Abstract:
Hundreds of fascinating and attractive plants are grown in aquaria for beauty and to maintain
the quality of water. In addition, aquatic plants provide food, shade, shelter and breeding places
for many life forms including fish. The foliage of some aquatic plants, especially the
Cryptocoryne species, provides surfaces to which suspended particles in water adhere. These
types of aquatic plants clean the water in the aquarium. The aquatic plants of Sri Lanka have
high export demand. Cryptocoryne wendtii green, the Sinhala name Athiudayan is a
submerged aquatic plant. Cryptocoryne species plays a major role in aquatic plant export
industry. The experiment was conducted to determine a cost effective culturing media with
best water level and substrate composition-required for the aquaculture ponds and healthy,
similar sized and same aged plants originated from same brooder plant and four treatments
were used along triplicates. First experiment was conducted to evaluate the best water level
(Tl-0” , T2-1” , T3-3” ,and T4- 5” ) for growth of C. wendtii green and river sand (S) and
compost (C), were used to prepare four different substrates (T1-SC=1:1,T2-SC=1:2,T3-
SC=1:3,T4-SC=1:4). Growth parameters, environmental parameters and substrate nutritional
compositions were evaluated. In water level evaluation T4 treatment (5 inches water level)
showed the best growth in shoot height increase, root height increase, fresh weight, dry weight,
mean number of leaves and leaf surface area. In second experiment, river sand to compost
ratio, 1:3 (T3) and 1:4 (T4) showed significantly higher growth performances in all growth
parameters mentioned above. T4 showed the highest nutritional composition. It can be
concluded that the growth performance is influenced not only by the nutritional composition,
but also the physical properties and the texture of the substrate.
