Question

Ok so I have had my tank for a year now and I am starting to come up with questions. I use 2 10k t5 ho and 2 t8 atanics, they are about 3.5 to 4 inches ofthe water. The atanics are open for 10 hours a day and the 10k are on for 8 hours a day. The problem I have is the mushrooms that I have are translucent, losing there brown color. does anyone have any insight on this?

 

well, the first question i believe would be how big is your tank? ( dimensions?)

water parameters?

 

my tank is a standard 29 gallon and my water params are all in the check. I check them weekly and dose what I need to and I do a 8 gal. change monthly. I also run a 20 gal sump.

 

bump Come on guys and gals I realy need help with this. Thank you.

 

Have you changed the bulbs yet? If not then you probably need to do so. Shrooms turning translucent is a sign of not enough light (though it looks like you have enough for shrooms)

 

Yeah, I'm using 2 t8, one of which is Actinic, and my red mushroom, of which is in the process of recovering propagation into 3 new shrooms, and a silver xenia that is only one week old, but already attached itself to a rock and doubled in size, are doing fine. I'd say the bulbs, which appear to "look" fine to the eye, are running low. If my mushrooms are doing fine on t8's, yours should be showing plenty of color. 6-8 months is usually the life I've heard for bulbs, even if they are still glowing.

 

Well after doing extensive research I come to the conclusion that my mushrooms are probably bleaching out. So to exparimant I made a 2x4 frame to fit under my canopy to get the lights about a foot off the water. Althogh this looks rediculous I figured in a month or two I should see some for change. If things get better I will build a new canopy.



This is a picture to show the differance. The one on the right is before I raised the canopy. As you can see there is a differance in color.

 

I changed the bulbs about 2 weeks ago. I did it over a 3 week time. Thanks.

 

Bleaching huh, guess that would explain why mine do well under the low light I use.
I'll look back here in a few weeks and see if you've posted the results. Good luck

 

Mushrooms can live under almost any lighting IME. I had one hitchhike into my seahorse tank and it lived for over a year under a lightbulb that came with the tank's top, something like a 13 watt regular fluorescent bulb, and I've had them live under my 6 bulb t5 in my 90. I would look into maybe changing their placement in the tank or something else but I don't think light is an issue with mushrooms.