Holes in Sword Leaves

[DJW]

Some of my Amazon leaves have these holes. The margin of the hole is light brown and thin. Water is straight RO that's remineralized to 80ppm, pH 6.8.

Does anybody know what might be the cause?

90742

[jdhuyvetter]

Do you have a pleco? Mine used to eat holes in swords.

[DJW]

Nope, no plecos in this tank. The edges don't look eaten, its more like wasted away... I am guessing it is lacking in some nutrient, but which one has me stumped.

[pastry]

I wouldn't worry. I've had huuuuge swords and some leaves end up that way. I just clip the leaf

[MKD]

Check it out. Not mine, i collected on net

90749

[Discus3anatic]

only time that happens to my plants is lack of pottasium

[bluelagoon]

I have swords for years and after awhile the leaves get old and die off.Just pluck them away.I find a good pruning now and then encourages new growth.

[strawberryblonde]

I don't dose ferts or use co2, so the leaves on my swords sometimes get holes (mostly the older ones), or get beaten up by my siphon, or turn yellow. I just clip them off and new growth appears. Yep, my plants have learned tolerate my crappy brown thumb. LOL

[DJW]

The swords in that picture are about 24" tall now, with just a few of those holes. I'm behind and need to get in there with the scissors tonight when the water is way down. This tank had masses of floating Hornwort spinning itself into knots with the inflow, so I was busy with that lately during WC's, trying to untangle it but throwing most of it away. Hornwort seems to grow like crazy when the nitrates are high, and when placed in tanks that get lots of wc's they gradually waste away.

Potassium? I have some stuff that's mostly K, I could try it but the growth isn't bad.

The less fiddling and fussing the better, is my approach to this.

[rickztahone]

It comes from a deficiency. Typically, you just want to prune that particular one and it will encourage new growth. If you get a whole lot of browning and die off, you will need to start dosing fertz. Not very typical with swords though, they are rather tough plants.

[FishFanMan]

You may want to look into dosing with API Leaf Zone for more potassium. When I had amazons, it grew well with Leaf Zone and root tabs.

[bluelagoon]

When I dose my swords which is not often ,I just use root tabs pushed under the plant.They seem to do a good job with swords.

[jmf3460]

without even seeing pictures, this is almost certainly a potassium deficiency. swords are huge potassium eaters, and iron. API root tabs are mainly these two things, they will help a lot.

[DJW]

I have the API Leaf Zone and some Flourish tabs, but haven't been using them for a while. Two months ago I started gradually decreasing the TDS in this tank from 100ppm down to 30, and I've been watching the plants. This was to see if the Rams would spawn more regularly. Some of the plants aren't growing very well and the algae is starting to get the upper hand in places, so I'm going to add the root tabs. This was more of an experiment than anything else.