125G – Plants
Anubias sp. and Valisneria sp. have been by far the most successful plants in my 125G tropheus setup.
Introduction
You can read about my general views on life plants in the plant section for my 240G frontosa tank. In a nutshell, I love life plants and will incorporate them in any tank whenever possible. With the frontosa, the main issue is digging up plants, and ripping them out when they get in the way of a fish creating a territory for itself. As a result, this tank now only has plants that can not be dug up, because they are not rooted in the substrate - Java fern, Java moss, and Anubias sp. With the tropheus, digging in the substrate is not so much a problem - they do very little of that. However, they love to eat some plants, and they like to tug on plants out of curiosity. I haven't actually tried it, but I am pretty sure tropheus would make a complete mess out of any clump of Java moss. They also keep my narrow leaf Java fern amazingly short leafed, and I might eventually have to take them out of the tank. An ideal plant for tropheus tanks seem to be Anubias, since at least my tropheus show no inclination to eat any part of Anubias, not even new shoots. The Anubias in my tropheus tank had a total of four flowers at one time, and thanks to the tropheus it is always spotless clean of algae, which has been a problem with Anubias in nearly all of my other setups! A surprise for me was also how well the Cryptocoryne sp. and a red leafed Amazon Sword Plant have done in the tropheus tank, which I would have guessed to be higher on the list of desirable tropheus food items than Java fern, but the opposite appears to be the case! They didn't even eat the Hydrocotyle leucocephala I put in the tank just as an experiment, and expected to be more a meal than a decorative item. A plant they completely eradicated from the tank is duck weed, and I will be eternally grateful to them for that! 🙂
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