[DanDaMan]

ive had these run of the mill plants in my tank that where recommended to me buy a store owner who obviously didnt know what he was talking about.

he gave them to me when i brought my first betta fish which he said was okay to keep in an unheated tank, that fish subsequently died.

i have since brought a new fish and now have the tank heated, but since then the coldwater oxygenating plants i had have been deteriorating and falling apart/dying. i can only assume the rise in water temperature is slowly killing them off.

im looking to buy some new oxygenating plants for the tank but dont have a clue what i can get that will be at home in the heated tank.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[kfish]

Browse around www.plantedaquariumscentral.com and read the information for the plant types. It tells you the plants' preferred temperature, difficulty to grow, and light requirements.

Some I can recommend offhand:
Anubias, Java moss/fern, Amazon sword, vals, wisteria, duck weed, anacharis, hornwort (can be annoying... mine annoys me and it doesn't even shed its needles, it just attracts hair algae).

If you have gravel rather than sand or soil, make sure amazon swords and vals can grow in that... they have root systems.

And... I'm not sure what you mean by oxygenating plants, but bettas don't care so much about oxygen in their tanks, since they breathe air from the surface. It's great to have plants, though, because they help with water quality and look pretty.

 

[Bombalurina]

What plants do you have in there currently?
All plants are oxygenating in the sense that they create oxygen.
The only low-light plant I have to add to Kfish's list is lacefern.

 

[DanDaMan]

Browse around www.plantedaquariumscentral.com and read the information for the plant types. It tells you the plants' preferred temperature, difficulty to grow, and light requirements.

Some I can recommend offhand:
Anubias, Java moss/fern, Amazon sword, vals, wisteria, duck weed, anacharis, hornwort (can be annoying... mine annoys me and it doesn't even shed its needles, it just attracts hair algae).

If you have gravel rather than sand or soil, make sure amazon swords and vals can grow in that... they have root systems.

And... I'm not sure what you mean by oxygenating plants, but bettas don't care so much about oxygen in their tanks, since they breathe air from the surface. It's great to have plants, though, because they help with water quality and look pretty.

thanks for the reply

i know they dont really need them since they can breathe at the surface but after my first betta died i want to give this little guy as much chance as possible even down to having extra oxygen in the water lol

plus like you say they make the tank look much prettier :-D

What plants do you have in there currently?
All plants are oxygenating in the sense that they create oxygen.
The only low-light plant I have to add to Kfish's list is lacefern.

i have a kind of ornamental fronded plant but the oxygenating one i had before was this basic stuff

after i put the heater in the tank it lost its colour and started to fall to pieces.

i went to an actual aquatic place today and spoke to a real cool guy about my problem and what i wanted. he seemed to agree with my idea that maybe the warmer water had caused what is normally a coldwater type plant to become all mushy and die

he gave me a similiar type plant (he didnt say what it was lol) but he said because it has so many small leaves it will give most oxygen to the water, he also said it will trap oxygen bubbles from the pump in its small leaves which will also dissolve and add more oxygen to the water

i have to admit since i put them in earlier today my little buddy is not going to the surface nowhere near as much to breathe.

he also seems to love them and has spent the whole time swimming inbetween all the little gaps. he has been quiet comical actually, just now he decided to swim right down in between all the stalks and he got wedged lol

he kinda froze as if he had realised what he done but he managed to wriggle out before i went all superman with the net lol

the plant has also caught lots of small particles of food that sunk which he seems to love hunting for checking every nook and cranny, and he has already claimed his chill out spot at the top.

heres a photo, maybe you guys can ID the plant lol

 

[Silverfang]

Cabomba, I love how it looks, but I couldn't keep it from withering. I'm not sure if it's high light or not.

 

[DanDaMan]

Cabomba, I love how it looks, but I couldn't keep it from withering. I'm not sure if it's high light or not.

thanks for the id

what do you mean by high light? (im a n00b at this stuff lol)

if this helps the guy said to keep a gentle current over it which made sense becase where it was stored in the plant tanks at the store it was always around the pumps

 

[kfish]

The plant you had before was anacharis. It's one of the easier ones to grow, and doesn't require much light (it was in my list), but sometimes it's finicky like that. It dissolves in my mother's fish tank like you described. It used to grow like crazy in mine and now it's slowed down a lot... I think it needs more water hardness/fertilizer since it grows so fast, so that was probably your problem. My hardness is really low right now and I haven't fertilized in a very long time, so it's not growing.

Good luck with camboba! I like the way it looks a lot, too. Never tried to grow it, though.

About lights:

Aquatic plants need sunlight, of course, as they're plants. There are bulbs that imitate sunlight (color temperature of 6500K). "Low light" is like 1-2 Watts per gallon, medium light is 3-4 wpg, high light is 5-whatever wpg. So, each bulb has a color temperature (measured in Kelvins, or K) and a wattage number.

 

[mathkid]

I had a purple version of cabomba... I think it likes high light or something, because it kept shedding needles in my tank (I only had ~5000K). I ended up ditching it, but I hope yours grows! It's a real pretty plant. =)