240G Plants
Amongst all the action provided by the fish, this group of Amazon sword plant provides a nice focal point in my 240G Lake Tanganyika setup.
Introduction
I should make one thing clear up front; I hate plastic plants with a vengeance. No offense intended, and I won't hold it against you if you decorate your tanks and the rest of your home with plastic and silk plants, but to me they are just a sign of bad taste. Sorry, I guess I have been brain washed from my earliest youth, since my Dad used to be a gardener. Luckily my wife feels the same way about this. She loves to have greenery around, so there is hardly a room in our house that doesn't feature at least one huge pot plant. In fact, when we moved from Australia to Ohio and couldn't bring our plants, furniture or electric appliances with us, the first thing we bough before we even had a chair to sit on, or a TV, or even a radio to entertain us, were a whole bunch of pot plants. The first K-Mart we stumbled into was running a special, and neither my wife nor I could resist. I am sure I have photos of us somewhere, sitting on the carpet amidst a bunch of big palms and Spathiphyllums in a house without furniture. Anyway, plastic or silk plants are a total no-no around here, and this holds true for tank decorations as well. Also, back in the day when I set up my first tank in Germany, the thought of having a tank without plants never occurred to me. In the US a lot of people are amazed to see plants in my tank - especially since it is a cichlid tank. When first seeing the tank, the immediate question often is: "And all those are real plants?" For some reason it seems more common in the US to have a setup without plants, while in Europe I can't remember ever seeing a tank without plants. Just the other day I set up a little 5G for some Lamprologus occelatus 'Gold', and this little shell dweller empire so far is the one and only tank I've ever had without plants. I liked the look of it when it was just newly established, but now a week or so later I can see algae sprouting around the sponge filter, and I am not quite sure what to do about them other than giving them some competition for nutrients by plants. I am convinced that if you choose your plants wisely, they actually make tank maintenance easier. A well designed low tech planted tank is actually a lot easier to maintain than a non planted tank, because in a planted tank you are working with nature, while in a non-planted one you are battling against it. As an alternative to introducing plants to that shell dweller setup to out-compete the algae for nutrients I can either use chemicals to kill the algae or manually remove them myself. The latter seems like real work, and I am a lazy fish keeper. The former probably isn't very healthy for the occies, and if I had to do it in a 240G, it wouldn’t be healthy for my wallet either. With so many good reasons for keeping plants, the only question that remains is which species to choose for a given tank. Of course it would be nice to be able to use plants from Lake Tanganyika for a Tanganyikan setup, but unfortunately I have never seen any of those available in the hobby. In fact, it is widely believed by aquarists that Lake Tank is devoid of plants. I have never been to the lake and can't confirm or refute this with certainty, but I have strong doubts about that. I have seen PowerPoint presentations by Ad Konings that contained numerous images that showed Lake Tanganyika cichlids swimming through densely planted areas. I don't believe the whole lake is densely planted, but I am pretty certain that there are areas - presumably around the mouths of creeks and rivers - which have dense plant growth. Why none of these plants have ever been exported from the lake and taken root in the hobby is a mystery to me. I certainly believe that there would be a market for Lake Tanganyika aquarium plants. Just have a look through the your tanks section of Cichlid-forum, and note how many people include plants in their Lake Tanganyika setups. In addition, the question which type of rock to use for the most authentic Tanganyika look comes up often enough to convince me that there are plenty of purists around who would prefer a clean biotope setup with fish and plants from the same environment. However, since I did not have any Lake Tanganyika plants available, I had to make do with their Asian and South American counterparts, and in the following pages I will explain which ones I consider to be the most suitable for a cichlid tank.
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