Salvinia Minima (water spangles)

[omermeral]

Hello floater lovers,

My salvinia keeps giving new shoots and showing good growth. But the shape of the new plants are almost the miniature version of the original plant. Young plants stop growing after a certain size but they keep on reproducing.

The original plant had much bigger leaves (at least 3x bigger) and longer roots (probably 5x longer). The newer generation resists to grow bigger.

This is a low tech tank with a led lighting, every week I add small amounts of NPK to the water column.

Cherry shrimps love to nibble on the roots, but before there were shrimps in the tank I had the same problem.

Every now and then I see small assassin snails hanging underneath the leaves as well.



Is there a trick to trigger bigger growth on this plant?

Stronger light / Lower light
More nutrients / Less nutrients (I assumed if the water column is rich in nutrients the plant would not bother growing longer roots. So I cut back the fertiliser but this resulted in yellow leaves which I still have some)

 

[mort]

In my tank it stays small as well but I added some to a new shrimp nano I was building (water from the other tank so that was the same as was the lighting) and it grew much much larger like your original plants. The only difference was flow. In my bigger tank I have strong surface current but in the nano I didn't have any flow for a few weeks. When I added flow to the nano the plants shrunk. I believe they come from slow flowing to almost no flow areas.

 

[omermeral]

I will make a protected circular area with an air pipe which can surround the plants. This might reduce the impact of the flow, or at least stop the plant smashing to the sides of the tank with the current.

Thanks for the tip mort.

 

[zozo]

More of everything is the trick.. But indoors this is rather tricky and getting it to equal size might be nearly impossible without bombarding it with an ultra strong metal halide lamp.

Even outdoors under the sun during the summer or in a greenhouse it is difficult, they need an awfull lot of ferts.. And with this many ferts and such high light intensity you also need an awfull lot of plantmass to ballance it without running into algae issues.. Growing it commercialy the more the beter of course. But having it eastheticaly in controlled numbers, might only work if the rest of the surface is covered with other floating plant spp.

 

[omermeral]

zozo that sounds like a dead end for me. No chance to max out all the things above. I laid the air pipe to reduce the flow around the floaters and will see how this will work out.

 

[alex08]

I also seem to have problems with my Aeschynomene fluitans since i switched to led lighting. For me, i think the light is the problem. Ferts, daily light schedule, are all the same.
It just went from a lush, bushy, strong plant to a smaller, weaker version of it.

When i had T5 lighting everything was fine and dandy.

P.S. : I also have some Pistia, Limnobium laevigatum and another small one that seem to have the same problems.