About

What TankNana is

TankNana is a catalog of aquarium plants for planted-tank keepers in the United States. For each plant it puts side by side what you would otherwise collect from several shop pages: how much light and CO₂ it needs, how hard it is to keep, how fast it grows, where it goes in the tank, its height, the water it is grown in, and how it is propagated.

All plants sit in one list that can be filtered by those fields. The most searched-for groups, such as low light, floating or carpeting plants, have their own pages listing every plant in the catalog that fits.

Where the values come from

Most values come from the plant profiles published by the shops that sell the plant, read one plant at a time. Where Tropica, a grower of aquarium plants, publishes a profile of the same plant, we compare the two field by field. The Sources section at the bottom of every plant page names each shop page and grower profile behind the values, and the day we read it.

Shops often give a range, such as easy to moderate or slow to moderate. The catalog stores one value, and it takes the end of the range that promises less: a plant rated easy to moderate is listed as medium, and one rated moderate to fast is listed as medium.

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Each one names its author and licence on the photo and links to the original file.

Cross-referenced, single source, AI estimated

Every record carries one of three labels. Cross-referenced means two sources were compared and agree on every field they both give; nobody on our side has grown the plant in a trial, so the label describes the sources, not a test. Single source means one shop profile supports the record. AI estimated means the record has not been checked against a source. Only cross-referenced records are offered to search engines.

Where the two sources disagree on a field, the record keeps the shop's value and marks it as an estimate with a dotted underline. A field that says not recorded means none of our sources gives it.

Corrections and shops

If you keep a plant and our record disagrees with what you see, or with a source you trust, write to us through the contact page with the plant and the source. If the source checks out, we update the plant and add it to the plant's sources.

TankNana sells nothing. A shop link opens the seller's own page, and the purchase happens there. Shops that want more than a row in the list of sellers can partner with us.