The ultimate Mangrove thread!!

[Eric R.]

If it helps, this is where I got the dry ingredients for my fertilizer mixes. The dry ingredients go a long way and are cheap/last a while. https://nilocg.com/collections/dry-fertilizers

I don't know how safe they are to use in a reef tank, but my planted FW tanks and the mangroves seem to like it just fine.

 

[Eric R.]

You could also try something like this: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/collections/the-easy-range/products/easy-green-all-in-one-fertilizer

I haven't used it, but I have used other products from aquarium coop and they all seem to be high quality and good value for product, and I've heard it's well liked by other freshwater planted tank keepers.

 

[thepotoo]

houseplant food that includes macros (NPK) and trace elements,

and iron, that's critical!

 

[CHSBoater]

Hey y'all. I've been playing with mangroves in freshwater for the past two years. Read through everything I can find on here. Got my first 5 (two years ago) then this spring I got another 5. Ultimate goal is a big walking mangrove tank(s). I've got a two tanks set up along with two single ones in mason jars at work!

Here's my video on what I've learned over the past two years that might be helpful to some but always learning:
And all of my learning videos can be found here:

 

[OrionN]

Black mangrove is the plant to grow in reef tank. They are smaller and looks more beautiful IMO. Here is my 2.5-year-old from seed plant. I pick up seed from the beach around Sept 2020.
The Black mangrove put out salt crystal on the leaves. I can easily wash off with spray bottle spray RO water on the plant. this can be seen in the 2nd picture below.
1/21/2022.

A few weeks later

Current picture, cramped in my sump with does not do it justice. It is about 2 feet high from the water and 2 feet wide. I need to set up an aquarium that tied to the system so it can spread our it's branches. Picture of the flowers also attached. The pictures of the flowers were taken bout 6 months ago.

Trunk today. See all the shoot coming off of the trunk, and also air roots

Flowers

Finally, picture of Black Mandrove in the wild

 

[Eric R.]

Black mangrove is the plant to grow in reef tank. They are smaller and looks more beautiful IMO. Here is my 2.5-year-old from seed plant. I pick up seed from the beach around Sept 2020.
The Black mangrove put out salt crystal on the leaves. I can easily wash off with spray bottle spray RO water on the plant. this can be seen in the 2nd picture below.
1/21/2022.

A few weeks later

Current picture, cramped in my sump with does not do it justice. It is about 2 feet high from the water and 2 feet wide. I need to set up an aquarium that tied to the system so it can spread our it's branches. Picture of the flowers also attached. The pictures of the flowers were taken bout 6 months ago.

Trunk today. See all the shoot coming off of the trunk, and also air roots

Flowers

Finally, picture of Black Mandrove in the wild

@OrionN Wow that's some incredible growth for such a short time period! Beautiful clams as well. What sort of light and substrate are you using? I might have to see if I can find some black mangrove seeds to try out.

 

[OrionN]

I use daylight floodlight from Home Depo. I have 5 of these bulb on the plant. I think each of the bulb is about 17-20 watts range, 5500-6000K. That level of light cause the plant to have compact dense shape as if it is in full Sun outside.

 

[OrionN]

 

[OrionN]

The largest part of the main trunk is about 1 inch in diameter. It has multiple off shoot from there and multiple roots come off from there. I initially planted it in a sand container but now it has escaped containment. It sends roots all over my sump and send multiple air roots up above the water. The structure is meet. I imagine this is a mini mangrove ecology I have pest aiptasia in my sump and multiple aiptaisia and various worms and snails take resident in the root system. I remove dropped leaves all the time.
I used to have light closer to the leaves, but it burns the leaves and shoot when it gets close to the lights, so I move the light set up several feet higher and increase the number of bulbs. Total of 5 daylight flood LED light on timer. These are cheap LED daylight outdoor light bulbs from Home Depo. Lighting period is 12 hrs. I have not measured the PAR yet. Maybe I will do this this weekend. I think the light is much brighter than usual reef light. I decided to use this amount of light because I see Black Mangrove here in the wild. They are under full Sun. They are growing both on land 100 feet away from the water all the way to totally grow in the water, attach with root to the bottom.
Here are a few close-up pictures of the trunk structure. Sorry the pictures are sideway. I am posting from my phone right now so I cannot easy change the orientation of the picture.
I have a mature but young plant in my sump and provide essentially the required amount of light for it. I read into pollination; they do have specific fly that pollinated the flowers. I am unable to get the flower pollinated even if I take one flower, removed the petals and insert it into another flower. I will need to read some more and will attempt this at a later time. I am just too busy right now.

 

[OrionN]

This is 6 days worth of growth. Sorry the magnification is not the same. That was unintentional. Still you can judge the growth by comparison where the leaves are and the size with respect to the trunk.
I edited and retake the picture to have the size as close as possible.

 

[OrionN]

Bright light result in all of these branches and compact plant. This really lend itself to great pruning and direct the plant growth so we can have an attractive plant.
I did not wash the slat off the leaves in these pictures. Anybody who want to plant this easy plant can see this is something we need to do for Black Mangroves but not with Red Mangroves.

 

[OrionN]

Red and Black Mangroves are unrelated plant that has convergent evolution and adapted to survive in salt water. Is there any other species of plants can be grow in salt water?
I understand White Mangrove really grow higher than the tide line so likely cannot be plant in our reef or sump. I have black mangrove easy here in Corpus so I choose to grow them. I tried Red Mangrove in the past. It did not do well for me because I did not provide it with adequate light.
I love my Black mangrove but like to have other people experiences with other species.
IMO, we have to provide light specific for the plant. Cannot just use spill over light from the reef. The light have to be bright enough at high enough from the plant so that it have enough light but won’t burn the tips when it grow just a little bit.

 

[OrionN]

I decided to take weekly pictures to document growth of my Black Mangrove. Three weeks of growth pictures below, every Saturday's for 3 weeks.

 

[OrionN]

more picture of the same area today near the end of the year.

 

[OrionN]

Black Mangrove all the way. Here is a recap on growth of 1 branch over 1 month time from Dec 4. 2022 to Jan 1, 2023.
Happy New Year Everybody.
12/4/2022

1/1/2023

 

[joros]

Hey ya'll, I've been ghost following this thread for a while now but finally joined in now that I need something (isn't that how everyone gets here?). Do any mangrove experts have any tips for helping my tank thrive?

Story: I grew my red mangroves on my balcony in Miami from propagules I found washed up on the beach, 2 years ago. I had them growing in a custom built rhino-liner'ed plywood planter loaded with muck and sand alongside some Florida purslane (see attached). I'd inundate the planter with water once a week so that they were always sitting in some kind of mud. I had to move to NYC for 2 years and bringing a little bit of SoFlo with me became a top priority. I built a shelf-situation to hold a 29gal freshwater tank. The idea was to make it freshwater for easy maintenance, but fake a salt water situation with the fish and things as best as possible. I read as much as I could of Julian Sprung's mangrove manuals. As expected, the plants - now a year old - hated being moved from soil to free floating in water. I anchored them from above some oolite limestone rocks to encourage the root growth. There is no substrate other than some sand from the Bahamas (Julian said you don't need any substrate). I have ghost shrimp, mystery and nerite snails, 13 rasbora, 2 bola sharks, a red tailed shark and a leopard plecco that have gotten along now for about 6 months. I have a Felt Electric 86 watt grow light (full spectrum, 5600 lumens). I accidentally burned up the 2 younger generation mangroves I had and I set the lamp timer back from 12 hours to 8 hours per day about 2 weeks ago. With the two trees I have left, I've seen new growth. One plant still has curled leaves indicating it's getting too much light, but I expect that to resolve in a few more weeks since dialing back the light. I've fertilized the tank with capsules buried in the sand twice in the past 6 months. Using a canister filter.

I've been reading about adding Fe and Mg, but I still have a bunch of critters to keep happy. Not sure if adding nutrients will upset the balance. I'm also concerned that my light may not be the best for this setup. My goals are to get some nice roots down within the next year or so and start trimming above leaf couples to encourage more branches up top once the trees are happy. Trying to get as close to a mangrove bush over the top of this tank as I can. It's only been less than 6 months, but am I on the right track? Cease and desist?

Update to FW red mangrove tank (5 months later):

The attached pics show the update after adjusting the light/nutrient parameters mentioned previously.

PROP ROOTS: To encourage prop root growth, I anchored the red mangroves to a small oak beam sitting horizontally above the aquarium using rubber bands. The idea here is that since the bands flex, the trees will feel slight movement from the filter's outflow, encouraging more root growth as opposed to being securely anchored to the beam. I originally super-glued the trees to the beam, then made the switch after 3 months when the root growth seemed slow. The change appears to have encouraged root growth, but this could also just be due to the other parameters being adjusted.

LIGHTS: I initially dialed back my automatic light timer from 12 hours to 8 and this relieved the plants to the point of growing again. Some curled leaves stayed curled on one tree, but all of the new leaves grew normally indicating a more desirable light schedule. Two months ago, I built an extension to my shelf that raised the light source an additional 6 inches. I then adjusted the light back to 12 hours after raising the light. No leaves have curled since making this change.

NUTRIENTS: I initially thought the fish waste would be enough to keep the trees healthy in the 29gal tank. I now have 10 harlequin rasbora, 1 bala shark, 1 red-tailed shark, a leopard plecco and 5 very sexually active corydoras (1 fry has survived so far and is in a separate tank until it is no longer snack-size). I lost 3 rasboras and a bala shark to jumping, so I also built a screen top that has to fit around the mangroves. Back to nutrients - the fish waste wasn't enough, as mentioned above, so I bought Flourish Iron and dosed half a cap per day. After a couple of weeks, new leaves were dark green and healthy. After two months, I switched to what I thought would be a more comprehensive fertilizer - Aqueon Aquarium Plant Food. New leaves then started coming out pale, again. I switched back to the Flourish Iron about a week and a half ago.

FUTURE: I will be moving back to SoFlo this summer and I predict a new mangrove environment coming soon. This is also why I've taken on many new mangrove children (as seen in the pics).

If anyone has any questions about their own setups, feel free to shoot me a message. I've learned a lot from doing everything wrong the first time and would be happy to share what I've learned. The biggest piece of advice I'd give a red mangrove newbie is to not bury your propagules in substrate. They don't need it, and I think the coolest part of growing red mangroves is seeing their roots come down and take hold on their own.

 

[joros]

Has anyone attempted a cover of any sort on a mangrove tank? Just lost a clown to jumping. It was the only fish in the tank, so nothing bullying it.

Replying to this late, so hopefully you've found a remedy by now. But I also had fish jumpers and the problem of mangroves being top-prohibitive. I built a custom 2-piece screen top that covers the tank from two sides. The screen was chosen because it's flexible along the edges where it touches the trees. The design could be further simplified if you assume fish only make their jumps around the perimeter of a tank. It's not pretty, though, so I only use it at night. Knock on wood - I've not had daytime jumpers. I think mine jump when they are being chased and can't see the waterline at night. Attaching a pic of my solution. Haven't had any suicides since. Hope this helps you.

 

[OrionN]

Another week of growth. A lot of growth and a lot of branches coming out from this one shoot.

I also got a new Red Mangrove pod and put it near the base of the Black Mangrove. I really don't have a lot of room in the sump so it is really close to the Black Mangrove. Hopefully it wont skip a beat, and start to grow well in my sump too. I loop a plastic tie on one of the Black Mangrove air root to keep it from moving and floating away. Will cut it off as soon as the roots take hold of the rock and sand below.

 

[OrionN]

After 6 weeks that small branch is 12 inches long.

Dec 5th, 2022

Today, Jan 20th ,2023

 

[OrionN]

That little branch is now 21 inches and a major branch come off of the main trunk. It is bout 1/3 inches thick.
Spring also bring on a batch of flowers. I was not able to get seed last year due to the plant needs a specific pollinator. I have not read closely into this to see if I can acts as the pollinator
I always baby this plant, now it come to the point that I must prune it to keep it manageable.