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Can fake plants be made of silicone and will it cause brown algae spots in your tank?

I don't think that it would but I am interested in what you mean by making plants out of silicone. Can you go into more detail or post a picture?

-Vincent

Ah, I think I get what's meant here.

When silicone adhesive sets, it's rubbery in consistency. I think the idea being mooted here is that silicone adhesive is pressed into plant shaped moulds, then left to set.

The problems with this are multi-fold. First, silicone adhesive on its own is colourless and translucent, so some means of dyeing the silicone green would be needed. Which would require a non toxic green dye that is chemically inert to the by-products of the silicone setting process (i.e., the production of signfificant quantities of acetic acid, which is a fairly useful organic reagent). This would have to be mixed into the silicone adhesive prior to injection into the mould.

Second, the mould would have to be lined with some kind of lubricant to prevent the silicone sticking to the mould. Again, the lubricant would have to be non toxic, chemically inert to attack during the curing process, and capable of being spread as a thin film within the mould. That is, of course, if you wanted the mould to be reusable.

Third, making the mould would be an interesting exercise in itself. While broad leaved plants such as Amazon Swords would pose relatively few technical problems in this regard (aside from the matter of making a leaf shaped mould 'negative' that produced a realistic-looking 'positive' cast, which would involve one in fairly in-depth botanical research to ensure that venation patterns were correct for example), fine leaved plants such as Cabomba would be a technical nightmare to reproduce in this fashion. Which probably explains why the plastic varieties are unconvincing. Myriophyllum would be even worse - the leaf divisions are less than the thickness of a human hair in some species, and making a mould to replicate THAT would involve some VERY skilled craftsmen indeed!

The problem with this enterprise is that even a cursory analysis quickly leads to it becoming necessary to plan it as a commercial venture with the intention of selling large numbers of moulded plants, in order to recover the very substantial costs of manufacturing the moulds. Ask anyone in industry about the startup costs for injection moulding and the answer starts to look like something that would be a proper province for a multi-national corporation with a good few tens of millions of dollars to spend upon the venture. The tooling costs for the company making your moulds alone would run into several hundred thousand dollars even if they had access to state of the art CNC machinery to speed up the process.

If you're thinking of making something that simply looks as if it ought to be an aquarium plant, without being too fussy about botanical realism down to a small scale, then I suppose you could launch into this, but then you'd still have to perform a good number of experiments (which again would be costly for a private individual) in order to alight upon the correct procedure. This probably explains why no-one has done this commercially, because if it were viable to do so, it would already have been done.

Don't let me stop you entertaining such ideas - after all, I had an idea for aquarium laser LED lighting some time back that I posted here, but that idea again became, even upon a cursory analysis, the province of some fairly high powered research requiring some nice venture capitalists to provide the startup funds. These people tend not to finance ideas that are non-starters, which is why LED lighting is still in its infancy, though some of the marine aquarium light manufacturers are spending R&D money in this field right now, with the expectation that the first saleable model lighting systems for actual aquarium use will be an engineering reality sometime around the year 2020. In that case, though, some VERY high-powered research scientists are involved, and the semiconductor materials involved in order to produce the correct lighting are pretty exotic, so when the first such systems come on stream, they're likely to be expensive. However, in that case, the idea of a lighting system that can be tuned to precise wavelengths in order to boost zooxantehllae growth in corals etc., is a goal that would make the end product saleable to marine keepers (who in the main spend more money than freshwater keepers anyway) and of course such a system would make the culturing of corals for the aquarium market a good deal easier, thus allowing other companies to increase their profits from their operations when using such a system. Therefore, there's an in-built long term profit motive providing momentum for the system based upon a capability that doesn't yet exist. Silicone plants, on the other hand, would be competing against existing fake plants, not to mention real plants, and in my case the latter are infinitely preferable because Nature's spent three billion years getting the designs right - out continued existence today relies to a significant extent upon the existence of 'working' plant life.

Don't let me frighten you off such ideas, and if you have the time, the money and the inclination to experiment, go ahead, everything in this game is a learning process. Who knows, you might just be the person with the passion and the enthusiasm to find a solution that makes silicone plants commercially viable, in which case you can shake my hand afterwards when you're company's listed on the Fortune 500 and pay me a consultancy fee for the advice I've offered here! But don't go into this without doing a LOT of thinking beforehand - which of course, is how you should approach fishkeeping full stop.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

I was just wondering if the plants that I have now are causing brown algae to appear in my tank. Joe Potato said that brown algae can be caused by silicon. Which I was wondering if it was a component of my fake plants.

-soidfuf

Hi,
I don't think Joe said "Silicone." I think he said
Silica, and that is correct. The brown "algae" is actually
an outbreak of an animal called a diatom. They use Silica
as the foundation for their skeletons, and draw it from the
water. Silica is generally in abundance in new aquariums as
it is part of the "dust" in the new gravel. Silica is THE
component of Quartz (SiO2), and outbreaks of diatoms or
brown algae most commonly occur in newly set up tanks
because of the abundance of silica. Some city water
supplies also have excess silica in them as well. You can
check with your water board to find out the chemistry of
the water that they are delivering.

Water changes, no "dead spots" (areas devoid of any current)
are the "cures" for diatom outbreaks. Some fish will also
eat diatoms with great relish.

Frank


-->>> The Confidence of Amateurs, is the Envy of Professionals <<<--

Here I go, getting misquoted again...

I think the main confusion here is that it needs to be made clear that silica, silicon, and silicone are, in fact, completely different substances.

As Frank already mentioned, diatom cell walls are made of silica (chemical formula SiO2). One of the components of silica is the element silicon, chemical symbol Si.

Silicones, on the other hand, are polymers which are for the most part chemically inert. So, any silicones containing either silica or elemental silicon will not promote diatom growth because the diatoms can't extract the needed materials from such a configuration.

Additionally, I'm not aware of any types of artificial plants that contained that contain silicone as an ingredient, not that it would matter anyway.

As far as getting rid of the brown algae, just follow Frank's advice in this thread or in this thread where the topic first arose.

Also, as a last remark, I'm still concerned about the stocking in your tank, especially since you've said that your pleco is already a foot long. Unfortunately, with just the pleco in there alone, you're still way way overstocked.

Joe Potato

I'm sorry Joe this is just one big misunderstanding!