Mangrove seedlings

[lawndart]

Anybody have any experience with mangroves in your tanks? I'm setting up a bw and wanted some plants in there and found some on Aquabid. I haven't found to much info on them other then they need the leafs coming out of the water. What kind of substrate, nutrients, etc do they need? I planned on making this a puffer tank. Oh, it's an 80 gallon.

[RTR]

Their roots are feeding in the substrate, but they are not picky about substrate material. The foliage is entirely emmerse (above the water level) and they do require frequent pruning for shaping and controling height (these are trees after all) and they eat light. I used an inexpensive shoplight from the home store, later went to two suspended shoplights (side by side) over my 30-long tank. DIY could provide much more aesthetic appearance.

I also used a "collar" around the inner rim of the tank to reduce fish jumping and splashing.

Check out Julian Sprung's site:

http://www.twolittlefishies.com/tlf_prod_plants.html

For a download on their care and use. My plants were from him.

These plants are natural habitat for many of the BW puffers, so you would likely be doing a biotope tank in using them.

HTH