Plant Suggestions for my new Shrimp tanks?

[Bedfordshire]

Hi, I'm looking for suggestions: small plants that not only are aesthetic but help with O2 and NO3. Moss I'm choosing is Fissidens Fontanus, but what about plants?

I also keep seeing a spikey plant about 5cm high and very narrow leaves beach from base straight up and at an angle of 30 deg. I'll try add a pic... You see them in a lot of Singpore, Taiwan, breeder tanks, very cool looking...

[jimmy james]

It might be blyxa japonica. I have various mosses, microsorum pteropus, Hemianthus micranthemoides, Monosolenium tenerum & blyxa japonica if that helps.

[retardo]

The spiky plants you're referring to sounds like it could be Blyxa. If you could post up a pic, probably could identify it better.

I think an awesome plant would be Staurogyne repens (aka, 049 or tropica). It's a great looking plant when grown into a bush.

[Bedfordshire]

Hi, sorry for bad picture.

Is this the "blyxa japonica"?

[escape]

Plants looks like a eriocaulon...parkeri or carsonii

[Bratyboy2]

Plants looks like a eriocaulon...parkeri or carsonii

yep erios! Tough plants to keep....

[jimmy james]

I concur. Blyxa japonica is taller, grows to about 7 to 15cm.

[madness]

I too have noticed erios and some of the other 'new and exotic' plants in some of the pictures from Asian breeders.

I wonder if they are more in show tanks rather than the majority of the breeding tanks.

It sort of seems like there always tends to be one 'fad' plant in there in the tank they take pictures in. Sort of a "I have the rarest shrimp AND the rarest plant as well" type of thing.

I don't mean this as a criticism (there is a lot of overlap between shrimp keeping and planted tanks) but it just seems odd that they would throw hard to care for and expensive plants into tanks with hard to care for and expensive shrimp.

[madness]

Fissidens is a very cool looking moss but I think that it requires a bit cooler temperature. If you have cooler water for CRS or tiger shrimp it should be fine but up around 78F (or more in tropical fish tank temperature range) it just sits there for me (as do the other 'pretty' mosses). It doesn't die but it just stagnates. Or maybe it very slowly dies. Hard to tell with moss since it tends to both die and grow very slowly.

Susswassertang is something that looks a little bit different but serves the same purpose as moss (shrimp hide in it, climb on it, eat bio-film and infusoria from it). It takes a while to start growing when you acquire it though (I think it gets shocked pretty bad by changes in water parameters when changing tanks).

For a carpet plant if you have a larger tank (might not fit to the correct scale in a nano-tank) you might try glossostigma as it is one of the few 'carpet' plants that people tend to have luck with without going high tech.

[Bedfordshire]

ty for all input people

I'm going with Fissidens & glossostigma to start, my temp is about 23 to 24 celcius, so I think thats cool enough for Fissidens.