Langy

hi guys,
just wondering if anyone could name my plants as i forgot the names. i also have a slight problem in that the first plant pictured kind of broke up and rotted at the stems of the main plant. there are some stems left which still look like they are growing though. so i took all the floating bits and cut them up to where they had roots sprouting off the branches, and planted them. do you think this will work and they will grow?

also should i be feeding my plants something? i feel they could be under nourished.

the second plant pictured also has roots growing off lots of its stems. could i cut a couple off and plant those?

sorry bout the pic quality, i used my phone as i'm not sure where the camera ended up

cheers guys, hope you can help!

Attached Images

	Image038.jpg (87.4 KB, 10 views)
	Image023.jpg (53.2 KB, 11 views)

mathas

The first picture is Hygrophila difformis, or water wisteria. I'm not sure on the second one.

Probably. When I used to keep wisteria, I tried cutting off the top 6" or so and transplanting the cutting, and it worked perfectly.

It wouldn't hurt to look into a comprehensive fertilizer like SeaChem Flourish. Whether you need to or not, it's hard to say.

Probably, but different plants are propagated in different manners... you may want to wait until someone can make a positive ID for you.

Langy

hey thanks for your help!
i did a bit of research and i thought the first one might have been 'Water Sprite'
Proper Name: Ceratopteris thalictroides. you sound like you know what your on about so i'll take your word for it. Any ideas on the amount of light i need? also could my plant have started rotting at the base because i had the gravel piled to high around it?? i had the gravel probably just sitting around the base of the stems and maybe a bit higher up, tiny bit though.

cheers

mathas

It might be, they can look fairly similar. See the following two pictures for comparison:

http://www.plantgeek.net/images/plantpics/wysteria.jpg
http://www.plantgeek.net/images/plan...atersprite.jpg

Both water wisteria and water sprite are low-light plants. Either should get by just fine on .75WPG or higher, though obviously the more you can provide the faster they will want to grow. The other plant I don't recognize may have higher lighting requirements, though.

Maybe I don't really know.

Langy

ok i had a look and the wisteria looks like the one. errrr .75WPG? explain? im not exactly an expert at this stuff. thanks

mathas

WPG = watts per gallon

While not a perfect guideline, it's a commonly-used metric to explain how much light you are providing. As the name indicates, divide the total wattage of light provided by the tank volume (in gallons) to calculate. For example, a 10g tank with 20W of light has 2WPG.

Once you know where you stand with WPG, you can attempt to classify your tank in one of various categories such as "low light" or "medium light" to help determine which plants would be suitable for your tank. These categories seem pretty arbitrarily determined to me, though, so which category you fall into may depend on which website you got your information from. One common breakdown I've seen repeated is the following, as posted by a moderator at PlantGeek:

Langy

ohhh ok i understand now, makes sense. thanks. well my light has 11w written on it. not sure if thats for each tube or the both combined (theres two tubes, one ultra violet and one white light) i'm pretty sure thats 11w for each tube though. so that means my light is rated medium (2.2WPG) so thats 22w/10g!

hmm..... and you were saying it need to be lowlight?

Butterfly

The second looks to be one of several plants commonly called temple Plant.
http://www.plantgeek.net/plantguide_...le&type=Search
They can also be trimmed and the trimmings replanted. Many plants grow water roots to take advantage of nutrients in the water.
Stem plants (both of these are considered stem plants) will frequently rot if the substrate is piled too high around them. They will also rot if they are planted too close together and the light can't reach all the way down to the substrate.
The first picture is definitely wisteria
Carol

mathas

It should be 11W per bulb.

But are you sure one is really ultraviolet? Humans can't see UV light, and plants don't use it for photosynthesis, so that would bulb wouldn't provide much effect other than a bit of sterilization if the UV bulb happens to emit exactly the right wavelengths.

Not quite. I was saying that the first plant needs at least low lighting. If you provide more (which you seem to be doing), they will just want to grow faster. In other words a low-light plant can thrive in a high-light environment, but a high-light plant would probably not do so well in a low-light environment.