[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Anubias Cuttings and Flesh Eating Bacteria
>>I sliced a rhizome all the way through, and I lost quite a bit of the
>>plant. Both halves recovered, but I was disappointed with the amount of
>>loss of plants as a result of the cutting.
>I've never had that happen. Generally they are very tough and the
>ends don't rot.
I bought a 4" long piece of A. barteri at the LFS about a year ago. It
was clearly a scrap from somebody's tank and not a commercially raised
specimen. It had a slightly ragged end where it had (apparently) broken
off the parent plant, but since the plant looked generally healthy, I
didn't pay any attention to this. Gradually, though, leaves at the
ragged end would rot at their attachment to the rhizome and fall off. I
let this go on longer than I should have. When I finally pulled the
plant out of the tank to have a look, it was clear that rot was
progressing slowly up the rhizome. I thought all I'd I've to do was cut
off the bad end and the plant would be fine. (Anubias are the
indestructible plants, right?) I squared off the bad end with a razor
blade, but I could see that there was still just a little necrotic
tissue within the rhizome. Once again, I didn't think this was a big
deal, but leaves continued to slowly rot at the bases and die, so I
pulled the plant again and decided to keep cutting this time until all I
had left was healthy tissue. I was surprised to find that the rot had
basically propagated all the way up the inside of the rhizome until the
whole thing was full of it to a greater or lesser degree. I tried to
save a pitiful little 3/4" stump and it's attached leaf, but it too
rotted and died; over the course of about 9 months the plant had slowly
rotted away to nothing. Later, when I bought an A. coffeiafolia (sp?)
"cutting" (that looked like it hadn't so much been cut as broken off the
end of the parent), I kept slicing away at the rhizome until I came to
absolutely healthy tissue. This entailed taking off about an inch of 3"
long piece, but the remaining 2" with it's few leaves started growing
well shortly thereafter and is now turning into a pretty little plant.
I guess the moral of this (too) long post is that it's best not to be
cheap or cowardly about cutting back rotten sections of expensive
Anubias plants. It also occurs to me that I have never had this kind of
problem with commercially grown Anubias -- they are usually vibrantly
healthy specimens. But who can resist a cheap little Anubias cutting?
-- Sherman Lovell