Macro/Seagrass Selection

[UprightJoe]

Hi everybody,

I'm in the process of creating a macro algae display tank (don't laugh). It's going to be a nano tank (jbj nano cube 6). Any recommendations for varieties of macro or seagrasses that don't get terribly tall or can withstand agressive trimming? Also, I'm not sure what my sand bed depth is going to be. I'm going to have to find a balance between making it too shallow and having half of the glass covered by sand.

 

[Samala]

If you cant go with anything more than 3" bed than forego the grasses. In your setup I'm not sure, due to low flow, that you will able to keep the smaller seagrass like Halodule wrightii - shoal grass or the Halophilas (if you can find them) happy. Seagrass also needs plenty of light and you are going to run into a major heat dilemma on this small tank I think if keeping both grass and SH. I dont think any of the macros are really that big. Why not stick with prolifera, Gracilaria, Halimeda and such? The SH will like the hitches. Theres a new suction cup Caulerpa that's neat - I'd love to have some. I'm just glad to see you're game for live plants/algae in the tank as most people go with dead stuff or fake plants.. (shudder)..

Oh.. and we would never laugh at a macro display in this particular forum. I have more fun with plants than coral (dont tell anyone else though, ok?)

>Sarah

 

[UprightJoe]

Thanks very much Sarah,

For those of you that didn't pick up on all of Sarah's reply, there's some cross-forum action happening here . I've been posting at seahorse.org a bunch as this tank will eventually house dwarf seahorses. I've replaced the pump on the nano cube with a mini-jet 404 and reduced the flow significantly. I've also added aeration for co2 exchange and to help provide oxygen to critters due to the low flow.

Prolifera and Halimeda are definitely towards the top of my list. I'll google Gracilaria and the suction cup caulerpa that you're referring to. Also high on my list are shaving brushes and mermaid's fan. I'm finding it's hard to find information regarding the requirements/maximum size for marine plants/macro algaes though. It's much easier to find info regarding the care of freshwater plants.

Regarding sand bed depth, I'm going to take out a ruler or tape measure tomorrow and figure out what I can do aesthetically. Luckily, with the low flow, I think I can probably slant the sand and increase the depth towards the back of the tank. With my reef tank this is impossible because, with the high flow, the sand pretty much goes where the sand wants to go .

I guess I should have been more specific in my original post. I'd like a macro/seagrass towards the back of the tank to act as a background that will grow to the full height of the tank but tolerate being trimmed if it gets too large. Everything else in the tank needs to stay smaller or tolerate being trimmed as well. Ideas are appreciated. As I start to make decisions, I'll post for a reality check as well. Help is much appreciated

Oh, and I'm not scared of real plants . I grow plenty of weeds in my garden, why not in my aquarium?

Now, if I could just grow food in my garden I'd be getting somewhere...

 

[eleodes]

UprightJoe

i have been experimenting with some of the same ideas and have a little bit of experience with a few species. i think that <em>Caulerpa serrulata</em> and <em>C. paspaloides</em> could both be real good background plants for a nano display. the latter is especially cool and has brilliant green foliage.

the halimedas that i have are all growing well. especially cool is <em>Halimeda opuntia</em>, which has real small joints. for me it is creeping over rockwork in a dramatic way. the <em>Sargassum</em> sp. that i got as hitchiker with LR is doing the same thing and is also very striking.

you ought to Google Image Takashi Amano. Sarah mentioned him on her website. as far as i can see everything that he has done is freshwater, but he has really impressive work in very small tanks.

i am still waiting for things to get big enough to divide, but let me know if you want to try trading stuff or if you want pieces with which to start. well have fun with this. you should post images when you can.

-Devin

 

[UprightJoe]

Oh, I have Nature World Aquarium. I'm definitely inspired by his work. I think he has a thing against saltwater though for some reason.

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll google 'em now

 

[Samala]

He does seem to have something against saltwater.. a lot of the freshwater plant folks seem to. Every now and then I see someone pop up with an idea to do macro or grass tanks, but not with any real support. Really I think its just a different direction that doesnt have much momentum at the moment. We'll start it here on RC.. our own mini-revolution.

Oh.. slanting the sand bed towards the back was something I did automatically.. left over from freshwater planteds. I have a sloping bed from 5 to 3.5" at the front. I think playing with the calcified species will be interesting.. I'm thinking of trying out some Halimeda species and possible a fan or two... I'm just not sure what fits artistically and biotope wise at the moment.

I didnt think paspaloides was a background plant... doesnt it throw fronds that are arranged in a whorl kinda like stargrass? The only picture I've ever seen of it sorta resembled it. Maybe that was a bad ID on the photo.

Oh, and I can commiserate on growing food in the garden.. the only edible bits are the basil/herbs etc. My poor tomatoes.. they never had a chance. Nasturtium flowers are edible aren't they??

I wish I had taken more shots of the macro gardens and grass beds while I was diving. That would at least be something to consider for inspiration.

>Sarah

 

[eleodes]

the <em>C. papspaloides</em> that i have actually follows a fairly erect form. it does have a rosette-like arrangment of fronds, but holds them mostly upright. these are born atop stalks that are up to 10cm long, so the whole thing is as tall as 20cm in places. i have noticed that <em>C. paspaloides</em> is a little bit difficult to propagate. at least for me, it keeps just one un-branching "runner" from which arise numerous stalks. the fronds die back about as fast as they sprout. so, if you want it to spread it might be helpful to slice through main runner periodically. i have done this once and it seemed to have worked well.

my <em>C. serrulata</em> produced gametes a couple of weeks back. it was just one smallish clump (now dead and almost completely dissolved) but it clouded all ~50 gallons of water. it didn't seem to have hurt anything, but it might have been a different manner in a real small tank. i guess that low N can trigger gamete release. 24-hour lighting also reportedly prevents it, but you probably wouldn't want that in a nano display tank with any other organisms present.

the gamete release was actually really cool and i took some pictures. sorry they don't have captions yet, but they are #'s 3-8 right here

http://entomology.wisc.edu/~dbiggs/aquatics/organismsII.html

in my tank <em>C. serrulata</em> had a pagoda-like growth habit. it held its fronds horizontally, but at a range of levels and the overall effect was more vertical.

you know i have a tube anemone and it looks really good with my seaweed. they occur on sand flats (at the least) so they might also be a fairly authentic animal for biotopic representation of seaweed.

 

[eleodes]

i also have several <em>Halimeda</em> sp. going. for me, they responded favorably when i started drip-dosing with kalkwasser: i had also tried adding calcium gluconate and just dumping in kalkwasser, but they seemed to have the best growth with dripped kalkwasser. my <em>Udotea</em> sp. and <em>Penicellus</em> look healthy, but haven't done much since i got them. i understand that they propagate via under-the-sand-runners, but i haven't observed this yet. either of those would be a good foreground plant, although i guess that there are also <em>Udotea</em> that get pretty tall.

green gracillaria has nice foliage. i found that it looks cool if you can spread the foliage out in a fan-like fashion, otherwise it tends to just look like a green mass. my <em>Gracillaria</em> sp. grows more vigorously than anything else.

 

[UprightJoe]

I have sand and live rock now. I made the sand as deep as I thought I could go aesthetically. It ended up at 2.5 inches in the front and 4.5 in the back. It looks very absurd from the sides but it looks natural from the front.

I arranged the rocks so that the larger ones were closer together and towards the front whereas the smaller ones are further apart and towards the back. This adds even more of an illusion of depth when combined with the sand slope.

It's been a long time since I've been snokelling in the carribean but here's how I remember it being where I went. You had to swim out quite far to get to the reef. Between the beach and the reef there were wide streches of empty sand but eventually you started seeing small mounds of rock followed by beds of seagrasses and then finally the reef. To a certain degree, I want to create the view you might see if you were sitting on the edge of one of those mounds of rock. There are ways in which I would want to enhance that view though. The seagrass wasn't particularly dense and there wasn't much variety of plants

I think I'm going to place three shaving brushes close together as an accent on the left wall of the tank behind the rock. Hopefully, in this artificial environment, they'll do ok placed close together. In all the picutures I've seen online from the ocean, they're quite far apart. I'm also thinking of putting a piece of kelp right in the front all the way on the right to frame the view. This won't do much for photographs but should provide a nice effect when viewing it in real life where you have depth perception.

I still haven't decided on background or middle ground plants. I'm googling everybody's recommendations and trying to decide.

I want to place an order asap so I'm going to try to decide tomorrow.

 

[piercho]

My Udotea has had blades over 9" in length. This is an algae that can suddenly release gametes and go white like Caulerpa. But only one blade turns, not nearby blades. Shaving Brush has petered out in my tank, but in a higher nutrient environment it may do fine.

Halimeda and Caulerpa racemosa do tolerably well for me in a 1.5G under a single 13W PC. Unlike some Caulerpa, racemosa tends to hug the substrate, a real pest in coral tanks if you can't control it. The Halimeda I keep in the nano tank is a larger-bladed one, the specie escapes me (tuna?), but very tough and nicely colored. Asparagopsis is another pest in stony coral tanks but pink and very prostrate. Many forms of Dictyota are prostrate, a few have an irridescent blue sheen.

 

[eleodes]

oh this is so exciting i can't wait to see more! it sounds like you have planned this well.

what is your lighting?

 

[UprightJoe]

It's the stock 18 watt 50/50 bulb (3wpg). I'm prepared to ditch it for a different bulb or modify the hood for additional lighting if needed though .

I'm also prepared to add Nitrate and Phosphate to my water to keep the plants happy muahahahah....

 

[UprightJoe]

I just placed an order for macro from floridapets.com. Shipping was expensive and the algae was cheap so I ordered a bunch.

1/4 lb prolifera
3 shaving brushes
1 Caulerpa paspaliodes
1 Halimeda
1 bunch of Graciliaria

I'll start with this and see what I end up with. Some of it will probably find its way into another tank I imagine.

 

[waterdog1]

I have turtle grass in my 50g in aboit a square food "meadow" outside the main reef. It grows slow but it starting to spread. I only have a 3 inch sand bed, but its fine southdown sand. Im a big vascular plant guy what can I say

 

[UprightJoe]

How tall does the turtle grass get?

 

[Samala]

Tall.. honestly I dont think it will look aesthetically pleasing in a 6gallon. About a foot tall for the plants.. and they look like giants in my 20gal longstyle.. but then again I'm so used to look at tiny plants its hard to be sure. But in a 6gal.. they'll look like giants I would think. If you go seagrass go for shoal grass.. shallower root system.. smaller roots.. shorter height.. small leaf size.

>Sarah

 

[UprightJoe]

Bummer, I should have ordered some shoal grass from floridapets. I avoided it because their page said it grows from 12-18". Maybe they are selling a larger variety.

I wish it was easier to find marine plants for sale. I guess when everybody just uses them as algae scrubbers, there's not much need for places to sell a large variety.

 

[Samala]

Actually.. I find it as small as 6".. its pretty variable as far as leaf size. If you look at the earliest pics of my tank you can see how short it was when I first got it.. in high flow and lots of light it grew up to 8" but no higher. It never hit the surface and the tank had only 9" of water column in most spots. I PM'd you about it..

>Sarah

 

[UprightJoe]

Well, my order shipped from Florida Pets today - I should have my first batch of macro on Thursday.

I'll post pics as soon as I have some things planted.

 

[UprightJoe]

I got my macro/plants from floridapets today. It was packaged very well and it looks like everything made it through ok. The Halimeda looks like it took shipping the worst but I'm hoping it'll bounce back now that it's unpacked and in the tank.

Man gracilaria smells really bad. I could smell it though the box. I'm hoping this is normal.

I planted everything roughly where I wanted it and kicked up a huge sandstorm in the process. As soon as it settles down, I'll tweak things (kicking up another sandstorm) then post some pics (tomorrow if it settles really slowly).