Azolla Carolina

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Video: Azolla Carolina

Video: Azolla Carolina
Video: Azolla Best Floating Plant 2024, March
Azolla Carolina
Azolla Carolina
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Azolla carolina (lat. Azolla caroliniana) - a floating plant from the Azoll family. This lace moss-like plant can beautify almost any body of water.

Description

Azolla Caroline is a miniature aquatic plant, the height of which does not exceed one or two centimeters. The roots of this aquatic inhabitant are absent - their function is performed by rather pretty underwater leaves. This fern floats freely on the water surface, and its tiny leaves, like tiles, sit in pairs on slightly branched stems. In the waters characterized by tropical conditions, Azolla Karolinska is a perennial, and in all other latitudes it is cultivated exclusively as an annual.

Oval double-rowed leaves of this bizarre fern reach a length of five to ten millimeters. All of them are finely dissected, slightly tiled and pinnately branched. As for the underwater leaves, funny spherical sori are attached to their bases.

The horizontally located stalks of the Karolinska azolla are always forked-branched, and its rhizomes hanging in the water are very weakly expressed - they look like thin cones equipped with tiny branches of numerous roots.

The bottom of the Caroline Azolla is usually painted in pinkish shades, and the top of its color boasts amazingly beautiful bluish-greenish tones. If this fern grows in dazzling sunlight, its leaves can even take on rich red hues - specimens growing in bright light produce a huge amount of anthocyanins.

Where grows

In nature, Azolla Caroline can be found mainly in South, Central or North America. This water beauty is especially fond of rivers, ponds and lakes with a slow current.

How to grow

The most suitable for growing Caroline Azolla will be soft water with either a slightly acidic or neutral reaction. The optimum pH in this case will be less than 7, 0, and the hardness of the water should not be higher than ten degrees. But its temperature can be absolutely any. Azolla Carolina will feel equally comfortable in tropical aquariums, where the water temperature is twenty-eight degrees, and in moderately warm water (with a temperature of about twenty degrees). If the thermometer starts to show a value of less than sixteen degrees, the beautiful plant will immediately stop growing, and its leaves will gradually begin to rot, and the luxurious fern will quickly go under the water entirely.

Azolla Caroline needs very bright lighting. In order to organize full-fledged artificial lighting for it, it is quite permissible to use both conventional lamps and fluorescent lamps (most often of the LB type). The power of the latter should be at least 2 - 2, 5 W for each square decimeter of the water surface. And the minimum daylight hours for this delightful culture should be twelve hours. Since its dying off by winter is in direct connection with a decrease in illumination, in order to avoid this unpleasant phenomenon, it is recommended to keep the azole Carolina at a sufficiently high water temperature in tandem with rather bright lighting.

In order to preserve the fern contained in the aquariums in winter, it is quite enough to move it from the aquariums to the pre-prepared bowls filled with moistened moss. Very well suited for this sphagnum - ubiquitous bog moss. The wintering temperature of Azolla Karolinska should not fall below twelve degrees. And at the end of March or at the very beginning of April, the overwintered water fern is returned back to the aquariums.

Azolla Caroline can reproduce both sexually (in other words, by spores) and vegetatively (that is, by detachable branches). In nature, spores nesting in the bottom silt give life to new ferns.

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