Rotala rotundifolia

Synonymies
Ammannia rotundifolia

Description
Stem plant with small lancet shaped leaves. Depending on the amount of light the leaves can be from olive green till red. Only with a large amount of light the leaves will turn red.

My experiences
At this time (19-9-01) I only have this plant in my aquarium for about two months. The first month I had this plant I was disappointed about the growth of this often mentioned easy plant. At first the leaves of the plant turned to green because the light above my aquarium was not strong enough to form red leaves, but after I placed an extra fluorescent light this problem was solved. But besides the color of the leaves the plants also lost most of their lower leaves the first month. This could maybe be because the lower leaves received tooless light or because this plant maybe loses it's emers leaves under water. After the first month it also looked like the plant would easily attract pointed algae, but now I have this plant for a longer time in my aquarium I think I can explain why. This because only the plants that had floating tops on the water surface suffered from pointed algae. These plant had formed totally red leaves under the bright light at the water surface, but when the where shortened the didn't received enough light anymore for the red leaves, which made this leaves sensitive for the pointed algae. The other plants that only had partly red leaves stayed healthy after shortening and also didn't attract any algae. Now about one month later the plants have formed a nice busy group (see picture) which also propagates easily by forming side shoots and hardly attracts pointed algae.

Place and lighting in my aquarium

The lighting I have used for this plant has varied between 0.42 Watt/liter standard TL lighting (2*18 Watt) till 0.63 Watt/liter standard TL lighting (3*18 Watt).

Foot-note The picture on this page is from my own aquarium.

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