I first had an interest in the Red Tiger Lotus plant (species Nymphaea Zenkeri) when I first got back into the hobby 5 years ago after seeing the plants in the Amano books. Finding specimens locally was difficult since it didn’t seem to be a common plant. I was able to find one specimen that was of questionable quality that was selling for about $25.00, but I didn’t want to gamble that much on a plant that I wasn’t familiar with and the prospects of failure existed for me since I was just getting back into the hobby and hadn’t quite received my wet green thumb yet.

I went online and posted a question on the Aquatic Gardeners Association e-mail forum trying to find reasonable specimens. A person in Delaware notified me that he had specimens coming in and I was able to buy 5 plants from him for about $23.00. I sent off the money order and waited anxiously for the plants. I was notified that his first shipment was of questionable quality and it was going to be about another month before another shipment would come in. About a month later the plants did show up and were in a grade B condition with leaf sizes ranging from about 1-1.5 inches.

I went to work and planted all of the newly arrived specimens in my 125-gallon aquarium. At that timeframe I was running eight 30-watt bulbs over the aquarium that were a mix of Sylvania Grolux and Luxline bulbs. The plants started out slow and were starting to shed leaves. As leaves were dying off I would detach the leaf from the plant. I did make a mistake by detaching the only leaf of one plant and killed the plant since it had no way to photosynthesize and grow. Well I was now down to 4 plants and things were moving along somewhat slow. I added a do-it-yourself yeast reactor (4 to 8 2-liter bottles) to the aquarium filter intake to start putting carbon dioxide into the water to see if that would help things move along. This turned out to be a good idea as the plants starting pearling a couple of days later with oxygen bubbles so obviously the plants were starting to photosynthesize. I also added some root tabs fertilizer near the roots to give the plants some extra nutrients.

Over the next couple of months the plant growth was exponential. I was able to get leaves up to dinner plate size and the plants started to "pad out" just like a water lily plant. The colorization was a deep red and I couldn’t be happier. I have found that if the Red Tiger Lotus starts to "pad out", you can snip off the leaves as they start to shoot to the surface from the main body of the plant and it will help the plant maintain a bushy appearance. After a couple of months I had to perform some maintenance on the aquarium and started to uproot the plants temporarily. As I was pulling the plants out I was finding that they were sending out runners and I now had baby plants! I detached the small plants from the parents and started to grow a small farm of Red Tiger Lotus. As time progressed I started moving the offspring to my 120-gallon aquarium and later to a 40-gallon.

After transferring plants to the 40-gallon tank, the plants were not only sending out runners and creating babies, the parent plants were also creating small seeds. I wasn’t sure about how to handle this newly discovered situation but I went and detached the seed from the parent plant and replanted it about 1 inch below the surface of the substrate. One end of the seed had a rough tip that I assumed was where the new plant would sprout from so I had that end pointed towards the surface. After about 4 weeks a new plant came out from the seed and started to grow. It became obvious that I was able to propagate this plant by either a runner or the plant producing a seed and then detaching and replanting the seed.

After having cultivated and propagated well over 100 specimens from the 4 initial starter plants I figured it was time to give a try at the Green Tiger Lotus in 2003. I haven’t seen any specimens show up in the local fish stores during my shopping trips at that time so I turned to AquaBid.com to search for specimens. I was able to find a supplier in Louisiana and had 5 of them shipped up for about $5.00 each. The specimens arrived in grade A condition and I promptly went to plant them into my 120-gallon tank. Cultivation and propagation for this species was the same as the Red Tiger Lotus. This plant does seem to pad out faster than the Red variety so trimming leaves becomes more frequent. The runners are sent out in the same manner but seed production is slower and the seeds are much larger than the Red variety.

Cultivating and propagating the Red and Green Tiger Lotus has been a very enjoyable and rewarding experience and I encourage anybody that has an interest in aquarium plants to give it a try. Both plants require medium brightness conditions (minimum 2 watts per gallon in my aquariums) for proper growing and reproduction. Typically I am running bulbs in the 6700 to 8800 Kelvin rating. Adding carbon dioxide via either yeast reactor or high-pressure canister methods will really get these plants growing. A medium grade flint gravel substrate with the addition of some root tabs for fertilizer would be a great planting medium. Once you get these plants going they won’t stop and you will soon have a field of Lotus plants ready for harvesting.