C. nurii 'West Pahang'

We located C. nurii 'West Pahang' during our recent field trip. Maybe due to the low water level at this site, the flowers were very much smaller as compared to those found in Terengganu or Central Pahang.

The locality is as usual in a small slow flowing stream along the edge of a forest where there is a good mix of shade and sunlight. The substrate is generally sandy and the pH measured was about 7.0.

The markings on the leaves are quite beautiful, "luminous green!" according to my friend. The leaves colour ranges from green for the more emersed leaves to brown for the more submersed leaves. The edges of the leaves are wavy, a typical characteristic of C. nurii, but unlike those found in Mersing, the specimens from this locality have no "red dots" along the main veins of the leaves.

C. longicauda blooming soon......

As expected, the C. longicauda specimens from two different localities (namely from Johor and Bintan) are competing to bloom in my tank.

C. longicauda 'Johor'

C. longicauda 'Bintan'

C. longicauda blooming soon?

This week, both my C. longicauda 'Bintan' and C. longicauda 'Johor' developed a needle-like growth which looked to me like the distinct prolongated tail of the limb of the spathe. If they really are what I expected them to be, then C. longicauda will finally be the 3rd species of cryptocoryne (after C. pontederiifolia and C. wendtii) which I managed to flower under my cultivation, if not considering of those specimens which I collected / given to me with attached spathe.

C. sp. 'Lingga - Red' seedlings progress update (1 mth)

This is an update of the progress of the development of the seedlings of C. sp. 'Lingga - Red' after 1 month. I transferred them from the tupperwares which I placed them in initial into proper pots in the main tank. Notice that the leaves are developing broader now as compared to their initial needle-shaped form. There are rooting themselves too. I will update their progress monthly from now on.

C. nurii 'Central Pahang'

The limb of the C. nurii 'Central Pahang' finally turned brown today and so, I decided to cut the spathe. Below are some photographs of this:

C. nurii 'Central Pahang'

My explorer friend managed to locate and collect C. nurii from a river in Central Pahang last weekend. According to him, the riverbed is hard and you could walk around with ease in the river. Around the same vicinity, the cryptocorynes growing on different substrates (some on sandy bed, some on rocky bed, etc) had different forms. He collected a few specimens of the various different forms for me, one of which had a spathe which opened today.

Form 1: petite with a lot of runners intertwined together to form a dense clump, roots are very long too

Form 2: leaves are narrow and long, with some black coating over the leaves and petioles, smelled faintly of blue green algae (BGA) to me

Form 3: broader and more greenish leaves, the spathe just opened with an outer white ring around the purplish limb with protuberances, beautiful!

Finally, my explorer friend's blog!

My explorer friend has finally started his blog after months of NATO (No Action Talk Only). I have advised him to start slow so that he will not run out of topics and subjects to blog and share. Well, he had already blogged 5 short entries today since I last visited his blog site a few minutes ago!

http://cryptoandbetta.blogspot.com/

The blog language chosen by him is Japanese so for those who do not understand Japanese (including myself :-P), you can make use any of the free online web page translators. Hopefully he could sometimes blog in English and maybe possibly even Bahasa Indonesian too.

Hope that you all will enjoy his blog and find it interesting and helpful. He will be sharing his experience and knowledge which he gained during his numerous field trips to the Malay Peninsula and the Riau Islands of Indonesia (and hopefully many other regions in the future) in search of cryptocorynes, bettas and parosphromenus.

Yet another C. cf. nurii 'Bintan' spathe opened

I know you all must be pretty sick of the photographs of the spathes of this species / locality by now as this will be my 3rd posting of them but I can't help it, they just get more and more beautiful each time round!

This is yet another collected spathe which opened yesterday. And today, some portion of the limb has turned yellowish. Maybe this is part of the natural disintegration (i.e. rotting) process but at this stage of its life, it looks simply stunning in my opinion.

C. nurii 'Terengganu' progress

The light orange leaf that was featured in my 10th Feb 2009 post became more greenish as time passed by and recently started melting away. The newer leaves are light greenish in colour with brownish tip.