Zath
Enthusiastic Enthusiast
I wanted to wait before I said anything concrete, but as I ended up trading away most of my test subjects, it looks like things are on hold for awhile until the next batch of seedlings are large enough, and anyone who knows me, knows that I can be impatient with certain things...
This began with a simple thought, and cascaded into something much larger, complicated, and completely unnecessary, though with great potential, if it were anyone but myself doing it.
The original thought:
"Is there anything better than bloodworms / mealworms that I could manually feed my Sundews / VFT's? And if not...could I make something?"
The original idea was to simply use additives, such as liquid fertilizer, when rehydrating ground insects, but that seemed to defeat the purpose. I was still using fish-food, which is what I'm trying to get away from.
Enter Gelatin; a collagen (protein) based compound that is high in organic nitrogen, amino-acids, and is readily susceptible to proteases. Except, instead of modifying it with vodka...I'm going to modify it with fertilizing additives.
Since I don't have access to lab equipment, nor educated enough to perform pyrolysis and gain anything useful from it other than, "Ooh! Pretty fire!", the results will likely be limited to the two most simplistic results; Leaf-Response, recorded as the approximate amount of time it takes for a leaf to react and curl around it's food, and Diameter; as in, how large the plants are at each measuring.
Two different controls will be used; Plants that are not fed at all (Redundant, since feeding them practically -anything- is helpful), and plants fed only ground and rehydrated mealworms which, along with bloodworms, are the "industry standard" for the manual feeding of plants.
Once I'm situated with enough plants to begin testing (now hoping to use 30-40 D. capensis seedlings), I plan on using between 6-10 different formulations of gelatin-based food and recording the results weekly.
Of course, this all hinges on whether or not gelatin is actually digestible by a sundew, which is about to be tested in a proof of theory over the next couple days, by a random adult D. capensis or two, just to make sure that the leaves respond at all, and that an appreciable loss of mass is evident, which will be compared to a similarly-sized piece left in the open air to dehydrate.
What I hope to achieve is a (possibly marketable) food that out-performs the application of "fish-food", taking into account the nutrients that -plants- need, rather than fish.
Ideas, comments, suggestions?
If nothing else, in the next couple days, you'll have a pretty picture of a Maxsea jello-shot. (Being used to test whether the leaves respond, since I had it on hand.)
(Edit) Also...I might be the first person to ever try this. I can't for the life of me find any pre-existing information on such a technique...so...hooray for making history!?
This began with a simple thought, and cascaded into something much larger, complicated, and completely unnecessary, though with great potential, if it were anyone but myself doing it.
The original thought:
"Is there anything better than bloodworms / mealworms that I could manually feed my Sundews / VFT's? And if not...could I make something?"
The original idea was to simply use additives, such as liquid fertilizer, when rehydrating ground insects, but that seemed to defeat the purpose. I was still using fish-food, which is what I'm trying to get away from.
Enter Gelatin; a collagen (protein) based compound that is high in organic nitrogen, amino-acids, and is readily susceptible to proteases. Except, instead of modifying it with vodka...I'm going to modify it with fertilizing additives.
Since I don't have access to lab equipment, nor educated enough to perform pyrolysis and gain anything useful from it other than, "Ooh! Pretty fire!", the results will likely be limited to the two most simplistic results; Leaf-Response, recorded as the approximate amount of time it takes for a leaf to react and curl around it's food, and Diameter; as in, how large the plants are at each measuring.
Two different controls will be used; Plants that are not fed at all (Redundant, since feeding them practically -anything- is helpful), and plants fed only ground and rehydrated mealworms which, along with bloodworms, are the "industry standard" for the manual feeding of plants.
Once I'm situated with enough plants to begin testing (now hoping to use 30-40 D. capensis seedlings), I plan on using between 6-10 different formulations of gelatin-based food and recording the results weekly.
Of course, this all hinges on whether or not gelatin is actually digestible by a sundew, which is about to be tested in a proof of theory over the next couple days, by a random adult D. capensis or two, just to make sure that the leaves respond at all, and that an appreciable loss of mass is evident, which will be compared to a similarly-sized piece left in the open air to dehydrate.
What I hope to achieve is a (possibly marketable) food that out-performs the application of "fish-food", taking into account the nutrients that -plants- need, rather than fish.
Ideas, comments, suggestions?
If nothing else, in the next couple days, you'll have a pretty picture of a Maxsea jello-shot. (Being used to test whether the leaves respond, since I had it on hand.)
(Edit) Also...I might be the first person to ever try this. I can't for the life of me find any pre-existing information on such a technique...so...hooray for making history!?
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