Floating Plants

Hi,
 
Just wondering which are the best floating plants for a 4ft community tank?  I am looking for somewhere for fry to hide and also a good floating plant to soak up nitrates.
 
I have had amazon frogbit before which I loved, but it doesn't seem to do well in my tank it seems to sort of disintegrate.  
 
I have been looking into plants like water sprite, riccia fluitans, hornwort, pennywort etc. 
 
Any suggestions?  My tank is mainly livebearers and tetras and want the floating plants to also provide some shelter and darker spots in the tank.  A plant which doesn't take much maintenance would be ideal.  
 
The plants I currently have are: Thin val, anubias, java fern, pennywort and elodea.  I have a few fake floating plants but want to replace those with live ones. 
 
Thanks for any help!!!!

Frogbit is my favorite, and there's a red variety that's lovely, but you are right, it doesn't do well under all conditions and does require some effort. 
Water lettuce is another good one to try. 
Of course there's duckweed but that's pretty much going to take over. 
Another option I've seen people do is to take moss (whichever type you like) and place it on something that floats (like wood or foam). It will ride low in the water keeping it moist and healthy. It looks cool. Eventually it does grow enough to sink the platform but a simple trip returns buoyancy. 

By red variety of frogbit, do you mean Azolla? I did read somewhere that under the right conditions that can look quite red...but I thought it was more like duckweed in terms of size and characteristics rather than frogbit? If that is the case, I'm not too keen as I don't want duckweed cause of it's invasive properties.
 
I always thought water lettuce was more of a pond plant rather than an aquarium plant....or is there a variety i'm not aware of.
 
I'm leaning towards letting pennywort or hornwort just float really....any disadvantages to this?

The azolla I'm familiar with  is a fern-type plant. 
What I'm talking about probably does have a different name, not sure, but it has the same look of frog bit. Here's an image I took off of Google. 
 

 
 

Yeah that does look like frogbit for sure...wonder if someone else knows more about it? I do like the look of it!!!!
 
After doing some research I'm thinking hornwort or riccia...they both seem to float naturally, provide good protection for fry and are fast growers which soak up nitrates!!  As an added bonus, they are easier for me to locate then some of the other possibilities.  Not many of my local fish stores stock a great variety of floating plants. 

Water lettuce, also has beautiful roots which extend down and give lots of cover. see here for shameless self promotion.  http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/437290-january-2015-tank-of-the-month-winner/
 
The roots get more than twice that length.

I think i've found the red amazon frogbit.....Red Root Floater (Phyllanthus Fluitans).
 
http/www.aquaticplantcentral.com/forumapc/plantfinder/details.php?id=45
 
Looks good - I wonder if I can buy it in australia anywhere.....

Munroco said:

Water lettuce, also has beautiful roots which extend down and give lots of cover. see here for shameless self promotion.  http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/437290-january-2015-tank-of-the-month-winner/
 
The roots get more than twice that length.

Click to expand...

 
Thanks for the pic.....a very pretty tank and the water lettuce does look great.  How big are the plants above the surface?  Does it need any special care?  

DeanoL83 said:

I think i've found the red amazon frogbit.....Red Root Floater (Phyllanthus Fluitans).
 
http/www.aquaticplantcentral.com/forumapc/plantfinder/details.php?id=45
 
Looks good - I wonder if I can buy it in australia anywhere.....

Water lettuce, also has beautiful roots which extend down and give lots of cover. see here for shameless self promotion.  http/www.fishforums.net/index.php?/topic/437290-january-2015-tank-of-the-month-winner/
 
The roots get more than twice that length.

Click to expand...

 
Thanks for the pic.....a very pretty tank and the water lettuce does look great.  How big are the plants above the surface?  Does it need any special care?  

Click to expand...

No special care, the brighter the light the quicker they will grow. The larger plants send out runners and small plants grow from there. I'll get some pics from above and post them. Gimme 5 mins.
 
The 2nd pic shows the runnners coming from the bigger plants. My main tank has half the surface covered and I need to throw quite a lot out every week. I chuck them in my pond and the goldfish love them.They die pretty quickly though outside luckily or my pond would be covered. The 3rd pic shows how long the roots can get. The tank is 15" deep.

Thanks so much for the pics! They look pretty cool.  Have you found they help with nitrates in the tank?  And they would provide heaps of places for fry to hide?  Will have to see where I can get them from in Australia....floating plants for aquariums are quite hard to find around my area

These would be ideal for fry to hide in. My nitrates are pretty low but I don't know if the plants are the cause. They certainly can't do any harm in that respect. Their biggest drawback is the speed the reproduce and they may shade other plants so much they will stop growing. Easy solution though, just throw the excess out. This tank has just been almost stripped of them. I only kept one of the big plants, but by next week half the surface will be covered.

Water lettuce is another on that gets my vote. I have these in my tank as well. I chuck out lots as well at the end of the week like Munroco does to keep about one third to half a tank covered in water lettuce, the shrimps, snails and am pretty sure the fish appreciate having these floating plants.
 
 
These are MUCH easier to keep under control rather than duckweed, I've had this before, won't try them again as they do take over the tank surface fast.
 
Water lettuce or indeed most floating plants are nutrient hungry and do absorb a lot of nutrients including nitrates from the water column, my nitrate in my tanks very rarely see anywhere near 5.0 ppm weekly and thats with additions of ferts twice a week.

I love the look of duck weed on the surface but it just causes too many headaches. That's why I started keeping frog bit, which I love because of it's medium size. Water lettuce tends to get too large for me. However, I can't argue against it's beauty, and usefulness. 

One other floating plant I liked a lot was Silvinia Natans, though they can be a bit fickle with water types imo, mine died out for some reason.
 
But a beautiful little plant,  its size is bigger than Duckweed but smaller than Water Lettuce, so sort of right in the middle type of plant.

One good floating plant not yet mentioned is Water Sprite, Ceratopteris cornuta.  This species is the true floater, and it does better floating than planted; there are two other species that are better planted.  Like water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) and Frogbit (the true tropical species, Limnobium laeviatum), once settled it can get large, but the many daughter plants produced on alternate leaves can be gently pulled off and kept with the main plant discarded if you want to keep the surface more open.  Ceratopteris can cover the entire surface of a 48 by 18 inch aquarium with just one plant when conditions are to its liking.
 
To your question of nitrates, live plants will help keep these down, and floating are the best for this because they use more nutrients and grow very fast.  But there is a limit to this assimilation of nitrate; aquatic plants prefer ammonium over nitrate, so they take up the ammonia/ammonium faster than bacteria, and the nitrates are thus less because the ammonia/ammonium has been primarily used by plants which do not produce nitrite and then nitrate.  However, there is likely also uptake of some nitrate as well, more by some species than others.  But this is not great, so if there is a serious nitrate problem, such as high nitrates in the tap or well water, these are not likely to reduce all that much because of the plants, but everything is relative.
 
Byron.

 
One good floating plant not yet mentioned is Water Sprite, Ceratopteris cornuta.  This species is the true floater, and it does better floating than planted;

Click to expand...

Water sprite is great as a floater my Bettas just love swimming among the roots,
If your duckweed is " taking over " it means it has the nutrients it needs to grow.
 
This is the top of my 2 foot Betta,Red Cherry Shrimp, Kuhli Loach tank.
 
Too much? Every now and then I scoop off a bunch of duckweed and put it in my potted plants makes great fertilizer.