I am confused about duckweed. I see them selling it at the pet store, yet people complain about it. I have never used it. What are the issues with duckweed? Overgrowth?
The biggest issue with duckweed is just how resilient it is. It's a pretty plant when sitting nicely on the surface, a good ammonia user, and a nice snack for any plant eating fish. But with any other plant, floating or otherwise, you can easily remove if you get tired of it or decide you don't like it for whatever reason. Not so with duckweed. It's irritating the way it easily blows down into the tank and gets caught all over everything, or clings to your skin any time you have to put your arm into the tank - those aspects bug a lot of keepers, since it's worse compared to any other floater. But even then, if someone found that aspect too irritating, if it was easy to just remove it all and get something else, it wouldn't be something people get so heated over!
Nope, what gets the duckweed haters (like me!) so angry with it is that once it's in a tank, it's SO HARD to get rid of it, once and for all. Those leaves are so teeny tiny, and they can seemingly rehydrate and come back to life even if they're dried out and hidden away somewhere. So you can try to remove it all, but it only takes one tiny missed leaf for it to suddenly start taking over again. Just one little leaf tucked away under the rim of the tank, on the lid, behind the heater, in your water change bucket or syphon, on a net you've used, caught up in the plants lower down could be anywhere... so in practice, you get some in your tank once, and can spend a year or more still trying to get rid of it all! I literally spent weeks removing every scrap of it I could find from all of my tanks and equipment, then another eight months or so removing each new gathering of tiny leaves that appeared each time they appeared, until I was finally free of it!
Then, having not seen a scrap of it in any of my tanks for months, it reappeared... from
somewhere, but I've no idea where. It's sometimes nicknamed "the herpes of the hobby" for that reason. Once you've got it, there's no getting rid of it!
Bettas are the best...
