Water Sprite problems   2/5/08
Dear Crew,
I bought 2 sprigs of Water Sprite (Ceratopteris thalictroides) about 5 weeks ago. Initially it was doing well, producing strong green violins and opening into large fronds. However, the last week I have noticed that the growth seems very weak. The new violins are small and white. The older material is producing lots of offshoots and has taken on a wilty, almost melty appearance. I take it the plant is not doing well and is trying to put off pups to survive. I have the plants floating (they were rooted in the gravel at the LFS) in a 10G tank lit with 2 10W compact fluorescent bulbs. The inhabitants are 9 Glowlight Tetras which I feed tropical flakes once a day 5 times a week and freeze-dried bloodworms once a week. My pH is around 7.6 and I keep the temperature at 79F. I do not have CO2 injection or add any fertilizers. From what I understand this should be taking over my tank.
Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Evan
<Hello Evan. On paper at least things sound good, but the "watts per gallon" rule doesn't actually hold with very small tanks or very big tanks. It only really works for medium-sized tanks in the 40-50 gallon size range. This will sound counterintuitive I know, but tanks as small as 10 gallons actually need a huge amount of light to get rapid plant growth or to cultivate bright-light species. If you're wondering, you need about 70-100 watts of light over a 10 gallon tank to get solid plant growth with light-hungry species! It's all to do with the surface area of the tank and the depth of the tank, which don't scale precisely with the volume of the tanks sold to aquarists (in other words, a 10 gallon tank isn't a scaled-down version of a 55 gallon tank, but a completely different shape. In fact it is a tank with a proportionally smaller surface area that the 55 gallon tank, but proportionally greater depth. This isn't to say you *can't* grow plants in very small tanks -- you can. It's just that some degree of trial and error seems to come into play, where you have to experiment with various species to see what works in your particular tank. From personal experience, things like Java fern, Anubias, Cryptocorynes, and so on work brilliantly in small tanks and can be used to make nice planted tanks. This is likely one of your issues. The other issue will be fertilisation: plants need fertiliser, either added to the water or put into the substrate. Ceratopteris does best as a floating plant, so the liquid fertilisers are the way to go. You could try this to see if it helps, but if that doesn't, I'd suggest just trying some other plants, preferably ones tolerant of low-light conditions. Cheers, Neale.>

Referencing your website (specifically Ceratopteris article)  2/28/07
Greetings,
<Hi there>
I was looking into referencing certain specific points from your Ceratopteris article titled
Water Sprites, Ceratopteris apparently, found in the Aquarium Gardner series. I would greatly appreciate any information as to how to properly reference the page in question, as there doesn't seem to be a date or much specific information of any kind.
Much appreciated!
Ian K
<Mmm, was generated by me... about five years back. Cite by the URL: http://www.wetwebmedia.com/PlantedTksSubWebIndex/ceratopteris.htm
Bob Fenner>