2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The duckweed is a true cosmopolitan. You can meet her in all corners of our vast planet. And it usually grows in lakes, swamps and quiet backwaters, forming a solid and luxurious green carpet. Quite often the small duckweed is kept in aquariums, although the duckweed of this species is rather a medicinal plant than an ornamental one. However, it is very beneficial for aquariums, as it supplies them with oxygen and removes carbon dioxide. And this baby looks pretty funny, giving the aquariums a special flavor
Getting to know the plant
Lesser duckweed floats on the water surface and is a tiny oval plate painted in light green tones. All plates are endowed with one single spine and reach five millimeters in size.
Small duckweed usually blooms from May to autumn, but with its flowering it rarely pleases, and bears fruit even less often. The flowers of this useful beauty are characterized by the absence of pistils and consist of two staminate and one pistillate flowers. Each ovary contains a single ovule, and the length of the columns reaches 0.1-0.15 mm.
The fruits of the curative aquatic inhabitant are equipped with pterygoid edges and reach 0.8-1 mm in length and 0.8-1.1 mm in width. The length of the seeds reaches from 0.7 to 1 mm, and the width - from 0.4 to 0.6 mm. All seeds are painted in whitish tones and endowed with rather noticeable ribs in the amount of ten to sixteen pieces. As a rule, after the fruits ripen, they remain inside.
The use of duckweed
Often the duckweed is used to organize shading for other aquarium plants, which are characterized by intolerance to bright light. And for many aquarium fish, this type of duckweed serves as an excellent vitamin feed supplement. In order to prepare such an additive, the plants collected and dried under certain conditions are ground until they turn into powder, and then the resulting powder is mixed with complexes intended for feeding aquarium fish.
Duckweed is also periodically mixed into feed for poultry and pigs. In addition, it is very widely used in folk medicine, and all its parts are used for medicinal purposes, without exception, and you can collect a useful beauty throughout the summer. Duckweed is famous for its analgesic and anti-inflammatory effect, and its alcoholic tincture in the form of drops is used for chronic persistent rhinitis, as well as for inflammation of the mucous membrane of the upper respiratory tract and pharynx. In addition, it is excellent for glaucoma, rheumatism, gout and jaundice and is an excellent choleretic, diuretic and antipyretic agent. And also the small duckweed can be found in the composition of some herbal teas used for diseases of the thyroid gland. And this is no accident - it is the most valuable source of iodine. Found in small duckweed and anti-carcinogenic substances.
How to grow
The temperature regime suitable for keeping small duckweed is in the range from twelve to thirty degrees. As for the active reaction of water, it, just like its hardness, is completely irrelevant for the good growth and proper development of this tiny aquatic inhabitant.
Useful water beauty reproduces very quickly, vegetatively. Each stem, which looks like a tiny leaf, constantly buds new parts from itself, giving rise to young specimens.
The small duckweed grows very well and quickly, but this is not always its advantage, since getting rid of it, if necessary, is quite problematic. To eliminate such duckweed from the aquarium, you first need to catch all the plates from the water surface, and then turn off the lighting above the aquarium, leaving only the side lighting. In this case, the parts of the plant remaining in the aquatic environment will also die rather quickly.
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