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I am sure this is a newbie question but here gose. I have a Red Rubin that has had a small bubble stream coming out of one of its leaves. This has been going on for at least 2 hours, what's up with that?

Thanks Jim S.

There's a cut of piece of the leaf damaged. The bubbles you see is the oxygen being produced by the plant escaping/leaking thru the cut.

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Some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue.

Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability.

What else is going on in the tank during this bubbling? High light? CO2? A stream of bubbles is usually called pearling, the plant is producing O2 at a good rate and the bubbles are visible. This happens in tanks with CO2 and good light conditions, or in tanks like my 10g when the sun shines in on it!

"If you're afraid you'll make a mistake, you won't make anything."
-Family Circus

There is some shipping damage to the plant so leaking throw a hole could be it. I just noticed another leaf leaking, both leaves are the tallest leaves in the tank and I have my 96 watt light on. No CO2 yet.

Should I cut off the damaged leaves? The plant has only been in the tank for 24 hours.

Cutting the leaves on swords isn't a bad thing. I do it that way the plant doesn't try to fix the leaf and just puts entergy into a new one.

What shape are your leaves? Round or long?

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

No need to cut the leaf. The damage is probably minor. The leaf will reamin otherwise healthy for quite a while.

The bubble streams from a cut of damaged leaf is quite different from pearling.

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Some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue.

Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability.

So would you say that its a bad thing to cut broken leaves or dying ones?

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

sorry, I didn't know the leaf was damaged, bensaf and I were typing at the same time.

"If you're afraid you'll make a mistake, you won't make anything."
-Family Circus

If the leaf is definately dying then, yes, it should be cut.

As for damaged leaves , well it depends on the extent of the damage. The fact that the plant leaf in question is producing oxygen which is leaking thru the cut would indicate that it's otherwise healthy.

The leaves are used to collect light and nutrients, the more leaves the more it can consume, so the leaves should be left alone unless it's absolutely neccessary to remove.

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Some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue.

Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability.

Your leaves are most likely perfectly fine except for the minor damage. if you can't even really see the damage where the oxygen is coming from, then just let them be. I used to have a big sword in my tank and a couple of angel fish. The angels considered the new young leaves of the sword quite deliscious and bit large chunks out of them. Needless to say, those leaves weare leaking lots of oxygen as well. Yet they generally always kept on growing to become as big as undamaged leaves. They just looked ugly. If you cut them off, than at the site where you cut the leaf, the sword will leak a whole lot more oxygen anyway.