Steralizing native plants.

[JessKB]

Hi everyone. I brought home a mess of duckweed today, and want to introduce it to my axolotl tank. I know duckweed is often considered a nuisance, but I rather like it. I've read other posts where people keep duckweed with their animals, but never a thread where it is explained how to make "wild" plants safe to add to an enclosure.I assume that the axolotls will inhale a lot of duckweed when coming to the surface, this wouldn't harm them would it? I imagine ambystoma larvae eat tons of the stuff on accident anyway.
There's also loads of elodea in the pond, and other random plants that come up with the net when i'm catching critters. The pond is really murky, well shaded, and cold, so I think that some of these plants would work well in a caudate enclosure. There's a healthy amphibian population in the pond, and no big fish. I know I'm gonna inevitably bring some critters in with the plants, but I doubt anything big enough to hurt an axolotl is going to get by me. I really want to grow some native plants in my tank. Is it possible? What do you guys think?

 

[SludgeMunkey]

I highly recommend against bringing in plants from the wild. The risk to captive pets is far too great. The stuff you can see is pretty bad, but it is the stuff you can't see that is deadly.


There is a few off the shelf products for killing pests on plants. My personal favorite was "Lime-it". Sadly that manufacturer no longer exists, however this was simply a high alkaline lime and water solution.

 

[JessKB]

That's highly unfortunate to hear. There are some really neat plants in my area that would look great in an aquarium. I even found a fish forum that has a whole section on aquatic plant collection. Another user on here provided me with a link to an anuran site that suggested using a mix of methylene blue and benzalk to soak plants in to kill any chytridiomycosis and other fungal zoospores that may be present on the plants. I still haven't made up my mind, but I may consider trying this.

 

[SludgeMunkey]

Aye, that works too, but meth blue can create problems for your caudates.

I have personally used wild caught plants in the past, but I quarantined them for over a year. Ultimately they didn't do very well, so I never used them with my pets.