Anyone have luck floating Rotala Indica?

onemanswarm

I've been striking out trying to track down Water Sprite locally and I'm anxious to get a nice floating plant. I checked out a new LFS the other day and they had some Rotala indica floating in an aquarium. The clerk told me that it should be planted, but it had been dug up numerous times by the large knife fish in the tank with it so they were letting it float.

I loved the look of the plant floating, with long straight roots hanging down from seemingly every node and the leaves turned up toward the light. I'm trying to find out some information about it, but we don't have a profile here and I'm not finding any info about floating it.

Questions:
Will Rotala indica thrive as a floating plant? Since I like the appearance, would it be worth getting as a placeholder for the Water Sprite (at which point I could theoretically plant the rotala)? If anyone is willing to share thoughts and experience, I'd appreciate it greatly!

Ami

I couldn't find Water Sprite either...so I'm using floating Hornwort & Anacharis instead. I tried floating water Wisteria and this worked for a while. But the leaves at the bottom end kepr falling off and the ends of the stems would start to rot and this really bothered me...so I planted the 3 stems left from the bunch.

onemanswarm

Sounds familiar. I started with a combination of Hornwort and najas grass, but the najas quickly failed and the Hornwort kept dropping lower and lower, so I planted it for the time being. I also have 3 stems of Wisteria floating because they wouldn't stay planted. They seem to be doing very well at the surface and have started shooting off some nice roots. I think I'll wait for the roots to develop a little more, then try planting them again.

I ended up buying what I'm told is "indica" which I then assumed to be Rotala indica. I love how it looks, but I'm having a hard time confirming that what I actually have is what I was told I was buying. Curse my combination of ignorance and impatience!

Boredomb

I found that my Wisteria made a great plant for floating. Never had any problem out of that plant be it floating or planted. Floating it would form long white roots that just looked cool to me throughout the stem of the plant. I have since moved on to Pennywort now that I finally managed to get some. Took me forever to get Ahold of some that didn't cost an arm and a leg. LoL