Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi:
I want to add live plants to my tank with rubber eels. Will adding CO2 hurt the eels at all? Any particular plants they would really like?
Thanks in advance,
Karen

I keep live plants in my tank, and I think it helps with water quality. You may or may not be able to keep live plants in there, it all depends on how the eels take to them - mine always seem to dig up one particular plant. I have a piece of driftwood in the tank, and have some sort of aquatic plant growing on the top of it - the roots are in the water, and about half of the plant is out of the water. I also have some java fern and a sword plant.

Don't plants give off oxygen, not carbon dioxide?

Katrina

Hi Kat:
Thanks for answering my post. Plants do give off oxygen, but they take in CO2, so pumping CO2 into the tank would help the plants flourish.
Karen

not quite sure what you meant by "pumping CO2 in will help" but you don't need to do anything extra to the plants the natural cycle of plant and animal is more than adiquat(sp?)

My best results (for the last 12 years or so) are using floating plants like water sprite as these will form thick mats that the caecilians will then crawl up into and rest. (It also helps as it gives any babies a shallow refuge to rest close to the surface.
I would not recommend using CO2 as yes while CO2 is picked up during the day it is relased at night. In addition additionally CO2 is really only needed if you have an extremely high plant growth (like a Dutch set up) and want to keep it at a high rate of growth.
Ed

"My best results (for the last 12 years or so) are using floating plants like water sprite as these will form thick mats that the caecilians will then crawl up into and rest. (It also helps as it gives any babies a shallow refuge to rest close to the surface.
Ed"

Ed,

Funny that you should mention the floating plants. My eels have been digging up my large sward plant lately, so I just sort of gave up on it and let it float, with all the leaves at the surface. In the last month my bigges eel has been spending most of her time up in the leaf canopy, resting in the leaves, sometimes with parts of her skin exposed to the air. I had been wondering if this was normal or not.

I've resorted to feeding moslty pinkies with occasional pieces of cooked shrimp. My rodent supplier is pretty cheap, so it was actually cheaper to feed them pinkies than nightcrawlers from the corner store! Of course, I'm going to try wormman.com tonight for a shipment of nightcrawlers this week.

If you hear of anyone wanting two females in our area, let me know - I'm too afraid to ship, but would like to just have 1.1 rather than 1.3 (since mine aren't breeding). They're getting rather expensive to feed, and I just feel that one 55 gallon tank is too small for four adults. I never knew how big they would get - Gracie is now almost twice as big as my thumb.

Katrina

Natans enjoy burrowing in a deep substrate of spagnum moss, so therefor it can be difficult to introduce potted plants. I have found that mine enjoy pothos, which I hydroponically grow in the aquarium; it can float on the surface. I also use some other floating plants. They give them a hiding place and add beauty to the tank.

DAVE