Who Gives A Fish Forums

I'm struggling to manage this issue, and I think it might be due to overfeeding, but I'm not sure how to balance it. My tank's a mess - 360l of hornwort and egeria, and it's always filthy. I have to manually clean the plants every week with a hose or by hand, as they're covered in debris.

The setup's a 360l tank with an Eheim 2217, throttled to 1/3 to avoid disturbing the small fish. The inhabitants are 15 Corydoras sterbai, 13 Carnegiella strigata hatchetfish, 34 ember tetras (6 still in quarantine), 3 bamboo shrimp, and 5 rabbit tylomelania snails.

I feed every other day, morning one day and evening the next, and skip two days a week to try and reduce the mess. I only use powder food - sera vipan baby, dried artemia, or hikari pellets. Every 4 days, I give them 2-3 small algae or other wafers, and every 3 days, the snails get a small piece of vegetable. When I feed frozen food, I only unfreeze 1/5 of the cube and split it among my three tanks.

I change 1/4 of the water every 7 days and have a massive sponge on the filter intake for mechanical filtration. Despite the mess, the plants are thriving, and the fish seem healthy. I do worry about the hatchetfish, as they don't seem to eat much, but they're still alive after 3 months. The tetras would devour lettuce if they could, and the corries fight the snails for food. If I notice the shrimps swimming near the surface, I'll feed them a tiny amount, but that hasn't happened in two weeks.

I'm constantly torn between fearing underfeeding and overfeeding. The corries don't have sunken bellies, and I check on them regularly. I'll try to add a picture of the plants, as it's been 6 days since I last cleaned them. Any advice would be appreciated.

I'd love to see some pictures of the stuff on your plants, that way we can get a better idea of what you're dealing with.

Considering the plants are growing like weeds, maybe it's worth thinning them out a bit? This could help create some clearings for feeding, making it easier for your fish to get to the food without all the debris on the plants.

Here are the pics of my tank.

Back of the tank - you can see all the gunk on the plants here.

Front of the tank - this is what it looks like from the front, not too bad but still some buildup.

Here's a close-up of the plants in different areas - you can see how they're covered in stuff.

I've given the plants a good dusting, tried to suck out as much of the debris as possible. Also, I've thinned out most of the egeria densa, rearranged the hornwort to one side, and shuffled things around. This week, I'll try to cut back on feeding even more - the tylomelania snails won't get anything extra, since they've got 4 leaves and some damaged hornwort to munch on. I'll keep you updated on how it goes.