When Plants Are Healthy..?

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Bruce Leyland-Jones

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There's much discussion about how we determine whether or not our fish are healthy and/or thriving, but much less on plants.
Plant growth is obviously slow and, with daily exposure, it's easy to miss just how far my plants actually have grown.
A series of photographs have been an excellent tool in this regard, clearly identifying for me what appears to be growing well and not-so well.
  • Growth can be used as an indicator of plant health, but not if that growth is weedy, or the plant becomes thin and 'leggy'. Then there's growth of new leaves and of roots to consider.
  • Leaf colour is always a good indicator, but care has to be taking in observing the actual colour of the leaves and knowing what colour they should be. For example, some might start off a nice red shade and become green, or even vice versa.
  • 'Pearling' has to be my favourite indicator, simply because those little silver balls of oxygen tell me that the plant is doing what it should and is effectively photosynthesising. (I suppose that, after dark, pearling with CO2, as a by-product of respiration, may also occur, but I'm usually asleep by then. Can anyone confirm whether or not this occurs?)
What other indicators of good plant health may there be?
 
It's a good question and like you say its sometimes hard to judge because the changes can happen so slowly.

Sometimes just existing can be enough to know it is ok.

In a lower tech tank with a slow growing plants noticeable growth could take weeks. In these cases you are looking more for things like.

No leaves dying off or discoloring.
No holes or melting.

Another useful indicator that a planted tank is going well is lack of algae. Were there is water there will always be a little algae (normally a bit of dust algae here and there). But if you have a good amount of plant growth/mass and everything is balanced and "happy" you will very rarely ever get any real algae issues. It's not a perfect indicator as an imbalance in the light/nutrient/growth rate can cause algae, even with great plant growth, but generally poor growing plants will mean algae.

A lot of stem plants will get very leggy, even in optimal conditions. In my experience it takes a lot of cutting/replanting to encourage a lot of the common stem species to really bush out.

Pearling is not a bad indicator but in my experience isn't a necessity for good plant health. In some of my low light/low tech tanks I never saw a lot of pearling but plant growth was still good. Some plants pearl more rapidly that others as well. generally pearling seems to be tied to growth rate as well some stem plants or things like Riccia will pearl more than an Anubias for example. Pearling can also be effected by the oxygen content of the water as well.

I have never seen a plant pearl at night. My guess is that the plants don't produce anywhere near enough CO2 to saturate the water to the point of pearling.
 
Pearling is caused by lots of light and the plant being able to photosynthesise. It will not occur at night or in low light conditions.

Pearling is where the plant produces tiny little bubbles of oxygen and these can often be seen streaming out of the plant leaves.

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Some species of aquarium plants that have had sufficient light for the day will close their leaves up against the stem. The top set of leaves will close up, then the next set down and so on. This is commonly seen in Hygrophila species and Ambulia, but some other plants do it to. If you have these types of plants and the leaves never close up against the stem, they might need more light.

Good light should encourage bigger leaves and shorter spaces on the stem between the sets of leaves. Plants that have big gaps between the leaves on the stem, and small leaves, usually need more light.
 

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