My experience with plants in the paro tank

Hello all! I have tried a lot of plants in my Parosphromenus ‘sentang’ tank and wanted to report on my experiences. My tank is currently a standard 20 litre with 40% WC’s with 8 Parosphromenus ‘sentang’ (one male, two females, and their five offspring) fed three times a week with a small amount of microworms and BBS (will eventually be getting grindal worm cultures going again). The tank has an LED strip that produces about 1,200 lumens of a mixture of 10,000k and blue LED lights, with one red and one green bulb; in the past, I used a 1,200 lumen, 5000k daylight bulb intended to light a room. The water is in the 4’s PH (it climbs slightly over the course of the week, starting in the low 4’s and rising to the mid 4’s), has plain ol’ peat moss as a substrate (note to aquariumists; cap it with something! It floats for days otherwise and makes a mess), and is unheated (oddly enough, temps as low as 16 celcius do not bother my paroes at all…I have been communicating with another fellow who found that paroes are completely unfazed by and even sometimes breed in much lower temps than you would expect them to ever encounter in the wild, and thus keeps them unheated as I do. Anyone’s guess why, especially since chocolate gouramies from the same habitats die at those temps). Conductivity is in the low 40’s at the beginning of the week and drops into the 20’s by the end (the tannins and acidity are produced by decaffeinated tea bags and sodium bisulfate respectively, which likely contain a few nutrients the plants ravenously devour…this is my only tank where conductivity DROPS over the course of the week). Anyhow, here we go:
Java moss – Grows slowly but surely
Java fern – Again, slowly but surely
Water sprite – I don’t currently keep this plant. It grows slowly for me and I am very good at breaking it while doing water changes.
Water lettuce – Grows feverishly, to the point it starts to crowd out duckweed! :ohmy: Often have to prune this every other week or even every week to prevent it from shading out everything else. Some individual plants grow to 10 cm across. I use this instead of water sprite.
Duckweed – Would grow fine except that it gets outcompeted by water lettuce. Only exists in small patches as a result.
Cabomba pulcherima, ‘purple cabomba’ – Grows reasonably well if not shaded by something (in which case it becomes quite leggy). Many consider this to be a form of Cabomba carolinia, which should also do well.
Red flame sword Did OK…didn’t die back much, but didn’t put on much mass either. Some swords grow in very similar habitats in the wild, so a species sword from the Rio Negro may work better.
Nymphaea stellata – Doing quite well, regularly shoots up pads to the surface. My tank has a mesh lid, so the top of the tank is quite attractive to look at with all the water lettuce and lily pads. Try to limit the pads for the same reason as I prune the water lettuce.
Aponogeton – Got some bulbs, none of which sprouted in any of my tanks. Don’t know if these do well in a paro tank as a result.
Sunset hygro – Briefly kept some floating in a paro tank once. Again, didn’t keep them long enough to determine whether it truly does well.

Anyhow, I thought you guys would find this info useful. Enjoy!