I bought this plant in a bundle pack awhile back. I forgot what it is. When I went to rescape my tank today I noticed its root system spans almost the full length of the tank. Apologize for the cloudy water, I just did a water change
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This is wonderful! I'm very new to aquarium plants, and have had some difficulty identifying some of them. Would you be able to point me to resources that are good for helping laypeople identify a plant please? Or where you get information like this? It's really interesting stuff I do wish I could go back and tell 12 year old me to sign up for those latin classes in school. I didn't see the point in learning a dead language at the time, but subsequent interests in plants and animals taught me how useful it would have been to learn!Further to my previous post, here are some photos and a bit more explanation for those interested.
The first three photos are of the so-called wild natural plant, Echinodorus parviflorus Rataj 1970. The natural “species” from which this plant was derived was described by Karl Rataj (1970) as Echinodorus parviflorus; the species epithet means small-flowered.
The two subsequent photos are of the cultivar 'Tropica' which was cultivated in Singapore and Sri Lanka and in the early 1980's the Danish aquatic plant nursery Tropica received a shipment; the Danish botanists Jacobsen & Holm-Nielsen described the cultivar in 1985 and named it in honour of the Tropica nurseries. You will note that this plant is quite different from the "wild" original.
Haynes & Holm-Nielsen (1994) considered the species E. bleherae Rataj, 1970, E. amazonicus Rataj, 1970 and E. parviflorus Rataj, 1970 to be conspecific [= the same species] with E. grisebachii Small, 1909. Kasselmann (2002) suggested that the different habitus of the submersed plants between these three "species" is reason to retain the present names in the hobby. But Samuli Lehtonen's extensive phylogenetic analysis (2008) basically supports the findings of Haynes & Holm-Nielsen, with a few changes, and this classification is now accepted. E. parviflorus is not a distinct species but is in fact within the one polymorphic species E. grisebachii complex. Differences in appearance between these plants are apparent and seem dependant on the specific environment in the aquarium; this seems likely to also occur in nature, what can be termed transitional forms of the species. But the limited genetic variation within the complex is insufficient to establish reasonable groupings (Lehtonen & Falck, 2011). This species epithet grisebachii takes precedence over the others under the rules of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature because it was the first name assigned to the species, and this was by the American botanist J.K. Small in 1909; the name honours the German botanist H.R.A. Grisebach (1814-1879).
Confusion has existed for the past few decades over the number of species in the genus Echinodorus, and many have been known under different names. In his earlier study of the genus, Karl Rataj (1975) listed 47 species. A major revision by the botanists R.R. Haynes and L.B. Holm-Nielsen (1994) listed 26 species. In his 2004 revision, Rataj increased the number of species to 62. More recent work by the Finnish botanist Samuli Lehtonen—incorporating phylogenetic (DNA) analysis—proposed 28 valid species (Lehtonen, 2007). As of 2013, The Plant List and the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (maintained by Kew) have 30 distinct species listed for Echinodorus.
This is wonderful! I'm very new to aquarium plants, and have had some difficulty identifying some of them. Would you be able to point me to resources that are good for helping laypeople identify a plant please? Or where you get information like this? It's really interesting stuff I do wish I could go back and tell 12 year old me to sign up for those latin classes in school. I didn't see the point in learning a dead language at the time, but subsequent interests in plants and animals taught me how useful it would have been to learn!