC :-D
> 
> It could be that the plant was grown emerged or if the plant was stressed from being shipped the Alum dip could have had a negative effect on the plant.


Plants came from another tank so emerged growth shouldn't be the problem. There was a delay from the time they were trimmed to the time they were shipped so maybe that stressed the plants



trenac said:


> I would remove any dieing leaves and new leaves should grow back if they died from emerged growth.


I plan on removing the dying leaves and hopefully it'll do better.


trenac said:


> Also Hygro sunset is a medium light plant and might not do as well in your lighting which is considered low light for a small tank.


Duly noted. Just wanted a fast grower to start off. I'm curious to see how it'll do in low light. I'm assuming that it won't die but maybe stunted growth or spiny looking maybe?



trenac said:


> As for the shrimp the easiest way to net them is to pour them into a bowl and net them out of the bowl. You can also aclimate them in the bowl. You should never pour water from someone else's tank into your tank.


Yup, I knew it was a problem. The darn suckers kept getting caught in the folds and corners of the bag when I was trying to net them.

Fingers crossed...


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