# can anyone tell me what plant this is and the problem???



## andy36263 (May 30, 2012)

hi all, i am new here, this is one of the plants i was given for my tank, its really nice and big but the lower leaves keep getting this algae on them, when i trim them off the next set get them but the ones in the middle are perfect, could anyone let me know what plant it is and how i can cure these leaves


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

The plant is an amazon sword. Hard to tell at this size exactly which variety, but it should get a lot larger in time. Your tank looks newly set up, and it is having an algae bloom that often happens in newly set up tanks. When the plants get going and occupy more space, the algae should become much less evident. See our forum on algae for specific advice on managing algae.


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## miremonster (Mar 26, 2006)

I'm sure it belongs to Echinodorus grisebachii (sensu Lehtonen => in the broader sense). That means, the group containing e.g. E. bleheri, amazonicus, parviflorus. Therefore E. grisebachii is perhaps the most frequent sword species in the aquarium plant trade.
The forms ("species") within E. grisebachii are really hard to distinguish, also because a number of variants is cultivated under each label - "parviflorus" and "amazonicus". But I mean, E. grisebachii as a whole is easy to recognize.


HeyPK said:


> The plant is an amazon sword. Hard to tell at this size exactly which variety


So it makes sense to take "Amazon Sword" as common name in the hobby for the variable species Echinodorus grisebachii, do You agree?


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

miremonster said:


> -----snipped---------
> 
> So it makes sense to take "Amazon Sword" as common name in the hobby for the variable species Echinodorus grisebachii, do You agree?


Yes. I feel that with some swords taxonomists have lumped together some varieties that may deserve to be separate species just because morphological differences are so great. However, I do not know what species criteria the taxonomists are using with the swords. _E. uruguayensis_ is an example. It encompasses the narrow leaved form and the red horemanii and the green horemanii. The narrow leaved form seems to me to be quite distinct from the other two, being much larger and having the ability to produce floating leaves.

I wish I could get my hands on the E. parviflorus variety of _E. grisebachii_. I mean the natural form, rather than that ugly tropica mutation. The natural form has all but vanished from the aquarium trade.


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## andy36263 (May 30, 2012)

yes its fairly new, i had that plant before but i emptyed the tank to do an aquascape, so i put some of the soil substrate down, and its been back only for about 5 weeks now, how long does this last for untill it goes down? i am also getting stringy algae on the sand too, i am expecting my jbl co2 within the next few days, will this help with the algae?


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## asukawashere (Mar 11, 2009)

Andy: CO2 may help a bit with your algae, but ultimately it's about reaching a balance - tons of algae indicates an excess of one or more nutrients in the water - this is totally normal for a new tank, as the plants haven't settled in yet and probably aren't producing a ton of growth. If it's not working fast enough for you, adding another plant - especially a "nitrate busting" species that sucks up extra nutrients quickly (most floating plants are good choices for this, others prefer quick-growing, undemanding stems like Hygrophila difformis) - may help the tank establish itself more quickly.



miremonster said:


> I'm sure it belongs to Echinodorus grisebachii (sensu Lehtonen => in the broader sense). That means, the group containing e.g. E. bleheri, amazonicus, parviflorus. Therefore E. grisebachii is perhaps the most frequent sword species in the aquarium plant trade.
> The forms ("species") within E. grisebachii are really hard to distinguish, also because a number of variants is cultivated under each label - "parviflorus" and "amazonicus". But I mean, E. grisebachii as a whole is easy to recognize.
> 
> So it makes sense to take "Amazon Sword" as common name in the hobby for the variable species Echinodorus grisebachii, do You agree?


Isn't that typically referred to as a "species complex" rather than a "species"? As in, "the E. grisebachii complex contains E. bleheri, E. amazonicus, E. parviflorus, etc." I know that's how it is in animal taxonomy, not sure that terminology holds true with botany. Or are the various forms classified as true subspecies/variants of the one parent species E. grisebachii (i.e. should it be written as E. grisebachii amazonicus or E. grisebachii var. "Bleheri" or something?).
...I don't follow sword nomenclature as closely as I probably should LOL.


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## andy36263 (May 30, 2012)

well my next plant i was after was a Rotala sp green, asi am after something that grows fast and bushes out nice, but as you mention it Hygrophila difformis was on my shopping list, does it do a good job that then?


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## miremonster (Mar 26, 2006)

HeyPK said:


> Yes. I feel that with some swords taxonomists have lumped together some varieties that may deserve to be separate species just because morphological differences are so great. However, I do not know what species criteria the taxonomists are using with the swords. _E. uruguayensis_ is an example. It encompasses the narrow leaved form and the red horemanii and the green horemanii. The narrow leaved form seems to me to be quite distinct from the other two, being much larger and having the ability to produce floating leaves.


I mean, it depends on the size of the sampling. At best the botanists check a lot of specimens of a complex, representative for the natural populations of the whole range. The more complete the collection, the clearer the pattern (delimitation of the taxa). We as aquarists cultivate only a handful of clones from the grisebachii and the uruguayensis complex, so our collection is very small and biased. Surely our plants from each complex show clear differences, but the findings of Samuli Lehtonen suggest that there are many transitional forms in the nature, making delimitation of taxa within each complex impossible (neither subspecies or varieties). But it's possible to distinguish the cultivated grisebachii and uruguayensis forms as (kind of) cultivars, as Kasselmann does in her new "Aquarienpflanzen" edition => E. grisebachii 'Parviflorus', 'Bleherae', 'Amazonicus', 'Tropica'.
Lehtonen writes that he even found wider genetic differences between populations of Echinodorus paniculatus (morphologically quite uniform) than within the polymorphic E. grisebachii. 
Btw., in the "Watery Varieties" paper he and Daniel Falck identified E. "horemanii red" as an E. uruguayensis x floribundus hybrid.



> Isn't that typically referred to as a "species complex" rather than a "species"? As in, "the E. grisebachii complex contains E. bleheri, E. amazonicus, E. parviflorus, etc." I know that's how it is in animal taxonomy, not sure that terminology holds true with botany. Or are the various forms classified as true subspecies/variants of the one parent species E. grisebachii


Matter of nomenclature: E. grisebachii must be the species name as it's the oldest available name within the complex treated as one species by Lehtonen, so all other names fall into synonymy of E. grisebachii.
The type specimen of the name E. grisebachii comes from Cuba, but it doesn't mean that the Cuban grisebachii is kind of parent of the other grisebachii forms. (apart from that, it would be interesting to cultivate E. grisebachii from Cuba)

Apart from that there are really many cases of species complexes or collective species in plants, groups of very similar but discrete species. Often only experts can ID them exactly, so they are united under a collective species name for practical reasons. E.g. European dandelion species, or Callitriche palustris agg.



> I wish I could get my hands on the E. parviflorus variety of _E. grisebachii_. I mean the natural form, rather than that ugly tropica mutation. The natural form has all but vanished from the aquarium trade.


 Some hobbyists here in Europe know an "old parviflorus" type that supposedly flowered under short day conditions only and had distinctive dark colouration of the veins in the new leaves ("Black Amazon sword"). Unclear if still cultivated anywhere or lost.


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

miremonster said:


> Some hobbyists here in Europe know an "old parviflorus" type that supposedly flowered under short day conditions only and had distinctive dark colouration of the veins in the new leaves ("Black Amazon sword"). Unclear if still cultivated anywhere or lost.


I used to have it, and now am kicking myself for having lost it. I am not sure if this is the "dark" form, but, like the other _E. grisebachi_i varieties, it sometimes had red veins in the young leaves. It also fit so much more nicely in smaller tanks that the other _E. grisebachii_ varieties. In this picture, it is in a ten gallon tank.


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## Cavan Allen (Jul 22, 2004)

It can get a LOT bigger than that. I gave one from you to a member of our club and it nearly filled half of a 55! There is a form of _E. uruguayensis_ that stays very small (maybe 8 inches tall) that was called _E. uruguayensis_ var _minor_, though it too has been synonymized by Lehtonen.


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## Cavan Allen (Jul 22, 2004)

andy36263 said:


> well my next plant i was after was a Rotala sp green, asi am after something that grows fast and bushes out nice, but as you mention it Hygrophila difformis was on my shopping list, does it do a good job that then?


Yes, as do many other plants. You can probably find some cheap weedy plants in the sale forum.


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

Cavan, Is the plant i gave you still being grown somewhere that you know about? I would like to get that variety back.


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## miremonster (Mar 26, 2006)

Hello Paul,

IMO Your E. grisebachii looks rather like the "Amazonicus" variant(s). "Parviflorus" in older aquarium literature, e.g. Mühlberg, has a broader, less narrowing leaf blade base. But this may also depend on conditions (day length etc.). The hobbyists here mean that the "old parviflorus" had "always" dark reddish colouration also on the finest nerves in new leaves. (additionally there's a discussion that also the "old" amazonicus (first erroneously called "Echinodorus brevipedicellatus") has probably vanished... this plant got as large as bleherae but with narrower leaves) But all these environment-depending characteristics also show the difficulty to distinguish the variants.

-Heiko


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

Maybe that is what I had. It is true that I never gave it a chance to grow in a large aquarium. I think the amazonicus variety looks more decorative than the broader leaved, longer petioled bleherae. Unlike bleherae, my variety accommodated to the size of the tank. Bleherae always jams itself against the glass top in a shallow tank.


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