# My fish eat my frogbit !!!



## mitko1994

WTF !!! All the forums I read, all the people I asked, everyone said no fish ever touches their frogbit. Guess what, my odessa barbs and rainbows nibble on the roots like crazy and now that they have trimmed them to the minimum I'm scared they might target the leaves. Anyone ever had this experience before??
LOL I feel like my tank is doomed to NOT grow plants.


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## cb1021

How often do you feed? I'm just curious (I think I'm overfeeding) because my fish ain't no where that hungry.


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## Professor Monkey

My gouramis like to nibble on frogbit roots, but I do not see any damage. I assume they are scraping off microorganisms growing on the massive surface area of the roots.

Frogbit seems very resilient and some of the ones that I received were in bad shape (yellow half rotted leaves and no roots) but after a week have grown roots and replaced a few leaves. The healthier ones have grown lots of leaves, 2-3 inch roots, and have started reproducing.

I hear that so long as they get a bit of light and the water has nutrients (especially nitrates) that they are near indestructible and will take over the tank.


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## mitko1994

I feed twice a day, but the food is gone in about 40 sec each feeding. I don't like to feed too much since my tank is already prone to high nitrates and I find that feeding less keeps the fish more active rather than stuffing them and just watch them sit there trying to process the food. The frogbit I got also came with some duckweed stuck to it, and they also took care of that in no time, they like it more than peas lol. I really hope my frogbit manages to survive so it can suck up the excess nitrates. Do you think mini salvinia and water lettuce would have a better chance of survival?


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## Professor Monkey

I have no experience with those species so I don't know how the fish would react to them vs the frogbit.

If you have a breeding box for livebearers you could put the frogbit inside - it will be protected from the fish and still have access to the tank's nitrate loaded water.

Alternatively you can take some of the frogbit plants and keep them in a glass/jar of tank water (change it daily) under a light until they grow larger sturdy roots which the fish won't damage.


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## mitko1994

The problem is I don't have an extra light fixture. Maybe I can put some of them in a bucket close to a window lol.


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## Atom

Good idea on taking some to grow in a separate bucket just in case.

I recently just got frogbit too and some of my fish love pulling at the roots  and they're now shortened because of this. They also lost the hairs on their roots, but now they're starting to grow back so maybe it'll just take some time.

I was torn between getting water lettuce or frogbit as well, but decided on frogbit because I had read that water lettuce can be a bit more delicate. People have said that if the tops of the leaves get wet on the lettuce they tend to yellow and die so they wouldn't be ideal for tanks with HOBs or closed off tops because water might settle on the leaves.


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## rmahabir

Hi Mitko,
I have a 65 gallon, fresh water, fully planted, low tech tank. I keep only hifin swordtails (which I feed 2 times per day), and they just nailed all of my frogbit. I have many other many plants in my tank as well. Here are my recommendations on what I did that will remedy the situation on your frogbit (many thanks to Mike at Finatics for the recommendation).
- I upgraded my light to a dual T5 coralife strip (using a T5HO light is better)
- Use Flourish Excel every other day or as per directed, as the carbon seems to stimulate growth
- Change water once per week

Once I adopted the 3 things mentioned above, my frogbit started looking greener, multiplying and growing faster than the fish can eat. I have about 30 pieces of frogbit (started off with just 10 pieces), and the fish still keep eating it, but the growth is much better than before.

I am very new to the hobby, but what I learned over the past 7 months is all based on mistakes, notably the one big one, was not knowing that lightling and fertilizing was key to the growth of floating plants.

Again, I am new, learning from mistakes as I go along, but I was able to overcome the same issue that you are having.


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## mitko1994

Thanks for your recommendation. I'm not sure excel really helps floating plants since they are exposed to CO2 from the air which is of much higher concentration than it is in the water, but again I might be wrong. My lighting is LED but I think it's fine since the plants are really close to it anyways. The good thing is the fish are not constantly picking it at it so hopefully it will be ok in the long run.


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