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Normal Rotala sp Green Arrival Condition ?

aquascape1987

Member
Joined
6 Nov 2014
Messages
368
Location
Leeds, West Yorkshire
Hi, I’m wondering if you can confirm something for me please?

I have just ordered and received some of your tissue culture Rotala Rotundifolia green from a 3rd party seller, and it has arrived looking like this:



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551F2AB9-1F1B-45EC-8658-DFAEFA4C5F0B.jpeg

To me it’s obvious that this plant has not travelled well, and has arrived in very bad condition, so I have complained and sent pictures to the seller, only to be told this is normal and to just plant it and it will be fine. My instincts and experience tell me that this is not the case, and there is little hope of survival.

I’m not naming the seller at this point, as I have again replied back and disagreed with the initial response I received that it is fine and to just plant it. I’m awaiting a response, and am hoping that they accept that this isn’t right.

I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do have some experience of tissue culture plants and this doesn’t look normal to me. It looks dead. The leaves are all brown and detached, and the stems are brown and mushy. There are no discernible structures left in the pot that I could even plant to give a chance as the seller has suggested.

Can you please have a look at this and tell me what you think as the grower? Surely this is not a healthy and normal tissue cup of plants as it has been suggested?
 
Looks dead to me. I had a pot of helanthium tennelum that looked identical, brown, limp and mushy from pro shrimp. They never got back to me.

A healthy fresh pot should be almost full of lush green growth ready to go - like you see in the adverts
 
Tell me about it. I had a similar batch of 7 pots of rotala macandra recently, that looked bad, but to be fair were in better condition than this. So around £40 worth. I didn’t say anything immediately, and planted it hoping it would take, and within 3 days it was floating mush in my tank. This was from a different source and when I emailed, I was refunded, no problem straight away. I got some more that still looked a bit ropey, but not so bad, and luckily this has taken and is now growing great.

But with this, I’m not being funny, but I’m not sure exactly what they want me to plant and give a chance to? There is nothing that will even go into the substrate, even if I wanted to put this in my tank (which I don’t)
 
Hi
They shouldn't be sending out aquatic plants in that condition.....obviously to everyone that has ever bought Tissue culture/Invitro plants knows what condition to expect within reason!
Those pots are way past their sell by date.............those are only fit for the compost heap🪦
hoggie
 
Certain vendors seem to be doing this on a regular basis of late. You could possibly understand in these times of "The great plant crisis" that quality is going to dip a bit, that I'll accept, but some of the stuff they're sending out is awful.

I got a pro shrimp delivery yesterday and the plant quality was mediocre, tub of tropica frog bit went in the bin.
The last couple of aqua essentials orders i've received haven't been up to the usual high standards but going to give them the benefit of doubt till the next order arrives.

I'd see what reply you get back regards a refund and if non is offered name and shame them.
 
That is extremely poor and I'm sure Tropica would be mortified. To add further insult to injury it sounds like the quality of their after sales service is equally poor. You'd be doing us all a favour if you did reveal who the retailer is. I certainly don't want to risk buying from them by mistake...
 
I had a Tropica pot like that from an eBay seller, a few months back - it was supposed to be S Repens, so nice and green, but it arrived as brown mush. They also tried to tell me it was normal and float it in the tank for a while lol

After I’d finished laughing at the suggestion, I asked them to send me a replacement, and couldn’t believe it when they sent me another one out exactly the same! Needless to say I got a refund.

No one should be willing to accept plants like this of such sub-standard quality, nor putting them in the bin and accepting the loss - they’re not exactly cheap. I had an issue with several plants in my last order from Proshrimp also, and had to insist on replacements from them.

@aquascape1987 you should definitely name and shame as Tim suggests.
 
Yes, not as if they are a couple of £s!
This is one of the reasons I like to try and purchase plants from members on here.
 
I had an issue with several plants in my last order from Proshrimp also
Same here, got a pot that was about a third full and had been opened previously. So that was the first and last purchase from such company! Was just told pots come like that! Well I have visited Tropica in Denmark, and I am pretty sure they don't ship like that :p
 
Thanks for the replies guys, and also the external validation... I was already confident that I hadn’t got it wrong about these being dead, but have to admit I was questioning myself for a minute, when I got the reply back that this was normal from someone who sells plants day in, day out.
They shouldn't be sending out aquatic plants in that condition..
Yea I fully agree. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t look like this when they dispatched, although I do suspect that they were pushing it with the sell by date. The plants arrived within 18 hours of ordering, so unless they got baked or frozen in transit I doubt that they can have deteriorated this much in such a short space of time. If they were like this when they were shipped, it must be the seller pushing the sell by, as I know that Tropica only get paid by shops upon arrival of their plants, alive and well. Tropica take the risk on their shipments in other words, so there shouldn’t be an excuse for sending out knackered plants.

Still waiting for a reply, but I’m definitely going to scorch the earth by naming if they don’t refund! Again, benefit of doubt that the photos I sent in the cups may not have fully illustrated how bad they were, but if the answer is no refund after I sent the ones with the plants on a plate, there really isn’t an excuse in my eyes.


Is there a sell by date on the pots?

Can’t see a sell by date, it just says use within 30 days on the back of Tropica pots, but no dates.


That is extremely poor and I'm sure Tropica would be mortified
That’s why I posted on here, as I thought that if I had confirmation that they weren’t acceptable from the horses mouth, it would help my discussion with the seller. Although it looks like Tropica don’t log in here very often, I’ve since realised from a quick look on their profile.

Ive had lots of bits from pro shrimp in the past and never any issues myself. Never any plants though! This isn’t from them so cant comment in respect of some of the issues others have had with them mentioned above.

Anyway, I’ve just returned from a 150 mile round trip to Horizon Aquatics to get two decent pots of rotala green. The difference in quality from what I’ve just picked up at Horizon, to what arrived in the post from the other company is about one million percent. Horizons are actually alive for a start, and they are all green and standing up!

Sounds an extreme measure for 2 pots of Rotala green, I know.... but I’ve been very irritated that it’s took over 3 weeks since the main planting to get my scape fully finished due to current issues with sourcing plants. I’ve had little gaps for the past 3 weeks where plants weren’t available, and this morning I’d had enough! So I called Horizon who had some in stock, and I bit the bullet and drove up. And glad I did, because now my scape is finally complete 👍.

I reckon Rotala Green tissue culture is possibly the rarest plant in the UK at the moment. I’ve failed to get my hands on it for weeks now. I’m assuming that this is because this is a popular ‘common ’ plant, and with the shortages, it just goes out of stock in most places as soon as it comes in. Try a Google search and you’ll see what I mean! Excluding Horizon of course, who I know have some because I’ve just been 😂

Anyway, I’ll update once I get a response 👍

Thanks again for the validation everyone 😁
 
Now that’s commitment!! 😁

Mate, this scape has been psychologically eating me alive with trying to finish it due to the Brexit plant situation, then issues like this with thinking I had the final plant, then it arriving as mush. The gaps have been driving me insane because 99 percent of it is in and growing. So frustrating!

I reckon I’d have got on a plane at Manchester Airport if someone had told me they had some Rotala Green in some far flung country, the way I was feeling about it this morning 😂
 
Mate, this scape has been psychologically eating me alive with trying to finish it due to the Brexit plant situation, then issues like this with thinking I had the final plant, then it arriving as mush. The gaps have been driving me insane because 99 percent of it is in and growing. So frustrating!

I reckon I’d have got on a plane at Manchester Airport if someone had told me they had some Rotala Green in some far flung country, the way I was feeling about it this morning 😂

Brilliant, love it 😂 . . .

Last minute international round trip: £2,000

Two pots of Rotala Green: €10

14 nights stay in a COVID hotel: £1,900

Loss of job from unauthorised leave: Sacked

Loss of partner from spending the holiday savings: Divorced

Filling that 3cm square space on the back left between the Sieryu Stone and the manzanita . . . . PRICELESS
 
I would like to add that I had a similar situation, ordered two pots of tropica Hydrocotyle tripartita from Aqua essentials about a month ago, which I found were not up to high standards being the price you pay per pot. Liquid was very dark brown! And leaves and stems were pale and brown in colour. Salvage what I could but 70% was binned.
 
I think there's a trend since the beginning of the pandemics, and maybe as hobbyists we should start to at least ask questions about it, maybe start to be a bit vocal too.
I've had 4 to 5 orders since last March, and all were in a various proportion and to a various level in that state. All orders were from different french resellers, some of which I always had good experience with.
Personally I think the resellers aren't the only ones to blame. They are, don't get me wrong, they shouldn't send that. But Tropica and other producers (although for one technical reason I think they're less prone to that, more on that later) have a logistics problem that's rooting everything we see here. As I understand from discussions with several resellers, Tropica sends plants that are not mature and which use a very small portion of the cup space and nutriments. The idea is that they'll continue to grow at the reseller's place, probably in a Tropica fridge with good lights (not always the case, of course) until they're bought. I'd imagine it allows longer conservation of the plant. Tropica has been sending smaller and younger plants to the resellers since the pandemic (3 told me that). And since there is a strong demand, the plants are sent almost immediately, therefore immature, to customers. Several problems with that:
-they are more fragile, both to transport and adaptation to new conditions
-they often don't even have the root system
  • sometimes they're not even in the right development stage (I've received some buce and glosso that were clearly just above the tissue culture point, and stayed that way, never transitioned).
  • most importantly, I think, they don't use enough space in the cup, which means they often don't touch the sides, which means - you know our delivery guy's conditions of work - they arrive having been shaken repeatedly against the cup's sides, upside down, etc. I think this is made much worse by Tropica's transition from gel to liquid nutritive media. Obviously gel was much better at keeping plants in place even if they were small. And this may be why other (smaller?) producers like aquaflora or Laboratorium 313 products may arrive in better shape since they use the "older" gel method. To be fair I talked about that with one reseller and Jurijs and they disagree. It still fits with my -limited- personal experience: plants in gel from tropica and other producers arrived in better shape than plants in liquid.

Anyway, besides the technical reason I think Tropica has to be aware of the problem, and should have either stopped sending younger plants (therefore sending less pots, making less money) or at least issued a statement to the community saying they're sorry sending plants in sub-par conditions, but they do so because of pandemics. Of course, if it's not because of the local production conditions but instead because there's a lot of demand and they just seized the opportunity to make money, they're completely to blame.
Maybe we should decide, as a hobbyist community, if it is normal to do what they've done for months now without any communication. Personally I'll refrain from buying in vitro plants for a while, unless I can see them with my own eyes, or the senders certifies they're top notch.

Sorry for the novel

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