...Squeamish to Insects

Probably the last update on Round 1 Science:

* The trap that was re-digesting the cricket is done re-digesting. I didn't even notice when it opened back up, so I'm not sure how long it was closed. Bleh.

* The drosera leaves have all mostly relaxed back to their normal not-eating shape, with the exception of the leaf that got the betta food pellet. I guess that one's still being eaten slightly?

* I could swear one of my two experimental pinguicula (crickets + yeast) looks like it's grown more than the other one, but if I judge by counting new leaves, the smaller one (osmocote + fish food) wins.

* While I guess it *could* be indicative of growth patterns from different nutrient profiles, this is clearly just a thing that needs way more statistics before drawing any real conclusions. Story of my life. :P

* I *do* have an awful lot of baby pinguicula right now. Maybe I could let them grow up a bit more and do some science on them before trying to give them all away again. The real worry here is if I let them get too big, it starts to get expensive to mail them to people.

Pinguicula growth, for reference purposes:
PingScience.001.jpeg


A bit of new science:
* I fed nutritional yeast to a couple other VFT plants:
- The only (super tiny) trap on a very young plant, and
- A large trap that already looked a bit "old", on a fairly big plant
* The goal with this is to see if nutritional yeast is reliably safe to feed to plants, or if it will sometimes kill the trap. I'll probably have to just keep re-doing this until a trap eventually dies.
* I also want to point out again that nutritional yeast is probably not great as the plants' *only* food source, since it basically has no potassium or phosphorous, which are both things that plants find delicious.

* This isn't really science, but more just a change in protocol for me: every pitcher-based plant that has a sufficiently large pitcher (and one that didn't..) got an osmocote pellet a while back. Some (but not all) with multiple pitchers got a pellet in each pitcher. This is a change in feeding procedure from my previous "they're on their own" methodology. I don't really know how I can evaluate the results, since I don't have any plant-twins to use as a control for that one, and I'm expecting them to appreciate the increasing seasonal light levels anyway, except for a couple of weirdo nepenthes that seem to think my north-facing windowsill has too many photons at this time of year.
 
Surprise science update!

The two test drosera, which looked very similar before, are now dramatically different colors:
DroseraColor.jpeg



Also, the green one used to be the slightly smaller one of the two, but I think it is now slightly larger. (There's a previous photo up-thread somewhere, for comparison.)

Of course I'm now kicking myself for not taking better notes about what I did to each one. You can still see the osmocote pellet sitting on top of a (red) leaf where I put it. The fish food pellet was fed to the green drosera. Buuuut I'm only like 80% sure about where I put the cricket powder and nutritional yeast, based on the texture of the, uh, remains. *facepalm*. My best guess is that the red drosera got the nutritional yeast and the green drosera got the crickets.

The two smaller drosera, also from the same batch of seeds, seem to have also reddened up (I guess there's more light these days), so maybe that's a useful baseline. Of these smaller two, I fed the larger/healthier-looking one nothing extra, and the smaller one got a bit of nutritional yeast -- but probably a couple weeks after the larger two were fed.

I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this. I'd usually think more red coloration was desirable, but since there seems to be a food-based option that prevents it, maybe it's actually more like a sunburn in this case, and the right type of food can help protect the plant?
 
spiffyzha said:
np! I usually use a paperclip or something to get inside the trap between the outer spines, and then wiggle it around a bit until the trap stops getting tighter.
Click to expand...

I usually use a soft plastic bristle from an old broom for this: rigid enough to handle, soft and flexible enough that it shouldn't scratch or otherwise damage the plant. It only takes very light touches on the trigger hairs to activate them, and I don't know how vulnerable they are to being damaged. After the trap has mostly closed and it's hard to judge what my bristle might be touching, I squeeze the trap very gently with my fingers a few times. Again, I don't know how much force is safe, so I try to err on the side of caution. I "candle" the trap with a bright flashlight while I'm doing this stuff so I can see where the food has become positioned in the trap, and perhaps nudge it towards the middle of the trap (with the bristle) if it's become poorly placed.
 
I've been curious about the possibility of vegetarian feeding of VFTs for quite some time, and about a year ago, got around to investigating. I bought three small ones from a reputable local florist, so I could be sure they'd be healthy. My plan was to feed one apiece with:
  • textured vegetable protein (TVP, probably bought from Bulk Barn years ago, soaked in water)
  • firm tofu (grocery store)
  • whey protein isolate (Boost Just Protein: 99% purified protein, 1% soy lecithin, mixed with water to give a paste then dried as small pellets)
My goal was to compare the growth of the three, treating them as identically as I could, keeping them isolated from insects. For a proper study, of course, I'd have fed one with insects, as a control. But... limited funds, and I was squeamish about killing bugs. (I do have a small bottle of bugs in my freezer, things I'm willing to kill, such as mosquitos, silverfish, and a hornet that got into the house.)

I messed up the "treat them identically" premise after just a couple of weeks, when I fumbled and dropped the whey-protein plant. That cost it a couple of leaves/traps, and I don't know how much other damage might have been sustained.

When the plants were small, feeding them didn't seem to harm the traps. As they grew larger, the "trap burn" became more of an issue. I figured that as long as the plants were getting lots of sunlight and putting out more leaf/trap area than they were losing, the losses were tolerable. One thing I tried that seemed to help somewhat was to wrap the food in tissue paper, just enough to cover it, once the traps were big enough to make it feasible. That made it easier to remove the food residue after the traps re-opened, so the residue wouldn't sit in the trap getting moldy.

The whey-fed plant did sort of okay; the TVP-fed plant did somewhat better. The tofu-fed plant did really well, and started putting out a flower stalk quite late in the autumn, just before I had to put the plants away for winter. A couple of months after I got them, I had to repot them. They had been grown in little peat-pellet units contained in plastic mesh; when I repotted them, I'd just moved those units into larger pots, packed with more peat moss from a garden centre (washed several times with water condensed from my dehumidifier).

Late in the summer, I also acquired a fourth VFT from a local grocery store. It had been poorly treated and was dying of dehydration. I hoped to nurse it back to health, but it kept losing ground no matter what I did.

For winter, I gently rinsed all of the medium away from the roots. This turned out to be problematic; the roots were badly tangled in the plastic mesh from their original peat pots, and the roots sustained some damage in the extraction. I sprayed the plants, especially the roots, with an antifungal liquid (water with some clotrimazole powder we had in the house). I didn't have any long-strand sphagnum moss, so I packed the VFTs gently in strands of sisal fibre from some old bits of rope (boiled repeatedly in pure water). These went into containers in the back of my fridge for three months; I pulled them out every couple of weeks to check on them and to spray them with a bit more antifungal liquid.

In the spring, I repotted all four plants into peat moss. This was probably a mistake, despite that having been what they'd grown in previously; I should have added something like perlite, and I shouldn't have packed the peat moss so firmly. The one VFT that had been on the verge of death suddenly did really well, but the other three, not so much. Many of their leaves died back, though the tofu-fed plant continued to grow its flower stalk. (I was hoping to grow a bunch of new plants from its seeds, enough to let me get statistically-significant sample groups and to let me try other protein sources. But I got no new plants, just a few white threads that looked like roots growing the wrong way. Again, I should probably have followed instructions for how to handle the seeds, rather than guessing.)

At this point, strict comparisons between the three kinds of foods are probably out the window; I just need to save the plants. I repotted them a couple of weeks ago, into peat moss / perlite, and found that they had almost no roots. Presumably it's a root-rot problem. It's a bit too early to know if they've recovered. I'll give them another couple of weeks, and if they don't seem to be doing noticeably better, I'll repot them again, spraying them with the antifungal liquid and thoroughly sterilizing the pots and growth medium.
 
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Very interesting about the tofu.
Dehumidifier water may be contaminated with aluminum. Check the fins and see what they're made of. I have an aluminum test kit.
Using a antifungal used on humans in your environment may induce resistant fungi, I recommend against it.
I have pure casein at home, I may try feeding it to the plants
 
Lloyd Gordon said:
Dehumidifier water may be contaminated with aluminum. Check the fins and see what they're made of. I have an aluminum test kit.
Using a antifungal used on humans in your environment may induce resistant fungi, I recommend against it.
I have pure casein at home, I may try feeding it to the plants
Click to expand...
Huh. I'd thought that the dehumidifier's cooling coils were galvanized steel; they had that look. But a magnet isn't attracted to them, and the slightly-greyish look appears to just be stuck-on dust, the apparent patterning just an illusion. I'm able to scratch the cooling coil with a bit of copper pipe from plumbing work, which suggests that the cooling coil is soft metal. Do you have recommendations for aluminum testing? Most of the water test kits I'm finding on Amazon don't do aluminum, including a couple that claim in their titles to test for it, but don't show it in their charts. The dedicated aluminum-testing rig I've found is really expensive, and beyond my needs.

As for the antifungal inducing resistant fungi, while I take your point, rather a lot of that powder gets used around this house. It's something of a lost cause here.

I'd be interested in hearing about the casein. I expect that it'd be fine as a supplement, but does it have any phosphate or potassium?
 
As far as I know the casein I have is a pure protein for TC.
If you want I could mail you enough for 1 aluminum test. Although from my experience, the aluminum fins do leach a significant amount of aluminum.
 
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Sometimes I'll add a little bit of L-glutamine to my fertilizer spray bottle, and put a little bit in my Nep,Heli and Ceph pitchers.


28958
 
No, pings like it, but only this brand.
If I spray pings with this the leaves stay wet with digestive juices for 3-4 days.
When I use something like Schultz or Maxsea, they are wet for maybe a day.
This one is hydroponic use, and I found the food grade stuff didn't dissolve as well.
It turns into nitrogen when the plant digests it afaik.

This is where I got the idea from. Posted back in 2009

https://www.cpukforum.com/forum/ind...cial-nutrition/&do=findComment&comment=238094
 
Other research I plan to look at, once my plants are doing better, is to wrap food in thin films, to see if that affects the traps being damaged:
  • Eggshell membrane
  • Onion epidermis (the single-cell-thick membrane between onion layers)
    • Fresh, or stored briefly in a refrigerator under damp conditions
    • Fresh, stored for a time in distilled water, in case the osmotic absorption of water bursts the cell membranes
    • Dried
    • Frozen in case the ice crystals puncture the cell membranes
      • Frozen quickly
      • Frozen more slowly, in a moderate volume of water, which will affect the growth of ice crystals
Not all at once, of course.
 
Another update -- will the sciencing never stop?!

First, the VFT:
* I didn't pick the osmocote pellet out after it killed the trap, until today. I found, in the osmocote pellet's immediate area, *several* dead traps, some not even fully formed, hidden underneath the original dead trap. Underneath all of that, I found a very very green spot of overgrown algae. To be expected, maybe? Though it couldn't have gotten much light under all of that. I guess the algae itself probably won't bug the VFT, but I'm kind-of wondering now if I should rinse the whole media to get rid of the excess nutrients.

* Hidden under the nutritional yeast area of the plant: that whole area is super overgrown with mold/fungus. I think a fair bit of yeast-water probably leaked out when I fed it. (It's kind-of amusing to me that fungus would prefer to grow on a medium of other fungus, but I guess that's how we get lobster mushrooms, so.) I might try to perform some sort of fung-ectomy. I don't think it's hurting the plant, at least.

* All in all, nothing I've tried seems to actually be a very good food source for VFTs. Even the cricket flour, which I totally expected them to like a lot better. Things I'm considering trying next include sesame seeds and mushy peas. And also, mixing different things together. (The hypothesis there is something like, maybe the 'make the trap digest things harder'-mechanism is triggered specifically by nitrogen content, but pure nitrogen, ie brewers yeast, is never going to have all the nutrients the plant needs.)

Next, the drosera:
* In fact, both drosera have now turned a similar shade of red, and the drosera that turned red first seems to have an awful lot of leaves that can't hold their dew. It's still putting out new leaves at a good rate, but even some of the new leaves don't have much dew. I think the previously-still-green drosera may also have less dew than before as well. The nearby mini-drosera that got no food at all seems to have plenty of dew still, for whatever that's worth.

* I gave the previously-still-green drosera another fish food pellet to see if that would change it back to green.
 
I'd go with rinsing the whole media, to be on the safe side. I'm getting the impression that VFTs don't have a lot of tolerance for being in contact with stuff that's decaying.

I'm not sure about the sesame seeds, because of their relatively high fat content, but they're worth a try. As for mixing things together, my most recent attempts at feeding my VFTs (prior to discovering how bad their roots were) were with a mixture of "reconstituted" dried shiitake mushrooms and whole egg, equal amounts by weight, blended as finely as possible then cooked well by microwaving. The idea is that the mushrooms have a high chitin content, and I was hoping that that might both stimulate the plant and at least partially protect the trap from the egg. I don't know yet how successful that will be, given the uncertain state of the plants, but it doesn't seem to be terrible. (I chose shiitake mushrooms because I had them on hand, and I knew that I was going to be eating the bulk of my mini-quiche myself. :)) I figured that cooked egg was worth experimenting with because of its high nutritional content combined with little expected residue to sit in the trap and go bad. Egg white disappears almost entirely, while egg yolk leaves a substantial yellow residue, presumably because of its high fat content.
 
I have had good success with feeding dionaea a slurry of ground up fish food pellets, as shown here


The traps need a bit of massaging to stay closed but won't burn, and will completely digest the food less a small amount of residue, as long as only a small quantity of food is added.
 
Ertiocx said:
The traps need a bit of massaging to stay closed
Click to expand...

Hmm. Is this not cheating, somehow? Like, if the trap pops back open after it's previously been thoroughly closed and digesting, doesn't that just mean that it's done extracting nutrition from whatever was inside, and can't really get much more out?
 
spiffyzha said:
Hmm. Is this not cheating, somehow? Like, if the trap pops back open after it's previously been thoroughly closed and digesting, doesn't that just mean that it's done extracting nutrition from whatever was inside, and can't really get much more out?
Click to expand...

No, just to clarify I mean that the traps need to be stimulated after initially closing in order to actually start digesting anything.

For example here:
29004

The traps start off in state A, I add a couple drops of slurry to the trap, and touch a trigger hair a couple times, causing the trap to transition to state B (semi-closed). In order for the trap to close tightly to form a stomach (State C), the trap needs further stimulation, which would normally be provided by the struggling of whatever was trapped. Since fish food slurry can't really put up much of a fight trying to escape the semi-closed trap, I gently squeeze the sides of the trap every 20-30 seconds for a minute or two in order to facilitate stomach formation.
 
@Ertiocx Thanks, that makes more sense.

Can I ask what brand/type of fish food you use for this? I'm not sure my VFT likes the one I've got.
 
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