You may recall that John Godbey was rescaping his 75g, and had pulled out quite a few crypts that had been in there for 2-3 years. I was fortunate enough to receive them, and they were amazing! The root systems were simply huge; a number of the plants had rhizomes 3/8" to 1/2" thick and six to eight inches long.
I had read on Jan's crypts site that when replanting crypts, you could trim the rhizomes and simply float them in an aquarium and they would eventually grow new leaves and roots. So I did that, and tossed them in a 5.5g tank with some java moss and a windelov fern (no substrate - just water taken from another aquarium), tossed in a little Excel from time to time, and last week, we noticed that every single rhizome had small leaves and thready roots growing off it!
OK, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Jan was right, and I'm sure several of you are yawning, but dang, we think this is cool. We've transferred about a dozen of the plantlets to another tank and planted them in ecocomplete, so hopefully in another few months, we'll actually be able to share some crypts we grew ourselves. Neat stuff.
