Want an emersed plant to flower? Try Warm White bulbs with 8/16 schedule

redchigh

Note-
the warm light bulbs could probably trigger algae, so only do it if you remove the emersed plant to a bucket or something...

With indoor gardening, "redder" bulbs with a shorter day triggers flowering and seed/fruit production- It only makes sense it would apply to emersed (and only emersed) aquarium plants too.

(Be careful when trying to research this- 90% of the articles that come up are related to illegal drugs. Still, plants are plants (for the most part) right?


I doubt there are many emersed plants that set viable seed as the primary reproduction method... most you can probably use plantlets or cuttings. This info might be useful for some hard-to-propogate plants like madagascar lace leaf and banana plants though...

Flear

in the natural world, the difference in lighting spectrum, reds are more prevalent in the autumn, blues more prevalent in the spring. guessing this may be more of a tendency towards a 60/40 split, or less

"shorter days" - yes, but unfortunately 8 hours of light and most plants are in the dead of winter.

autumn and even spring lighting hours can be used to flower, typically these seasons have 12/12 (day/night) and plants enter their flowering stage very well. as you notice flowers in spring and plants producing seeds and fruit in the autumn.

16/8 (day/night) is used to grow terrestrial plants to ensure they don't flower, and this logic may ring true for all germinating plants

our aquarium 8/16 (day/night) tends to come out of a minimum light to avoid algae. but i doubt it's enough light to cause flowering or seed production.

for flowering the light spectrum has a tendency towards red (natural world) but plants will take what they can get, if it's not enough the plants get sick & die. if they're getting the right amount of light and the spectrum is off, the plants will still flower (why spring also works to bring plants to flower)

plenty of emersed plants produce seeds and even flowers, true aquatic plants i'm guessing not so much. emersed plants that do flower generally don't let the water stop them from flowering, ... the flower just tends to rot off very soon.

and some it's more temperature related, i only know of one, the cherry tree. the cherry tree flowers when the temperatures rise as winter ends

Edit:
for specific lighting to promote algae, actinic would be your best bet, dark blues tending towards UV
yet these same lights hit some key specific spikes on the light spectrum for all photosynthesis in general (all in the blue ranges and towards UV)

funkman262

I'm confused as to why you believe shorter days will always trigger flowering in plants. There's something called "long-day" and "short-day" plants, usually depending on where they come from and what season they bloom. They use protein productions driven by photochemical responses to run their internal clock (look into photoperiodism). For short-day plants, the signal to flower is caused by P(FR) being converted to P(R). Essentially, during the day, red light is absorbed by the red-light absorbing phytochrome [P(R)] and is rapidly converted to to P(FR) (the far-red absorbing phytochrome). Conversely, far-red light is absorbed by P(FR) and converted to P(R). At night (complete darkness), P(FR) is slowly converted back to (R) spontaneously. When enough time has passed for ALL of the phytochrome form to convert, the pant recognizes that it's the correct time of year to bloom. But when the night is too short, red-light is absorbed and interrupts the process, signaling that it's the wrong time to flower. In home aquariums, any sort of light like a night-light, television, or a street lamp shining through the window would be enough to interrupt this process. It's been theorized that flashing a plant with far-red light after lights-off will convert all of the P(FR) immediately back to P(R) and trigger flowering. It's a similar process with long-day plants except it involves conversions within the mRNA instead of the phytochromes.

Flear

wow, learning something new.

from my experience, never knew any of that, just went with 12/12 lights and flowering did it's stuff.

did know others who would shine a light around when it was supposed to be night to look around and it would totally interrupt the flowering and things would have to be started all over again. it would waste weeks of flowering and progress.

i may not understand the mechanisms, but i can now say there are mechanisms at play i didn't know about before.