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.

I bought a huge Amazon sword plant with a gazillion of runners as a focal point for this tank. Large plants like that are almost impossible to come by. I was lucky in that I attended a meeting of the GAAS, when we had Pete Mang as a speaker. Pete is a great guy and always delivers a fantastic show. In addition he runs one of the best fish store I've visited. It's called 'The Fish Place' and it is located at 141 Robinson Street in North Tonawanda near Buffalo, NY. His wife, who often accompanies him, grows the most fantastic aquarium plants I have seen for sale anywhere. I paid $30 for the Amazon sword, which seemed like a steal considering its humongous size.

Together with all the runners that I planted as well it sits about a third of the way in from the right hand side of the tank right next to my big two story cave. Without CO₂, and with the low light levels I have in the tank, the plant doesn't grow vigorously, but it manages to stay alive. Recently the fronts are giving it more of a hard time because they are getting to a size where they can pluck off leaves. In addition some brown algae as well as hair algae are growing on the older leaves. I guess as a comparatively slow growing plant (under the conditions in this tank) that needs to be firmly rooted in the substrate, the long term survival chances of the Amazon sword in this tank are probably slim, because the fronts will more and more uproot it. However, I certainly had my money's worth from this plant over the last few years, and I managed to get little sword plants from it for all my other tanks in which I would want them.

As an aside, when I put one of them with lots of brown unsightly algae on the leaves in a South American setup with wild strain Xiphophorus helleri, I noticed after a few days that the swords had cleaned all the algae off the leaves, which suddenly had the bright green color of young leaves again. Now I am just looking for a fish from Lake Tanganyika that would do the same thing for me!

Pictures taken shortly after planting this group of Amazon sword plants.