Red Root Floaters on the Surface:

Red Root Floaters (Phyllanthus fluitans) are a free-floating aquatic plant native to the Amazon Basin, where they drift in mats or entangle with river margin snag habitat in the still blackwater backwaters of the Rio Negro and its tributaries. Slender stems carry small, paddle-shaped leaves with a fine hairy texture that keeps them water-repellent, while a tangle of reddish roots hangs below the surface, drawing nutrients from the water column. In the Botanical Method Aquarium, they build habitat at the water's surface, diffusing light and aiding in shading the waters below. 

Essential Details

• Care Level: Easy
• Growth Habit: Continuous, spreads via side shoots
• Light: Low to High
• CO2: Not Necessary
• Propagation: Side shoots
• Tint Tolerance: Low to High
• Habitat Location: Amazon Basin, South America
• Optimal For: Betta fish, tetras, dwarf cichlids, corydoras, and other species suited to floating-plant cover in blackwater and biotope aquariums
• Use with Caution: Rinse before introducing; may carry beneficial hitchhiking snails, snail eggs, or duckweed from the grow-out ponds
• Size Range: individual leaves are 1/4-1/2' in side, plant strings can grow up to 6"+
• Quantities: 4oz cup portion
• Red Root Floaters for Aquariums & Vivariums

Red Root Floaters for Planted Aquariums & Blackwater Biotopes

Shading the water column and absorbing excess nutrients are the two most beneficial impacts of building your ecosystem with Red Root Floaters. This mat of aquarium plants helps to limit the light available to algae and is useful for shy or dimly patterned species that prefer diffused conditions. The dense network of roots hanging into the water becomes a microhabitat, where biofilm forms on the root hairs and microfauna such as copepods, ostracods, and daphnia can forage on this supplemental nutrition, giving betta fish, tetras, and fry a foraging surface at the top of the aquarium rather than beneath the leaves on the substrate.

Because Red Root Floaters draw nutrients directly from the water column rather than the substrate, tint level has little bearing on their growth. We can grow them in an aquarium tinted dark by leaf litter and seed pods or in clear, untinted water, and they grow the same either way. What does shift their growth is light and available nutrients: low to moderate light keeps the plant green and slow-growing, while stronger light intensifies the red pigment in the leaves and roots and speeds growth, though it also calls for more available nutrients to sustain this growth. If your want deeper red coloration, mess around and adjust light and fertilizer together rather than light alone.

Red Root Floaters propagate through side shoots that split from the main rosette and drift free, making them simple to divide and distribute between your Botanical Method Aquariums. They do not like getting wet — floating their leaves above the waterline and rely on that surface exposure to stay dry; still water and an open top keep the leaves from rotting, so aquariums with tight-fitting lids or heavy surface agitation from filter return or airstones are not a good environment for this plant.

Beneath the Leaves: Phyllanthus fluitans in the Wild

Phyllanthus fluitans is native to the Amazon Basin, first described from the blackwater Rio Negro, and ranges from Colombia and Venezuela south through Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and northern Argentina. It grows as a free-floating annual or perennial depending on how long its habitat stays flooded, drifting across the water surface of oxbow lakes, flooded forest, and backwater channels during the high-water season. In the Peruvian Amazon, it regularly forms mixed floating mats alongside Salvinia, Pistia, Lemna, and Azolla, a community of surface plants that together shade the water and export nutrients.

Where a botanical contributes as it breaks down, an aquatic plant is living and contributes as it grows. So let them grow. Mother Nature leads the way.

Please select a heat/cold pack if necessary. Check your local weather before ordering to avoid any shipment holds or cancellations. All Plants may contain snails or snail eggs. We keep them in all of our aquariums for the benefits they provide. Our blackwater aquarium plants are provided in cooperation with PNW Bettas in adherence to their Shipping and DOA Policies. Your curated selection will arrive in their packaging separate from your botanical, wood & merch orders.