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'Rock and Roll plants'
Hello all,
A friend of mine at the University of Florida was part of a study last year
that involved playing music to stimulate plant growth in freshwater aquariums.
Much study has been done concerning this topic on land based plants and as far
as I know this was the only such study on aquatic plants.
The experiment involved fifteen, 55 gallon tanks. The tanks were all planted
with the same plants, same lighting, same water changes, etc.. They were
split up into 3 groups of five. The first five were given no sound at all,
the second used underwater speakers to convey the sound and the last five used
exterior speakers to convey the sound. The differences in the second and
third groups were the number of fish stocked in each tank. The first tank in
groups two and three were very lightly stocked with fish, the second tanks in
the groups were a little more heavily stock and so on until the last in each
were stocked to a heavily stocked.
This experiment went on for 210 days or so. Surprisingly (to me at least),
the results were about the same in the planted tanks with sound. It seemed to
make no difference whether the sound was under water or coming from outside.
The results were not the same as land based plants have seen in the past
experiments but I thought were interesting anyway. It would seem that the
root systems were five to fourteen percent larger and the plants themselves
were having to be pruned two to six days earlier than in the control tank.
The was some conjecture that the sound vibrations may have caused the
substrate (Flourite if I remember correctly) to stay more or less in sync with
the plants root growth and not requiring the roots to actually push their way
through as much as constantly being given more room to grow. They never did
come up with a good answer at last I heard.
A note concerning the fish. The music did seem to stress the fish at first,
for anywhere from four to fifteen days before they grew used to it. After
that, they seemed to have adjusted quite well.
Just thought it was interesting and wondering if anyone on the list uses music
for their aquariums. James