# C.D.K.Cook - Water plants of the world.



## rs79 (Dec 7, 2004)

This can be found on Google Books and it's possible to read quite a few pages of it. He attempts to cover every freshwater macrophyte and which he defies as having the photosynthetically part active sumersed for most of the year and excludes rheophytes that are only submersed during flooding from heavy rains etc.

Sounds ok on paper, but, he's excluded Anubias, Microsorium, Cryptocoryne and so on, which ok, I'll buy that they can live their whole lives without being submersed. But. He's included Iris and Lobelia (and others) which strikes me as really weird - you can grow these in your average front yard - they don't even have to live in or near water; in contrast, Anubias (etc) are never going to be found too far from water and they're not going to survive at all in your front yard and in this sense I'd say they're more of a "water plant" than Iris (or Lobelia) are


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## miremonster (Mar 26, 2006)

Hi,
which edition of the Cook book do You have? I've got the 1996 one (title: Aquatic Plant Book), it does include Cryptocoryne, Anubias and Microsorum (pteropus).
But also this edition excludes a number of genera containing aquarium plants, apparently not matching his definition of aquatic (or maybe data deficient).


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## rs79 (Dec 7, 2004)

I looking at the book online in Google books; you don't get all of it, but you can see all of the keys.

It's the 74 Springer edition and I was mistaken, it does have Anubias - but only once on P138 but not in the keys to all genera at the beginning.

Same with Crypt. - it shows up once on P144. 

Not a book you can find cheap!


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## miremonster (Mar 26, 2006)

Remarkably that the Cook 1974 edition also deals with aquatic moss and characeae genera. In Cook 1996 only pteridophytes and flowering plants. 
In the former e.g. the genus Taxiphyllum is not included, but many moss genera that are unknown as aquarium plants.


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## rs79 (Dec 7, 2004)

I noticed that too. Weird, isn't it?


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## Kai Witte (Jan 30, 2006)

It is obvious that quite a lot of knowledge as well as effort went into the original edition; however, I guess any book of such a wide scope will always have issues and, of course, need corrections based on new discoveries or information that got overlooked originally.

It is certainly far from easy to settle on a definition of "aquatic plant" and stick to it... 
I agree that many Cryptocoryne species need to be included given Cook's definition.

BTW, the entry for Lobelia is reasonable considering the very rare temperate species L. dortmanna which is a true aquatic (not suited for aquaria though).


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