Mayaca sellowiana

Care at a glance

Overview

A fine-textured midground stem for soft-water tanks. It wants low hardness, a pH at or below neutral and CO2 in the 25 to 40 mg/l range; in hard water it stalls and pales, and pale, brittle tips are its standard complaint about iron running short. Under good light it grows quickly into dense, moss-like bushes, so trim the tops and replant to keep the stand tight. The fine foliage traps debris easily, so give it clean flow and keep mulm from settling into the clump.

In the wild

A soft-water plant from tropical South America, growing in nutrient-poor swamps, stream margins and flooded ground with acid water. Like its better-known relative Mayaca fluviatilis it is amphibious, growing submersed in the wet season and carrying on as a low emersed plant on damp banks when the water falls.

Good to know

Mayacaceae, the bogmoss family, contains just the single genus Mayaca, a small group of flowering plants that look convincingly like mosses. The species is named for Friedrich Sellow, the German naturalist who collected extensively in Brazil in the early 1800s. Compared with M. fluviatilis it is finer and denser, with narrow leaves set alternately and close against the stem; that alternate leaf arrangement is the reliable way to tell it from a whorled-leaved lookalike stem plant that was long sold under this name.

Did you know

The whole bogmoss family is one genus, and its members are flowering plants that pass for mosses at a glance. Mayaca sellowiana is the finest and most compact of the ones that reach the hobby.

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