Low-Light Plants

[kng2bishop]

By all accounts, the lighting in my tanks isn't sufficient to grow anything, yet my tanks are full of live plants. Both my 45 gallon and 33 gallon tanks have just a single flourescent tube. I haven't changed the tube on my 33 gallon tank in the three years I've had it. They're planted in plain ol' gravel. I don't add fertilizers. However, my water quality is excellent (I think the fish could live in straight tap water where I live), and I deliberately feed my fish well so that their waste and the extra food feeds the plants. I balance this by doing frequent small water changes and rinsing my filter media regularly. With all that crud in the gravel, I never have a problem with washing away too much of the beneficial bacteria in my tank. My fish seem to always be healthy, so my plants are really never exposed to medications. My plants even grow well under incandescent hoods.

Anyway, I thought it might be helpful for you to know which plants have done well in my low light conditions.

Amazon swords - grow like weeds. They may not be the true Amazons... I've never been 100% certain, as they do look very similar to the Echinodorus bleheri. Anyway, I started with one, but it sets off runners with babies all the time, so I now have several. The rest have been given back to the lfs or my neighbour's pond (they're doing well there!). As for trimming them, just remove old leaves at the crown and new ones are always growing.. that way you always have a compact plant.

Vallisneria... another total weed.. if not pruned, it soon grows so long that it trails all across the top of the tank. It requires weekly pruning in both my tanks.

Microsorium (I think.. I'm going on memory for the latin names here).. java fern.. that stuff is impossible to kill. Attach it to a rock or piece of wood with an elastic band or some fishing line. It will soon attach itself and grow like a monster. It propagates like mad, creating new plantlets on its leaves.

Hygrophilia - weed, weed, weed.. It's a great one for taking clippings.. just pinch off the top and voila! You have another plant.

Bacopa - grows well if I float it, but I have too many herbivorous fish who refuse to leave it planted for any amount of time

Some kind of crypt/chain sword which I've never been able to identify.. it doesn't look exactly like any of the ones I see in books or online... but it grows like mad and produces oodles of new plants.

Cardamine lyrata - such a lovely plant.. I didn't know if it was going to make it.. it was the one new plant I bought when I set up my 45 gallon tank just a couple of months back (I planted the rest of it from clippings from my other tanks). It wasn't looking phenomenal initially, but is now growing fantastically! I'd say it's grown a couple of inches in the past week. I've now taken clippings from the initial plant and planted them elsewhere in that tank and in a couple of my other tanks. All the clippings are growing well, too.

I grow other plants, too, but those are the ones that really thrive and produce new plants for me. Good luck!

I too have low light levels and same parameters, thanks for the information. I went buying today based on this guide.

 

[SuperColey1]

I know its an old thread but the following extract from a post above where the poster details what their 'book' says made me chuckle:

but not c. cordata, c. pontederifolia, c. wendtii, or c. willisi , all of which need 50 watts per 25 gallons. That is also the recommendation for the Amazon Sword Plant, echinodorus amazonicus , but the echinodorus bleheri (no common name given) tolerates less and looks very similar.

Now if you ask anyone on here (or elsewhere) who knows about planted aquariums they will give you the same answer. More likely it will be hysterical laughter than words

Crypts and swords do not need 2WPG at all. They don't need 1WPG at all. Crypts are pretty hardy and will grow healthily under much lower light than most tanks come with as stock.

There are only a small percentage of books out there by people who actually know about aquatic plants. There are many books out there from people who succesfully grow plants under a number of conditions but that does not mean that they know about aquatic plants. This is the danger really. You assume that a book has factual information in it whereas the majority have conjecture which is either opinion, or personal experience or driven by old outdated beliefs etc.

So be careful what you spend money on people. Buy a book to read and get a starting point from but don't buy it as a bible. Even the experts on these subjects do not know the complete facts. They may be close to the real truth but it is more often than not based on a mixture of uncontrolled tests or chinese whispers or simply copied form someone else.

For example if I put a fish that a book says MUST be kept in a temperature between 26 and 28 in a tank. Put the temperature at 25 and it dies. Have I proved to myself that the book was right? No. Just because I changed 1 parameter doesn't mean that that parameter change was the cause.

Similarly if I put a plant in a tank that the book says needs 50W per 25G and I only put 20W over the tank. It dies. Have I proved to myself that the book was right? No because it may be something else like fert defficiencies, CO2 problems and another 1000 different possible causes.

So should we not get the books? There is no problem getting the book. There is no problem using it as a starting point but by no means should it be treated as a bible. Similarly the internet. If I want to believe that I need 50W over 25G then I can find somewhere that tells me this is true. I can also find a million others that say something different. There may be extremes of different answers too.

Take care people

AC