hooha

I've noticed an interesting change in my Rotala sp. 'butterfly'. This is what mine has looked like in my tank:



In aother tank I had majory stunting of the fast frowers, including my 'butterfly'. After two weeks of these condtions, the plant 'converted' into this:



anyone else have a similar experience? I know that people had have had conversions with Rotala spp. 'mini'.......

s0ulcommited

What are you parameters? It looks like a combination of low light/lack of co2 to me. It looks healthy, just growing under different conditions than it would take to make it crazy red.

ashappard

hey hooha in the second pic which stem are you indicating as 'butterfly' -
the one in the center that looks like R.macrandra 'green' ?

the reason I ask is that I thought I had a stand of only R.'butterfly' and recently from it I noticed 2 stems of what looks like R.macrandra 'green'. I was pretty sure I didnt have that one in the tank at all, and definitely not in my R.butterfly.

hooha

yes, I thought it looked very much like Rotala macandra myself, but wanted to see if anyone else thought so as well When I followed these stems down they were growing from the Rotala sp. 'butterfly' mass I had growing in the tank.


soulcommited, the stunting initially occured when I did not raise up my macro dosing in the tank. I have an automated system going, as the plant density greatly increased, I did not change my dosing amounts until recently. I also had my Pogostemon stellatus stunting in the tank, which recovered nicely when I increased the dosing amounts.

current parameters:
CO2 is continuous to bring it to over 30ppm (yellow-green on a dKH 4 standard in drop checker)
lighting is 192 watts of compact flourescent in a 55 galllon.

ashappard

whew! then I'm not going crazy.
If I can snap a pic of it this evening, I'll try to confirm that the different growth appearance is in fact a branch off an R.butterfly stem.

I've got quite a few R.macrandra variants now (different combos of mini, narrow, pointed, variegated, green, super red, japan,etc) as the summer continues I'll see how stable they are or if they start to look more like each other. I have 4 variants of R.mexicana also and I'm eager to see what they do over time. The mexicanas seem to be more stable in growth pattern, at least for the two I've been keeping longest.

edit: I'd like to add that I've seen R.butterfly as R.macrandra mini 'butterfly' in places

bsmith

This plant changes quite abit from one tank/lighting situation to another. I wish I would have taken pics of it before I put the extra light on my mini-m. It was very green/yellow and was tiny, now with an extra 27w of spiral pc it is looking sort of maccandraish (wavy leafs) and getting alittle more red.

bsmith

How do you like this for a rotala story. My Mini butterfly is now curling its leaves like my mini type 2.

HoustonFishFanatic

I guess my Rotala sp 'Butterfly" is nicely maintaining its color and form.



But yes very interesting transformations.

Bhushan

ashappard

yeah very nice. Good detail on the leaf margin.
Being toothed like that means its a Rotala macrandra variant right?

Tex Gal

Not to muddy the water, I have Rotala macrandra narrow that is converting back to the regular Rotala marcrandra. This is just like my Rotala mini type 2 converting. Maybe the rotalas just do this?...

My butterfly is still narrow but not as dark red as when I received it.