One of the modern alternatives to conventional aquarium plants are new photosynthetic creatures of nature, which, majestically drifting around the aquarium, are able to do without rooting in a certain place.
Plants without soil: reality or fantasy?
If the owner of the aquarium is not particularly inclined to constantly cleaning the habitat of his wards, then usually he buys a house for fish without a primer, which means that almost everything will be in a floating state. Consequently, even the snails that are used to cleanse the walls of the aquarium will crawl lazily along the walls … and plants, as there are varieties that can easily survive even in the absence of earth to strengthen! Particularly striking examples of such "water travelers" are the common pinnate, African elodea, hornwort and Riccia. The latter, by the way, tends to grow to the size of a lawn with moss without proper care and weekly thinning, so this plant will need an eye and scissors for a haircut.
How does reproduction occur without soil
There are two ways to propagate plants in an aquarium without soil:
1. With the help of the appearance of a daughter process on the body of a plant, formed by budding, the emergence of new shoots, the branching of "whiskers" - the so-called vegetative. With this method, after the formation of daughter plants, the resulting "child" is transplanted to another part of the aquarium, so that the overgrown plant does not occupy the entire upper water column, blocking oxygen and light for the fish.
2. Leaf propagation. In this case, new shoots with a rhizome are formed on the leaves, which are subsequently separated from the parent, going on an independent drift around the aquarium. It is only necessary to cut the top so that the plant, gradually increasing in size, does not fall under the destructive effect of the direct rays of the sun.
It is curious that not every aquarium plant is able to reproduce often enough - it all depends solely on the intensity of the nutrient medium. If, for example, you feed the hornwort with a multivitamin solution, then it will accelerate the flowering period and the daughter formations will be almost twice as large as with normal flowering! However, such radical methods can only be used if the aquarium was recently purchased and it is urgent to create a layer of plants.
Floating plants can serve not only as an excellent alternative to ordinary soil ones, but also allow fish to lay eggs right in such a drifting “green island” - due to the fact that the plants are constantly in motion, other fish rarely seek to destroy the eggs of their neighbors.
