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A little experiment
- To: Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
- Subject: A little experiment
- From: James Folsom <hymy at arches_uga.edu>
- Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 18:27:00 -0400
- References: <200207211948.g6LJm0c24893 at acme_actwin.com>
- User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020512 Netscape/7.0b1
Maybe this will distract everyone from "the LaMotte fight".
Back in spring of this year, I decided to do and experiment with an
Ozelot sword. I expected this experiment to be an unmitigated failure.
The ozelot was huge and occupying the entire end of my 30 gallon long.
It was blooming a couple of times a month, and I had tons of plantlets.
So I went to home depot and bought a big pot and some aquatic soil. I
dumped in the soil and planted this Big ozelot, then filled the pot with
water. Soil soup was the result, so I drained it and added some gravel
as a top layer. This solved that problem. The north facing placement
resulted in the water temp only being about 100 degrees F buy the end
of the day. So I added an aquaclear power head with filter attachment
to the setup. With the aerator on full, the temp stayed about 95.
This plant had leaves that were up to about twelve inches long, and
several inches wide. The stem of each leaf was very short. All of
these leaves slowly turned brown and decayed after it was placed
outside. At first I thought it was the 50 degree F nights, and added a
heater. The leaves continued to die. That when I added the power head
thinking it was too hot in the day. But all the leaves died, they were
replaced by similar shaped leaves about an inch in length. The water it
self was murky and occasional water changes helped. The filter seemed
to have no effect on the murkiness, and for the most part you couldn't
see the plant. Over time it produced many of the smaller leaves. Then
one day I went out to check on it and the water was crystal clear. It
had tons of little leaves, plus it had produced a quite unexpected new
leaf type. This leaf is an ellipse, about 4 inches long and and inch
wide. This new leaf has a long slender stem and the leaf floats at the
surface like the surface leaves of an Aponogeton Species.
I guess it finally got strong enough to strip all the nutrients from the
water column, but what I'm wondering is if it would be possible to get
the plant to grow like this in an aquarium. It's really a much prettier
plant now than it ever was. I'm in north Georgia, where winters have
been getting milder every year. I might just put a heater out there and
see if it can over winter.