# ID - I feel silly for not writing the name down...



## andrew__ (May 18, 2007)

I was at a petstore today and noticed a nice tank I will be revisiting. Anyway, all crypts in this tank were $4, and this looked like a pretty big plant for $4 so I bought it. (turns out it was actually 9 fresh divisions with barely any roots... crosses fingers that there isn't too much melting from them)

It was either a C. lucens or a C. lutea (The C. lu... was there for sure).

The pictures I've seen of these two plants online typically show lucens with smooth leaves and green to red petiole slightly longer than the leaf, which is consistant with the plant that's now in my tank. The pictures of lutea I've found typically show a more consistantly red petiole (whereas the smallest plants in the bunch I bought barely show any red) and a wrinkled leaf (again, mine is smooth however I know that variation within species can cause some specimines to show wrinkles and some that do not - I recall reading a discussion about with with respect to C. spiralis a while ago, I think it was even here).

Next question - is







<- that a typical appearance of C. lucens? (I think that while writing this thread I've almost convinced myself that it was lucens on the label in the store)

And my next question would be... how did my SA community tank become a crypt farm?  :mrgreen:

Thanks for any input on this, I'll try to get a picture up tomorrow to see if that can help (and also try to find the phone number for the store and see if they remember what it was.)


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## Purrbox (Jun 1, 2006)

Most LFS are much more likely to carry C. lucens than C. lutea, so unless your LFS tends to get in more interesting plant species I'm betting it's C. lucens.


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## rs79 (Dec 7, 2004)

"lutea" is a junior synonym for "walkeri" which looks more like wendtii than what you have there.

"lucens" is actually a natural hybrid cultivar of the plant we know as "x willissii" and is what you have there.

Ref: http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/Cryptocoryne/Botanical/synonyms.html

Walkeri:
http://images.aquaria.net/plants/Cryptocoryne/w/WAL/

"x willissi var lucens":
http://images.aquaria.net/plants/Cryptocoryne/w/WIL/lucens/


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## andrew__ (May 18, 2007)

Thanks a lot. (I did think it looked a lot like willissi actually when I bought it so it makes a lot of sense that they are closely related)


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

Your plant looks emerse grown. If it is C. lutea (walkeri), then the submersed growth will be mostly brown, long, large, narrow (narrower than wendtii) leaves getting up to 1 foot long under good growing conditions. If it is C. lucens, the leaves will stay mostly green and remain only 3 to 5 inches long. In your picture, the leaves look a little large and broad for C. lucens. I am betting it is lutea. Picture, below is submersed lutea.


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## andrew__ (May 18, 2007)

HeyPK said:


> Your plant looks emerse grown. If it is C. lutea (walkeri), then the submersed growth will be mostly brown, long, large, narrow (narrower than wendtii) leaves getting up to 1 foot long under good growing conditions. If it is C. lucens, the leaves will stay mostly green and remain only 3 to 5 inches long. In your picture, the leaves look a little large and broad for C. lucens. I am betting it is lutea. Picture, below is submersed lutea.


You raise an interesting point regarding the size of the plants. mine are approximately 8 inches from the crown to the tip of the leaves. And now that you've got me thinking about emersed growth as well it looks a lot like this picture of walkeri ("lutea") emersed from here. Unfortunately it also looks quite a bit like this picture of C. lucens also emersed.

I've just taken some pictures of the plants I bought:

Overall shot, one of the larger plants, on an 8.5x11 sheet for scale - a little big for lucens apparently (not happy about the size of the roots on any of these but they should live):









Closeup - some leaves have crinkled edges (more likely to be lutea because of these - the leaves that are just starting to show up now are far more crinkled than most that are already on the plant):









Other leaves are much more smooth, though now that I look a little closer I'm not sure I would actually describe them as being smooth, all have some sort of variation on the edges:









If I were to try to grow this plant (whichever it is) emersed for a better ID, what substrate should I use?


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## rs79 (Dec 7, 2004)

"lucens" grown emersed gets huge. THey cut the plant off the rhizome and ship them. 

In tanks they've maybe half as big.

I've seen them potted emrse in sand/peat and full manure. They all work.


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## andrew__ (May 18, 2007)

I have had some new leaves grow on some of these plants grown both emersed and submersed and I believe that the plant that I have is C. walkeri 'lutea' due to the ruffling of the leaves both emersed and submersed, but especially the degree to which this is present on the plants on the submersed specimens compared to the emersed growth.

Here is a picture of the new leaves that have grown under water:










The new leaf on the plant I have emersed looks the same as the leaves shown in my previous post which makes me fairly certain that what I bought was a freshly harvested emersed grown lutea based on leaf shape and very small size of roots - the plants have since produced leaves more typical of C. walkeri 'lutea' while submersed (as well as some pretty substantial roots in a short period of time!)

Thanks all for your help


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