welcome. Your long post was informative and useful. More posters should provide such good background info for their questions.
FA when it floats, is on its way 'downhill' and indidates that it has been stressed. In your case stressed by lack of sunlight getting to it due to - bloom shading. FA always, ALWAYS starts, life growing attached to a substrate. As it grows taller and thicker, the mats usually shade out the specialized holdfast cells attaching it to the substrate (bottom?). After periods of heavy shading, holdfasts begin to breakdown, weaken and bouyancy of mat causes it to float to the surface where it is obvious. At the surface it usually slowly starts to decay &/or hangs around until wave action or a heavy rain breaks it up and it sinks. It just went through the normal FA life cycle.
You are seeing floating FA due to it not doing well on the bottom where growths are starting to break down due to poor growing conditions. New FA growths will not reappear in those locations until enough light occurs i.e. clearer water. IMO maintain fertilization progarm to keep bottom area shaded and new growth of FA should subside, although you may see more floating FA due to more old bottom growths getting stressed, releasing and floating.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 05/04/11 02:10 PM.
