Your Planted Aquarium May Be Hiding a Deadly Secret!

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. This is Jason from Prime Time Aquatics. Thank you so much for being here. You read that right. Your plants may be causing an issue and I've got the perfect example to show you.

[00:00:11]Let's go take a look. So, as we look around the gallery, we've got the five tanks here. All the tanks are doing great, but the one I want to focus on for this video is this one right here.

[00:00:22]This is the Nano 125. I call it that because it's just filled with tiny fish and a lot of plants. Now, what's interesting about this aquarium, I'm going to show you a picture of when we first got it up and running. Not a whole lot of plant growth. I'm going to show you a picture of the last time we did a gallery tour and take a look at the tank.

[00:00:46]Now something interesting has happened to this aquarium and that is as we look at the fish tank now especially over in the front here and over here something dramatic has changed and I want to pay special attention to something and so we see here over on the left hand side and then over here on the right hand side a very different story. Here's the thing.

[00:01:11]We did not necessarily plant it this way when it was first set up. And it didn't even look like this a few months ago.

[00:01:19]And so what's happened here is you're going to see all this corkcrew valve has really started to take over the tank. It started out as a plant that we planted in the background and it was spreading throughout the back and it had pretty much stayed there. But now what's happened is it's wound its way around the perimeter and it's kind of snaked its way through that center part here and it's now pushing its way up front.

[00:01:44]It's had years to do this and yet it just started doing this recently in the last month or so. Why did it do it? Why did this stuff just seem to come out of nowhere? Nothing has really changed in terms of the stocking levels. As most of you know, if you've been watching the channel for a while, we don't add liquid fertilizers ever. We put root tabs in this aquarium when we first set it up a couple years ago. Never added a single root tab after that. We rely on the fish to do what they do, and that is supply the nutrients. The lights have stayed exactly the same. The water parameters are exactly the same. And yet, this plant is really starting to take off.

[00:02:23]And I think the reason why this has happened is Joanna went in here about a month or so ago and she pulled out a bunch of bronze crips from this front area here. In fact, this area looked a lot like this front area did. It's not just the space that's allowing this valve to grow. There is a special word that I want to introduce to you today.

[00:02:49]Maybe some of you have heard it before.

[00:02:51]Aliopathy. This alilopathy is basically when plants secrete chemicals that prevent other plants from encroaching in on their space. It has been scientifically shown that actually the different types of valves they will do this. I think based on what we're seeing here, the crips were doing it as well and they had their little spot and you can even see it right here. Right?

[00:03:15]There's a big bunch there's an area here of crips where Joanna did not pull from that part of the tank and there really isn't any jungle vals growing around the perimeter of where those crips are. I think that's why this jungle val is encroaching here and we'll see but I don't think it's going to get much further. We find the same thing in Hornward. I mentioned this a long time ago. I had a 20-galon one, had some Julia chorus ornonatus and the tank was filled with black beard algae and it was really annoying and I put some hornwart in that tank and within a month all the blackbeard algae was dead. Now there's a couple reasons why this can happen. One perhaps the hornwart out competed the blackbeard algae used up a lot more nutrients and the blackbeard algae could not survive. But the way that it happened it was all gone. Hornwart is also known to secrete chemicals in the water column that can prevent certain allergies from growing. And I think in that particular case, we had a combination of the two things happening.

[00:04:14]Yes, it was taking nutrients and creating competition, but possibly also secretreting these anti-growth chemicals. Now, plants can do that in the water column. They can also do that in the substrate. Things like phenolic acids and fatty acids. These things can prevent other plants from growing. And so what we're learning, what we should be thinking about is when we have a planted tank similar to what we're seeing here, and we plant a lot of different types of plants, sometimes some grow really well and other times plants don't grow well. And yes, it could be lighting. It could be water parameters. It could be where they're at in the aquarium or there could be some competition going on between the plants and some plants are preventing others from fully growing. And I think that's a really strong case as to what happened here. Now, do I like what's turned out?

[00:05:05]Not really, because I love the corkcrew val. And it's I'm telling you, it's insane how fast this has grown. I just noticed this last week. And it was little stubs all around. And it is growing very, very quickly. And like I said, nothing has changed. Now, again, the jungle bell, I don't like it right up in front of the tank. And so, we're going to be pulling this out because I don't really want growth right up here.

[00:05:26]Just like for the most part, I'm not a big fan of the growth that's happening right here. I love these plants and I'll probably pull them out of the front area and put them in other tanks just like I will do here with this corkcrew val. I will put that in other aquariums as well. But it'll be interesting to see once I clear that out. Can the crips regain that area? Now, of course, there are other compounds that are being secreted as well that would prevent the roots from getting all entangled. And there's still a little bit of that happening right there. But for the most part, the way this has grown out would lead me to believe that the concentration of those chemicals was probably reduced when we pulled out so many of those crypts and it gave that corks graval a chance to grow. And perhaps that's what we're seeing here and seeing it now. Now, I could be wrong. I can't back that up necessarily with scientific research that shows that the crypts were secretreting this. At least I didn't really look that hard, but this is one of those cases where it just seems possible that it has happened. Maybe even probable. And I would love to hear from you. Have you seen things like this before? Have you seen plants that once you cleared out a little bit of an area, they start going absolutely crazy? I've seen that here.

[00:06:41]Like I said, I saw it in the 20 gallon.

[00:06:43]It's a really interesting concept. It's not a new concept. I'm not somebody who's just like, "Oh, look at this. I'm the first one ever bringing this to the aquarium hobby. People have talked about it before, but I think it's something that we should all be keeping an eye on when we're getting frustrated. We're thinking, "Oh, you know what? We're doing something wrong. I'm trying everything I can. I'm using the fertilizers." And then you start adding too many fertilizers, hoping the plants could really utilize it or we're turning our lights up too high and trying to do things that are now creating a bunch of algae. The one thing that you'll notice in this aquarium is not a lot of algae growth, right? So, I'm going to come in here. area. There's some hard water stains cuz I did a bad job of wiping down the front of the glass, but for the most part, we've got a little bit of that red algae right there on that rock, which I actually like. And it's back there, too. I don't know if you can see it kind of poking back there, poking poking out of the rock over here. These rocks, believe it or not, used to be like a light tan. And so, there's this red algae here, a little bit of it on that side glass, but we don't see it on the plants. We don't see it on the wood.

[00:07:43]We don't see any green algae or datom algae pretty much anywhere, even on the back of the glass. Now, most of you know if you've got larger aquariums, especially planted aquariums, I'll try to block some of the light. That's really hard to do, right? That would be really, really hard to do. And that is to take the algae off the back of the glass. And so, this is a very wellbalanced tank and that's what we're all shooting for. And so, sometimes we're going to get plants that don't grow and it's not really our fault. You know, I can take you over here to this aquarium where it's a very different feel. Got this giant anubius which just keeps taking off and growing and the anubius in here is doing absolutely fantastic. Right, we've got it all growing throughout here. This sword plant was doing great, blew up and now it is looking rather rough. This might be an instance where I have to add some root tabs in here. But again, you see these plants and they're kind of confined to their area and not really growing in other areas. So, it's a it's an interesting concept, one that I think we should be looking for. If you want more information on plants in general, check out those videos in the upper and lower right hand corner. As always, thank you so much for being here. We'll see you next week.