Triming Floating Plants Roots?

[Orbit887]

I've got some amazon frogbite (i think) in my 10g low-tech with bout 2.4wpg using Nutrafin Plant Gro for most nutrients and also daily drop of Flora 24 - Daily Plant Supplement, with some of nutafin root sticks in the substrate too. The amazon frogbite is loving it, and growing nicely, but the roots on it are getting huge! They're about 5-6" at the longest, and now always getting tangled on the plants below. Can i just trim back the roots to a more reasonable length, or will the plant suffer too much?

 

[three-fingers]

You can trim them back and they will be fine, the roots of my frogbit never get over 2", the fish eat the roots .

 

[Orbit887]

You can trim them back and they will be fine, the roots of my frogbit never get over 2", the fish eat the roots .

Haha thanks I've only got 3 ottos and a lone shrimp in the tank at the moment, debating what to put in it still., but none of them nibble the roots yet! I'll give them a trim in the morning. Any reason why they're growing so long, looking for even more nutrients?

I've also got a some salvina auriculata (or v similar) in the tank, but that's not doing so well, doesn't seem to be growing much and looks a bit darker in colour than probably should, any ideas why?

 

[three-fingers]

Yeah, when I had frogbit in my nano planted tank with just shrimp, the roots grew to over 12" in length and went all over the place, it was crazy! I'm guessing that's just how it grows and it's not a lack of nutrients or anything, I had ADA aquasoil in that tank and used tetra plantamin fertiliser.

I had some rubbish Salvinia auriculata from plantsalive and it just rotted and died like yours sounds to be doing, it was also being eaten by something that I later discovered to be moth larvae when 3 small moths flew out of my aquarium hood upon opening one day . Here's a picture I took of one of them (for size comparison, the big circular object on the upper left is a thumbtack).

The thing with Salvinia auriculata is that it appears to grow in different forms depending on the enviroment. In ponds or when it receives direct sunlight, it tends to grow like this (sometimes bunched up even more), and when growing in the relativity low light of an aquarium it usually looks like this.

For me anyway, whenever I've put the high light form in an aquarium, it just died. Granted one time it was being eaten as well though, so I cannot say for sure lack of light is a problem.

 

[Orbit887]

Ahhh that explains what's been happening with the salvina auriculata in my tanks! When I first bought it the majority of it looked like the image you posted of it after being grown under direct sunlight, but then slowly reduced itself to how it presently is, which looks rather like that image of the low light version. I actually thought that I might've bought 2 different plants after I'd had it in my main tank for a few months, as it looked so different. It's not rotting as such now, and is doing much better under 2.4wpg compared to my main with 1wpg, but it's still not as nice looking as when I first bought it. That moth eating away at yours looks quite nasty!