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Bohemian Garnet just won't grow!

  • #41
Thanks for the reply Maiden. I got your address and will ship the seeds out to you today.

Sorry if I upset you with my previous posts. I wasn't trying to be a jerk or call you a liar, I was just expressing my extreme skepticism at the reported age of the flytrap seedlings.

Your conditions sound ideal, but even under ideal conditions and with regular feeding, I've never seen seeds grow to adulthood so quickly. I hope that you're able to repeat the results with the seeds I'm sending you. Your germination rate should be much higher with these than those you got from BCP.

Good luck! Looking forward to seeing your results!
 
  • #42
Thanks a lot, you guys will be stunned. Im pretty confident.

Dont tell me what kind of vfts you are sending to me, that way, you will be sure that i cannot cheat.
 
  • #43
Maybe i have a clue.

Vfts and mostly all drosera came from the same ancestror: drosera regia.
The reason why the vft evolution where better than drosera(more elaborate traping system) is because the preys they catch insitu(carolina us). The vfts eat rampant insects, like worms or spiders. And theses insects have more nutrients. The droseras everywhere else in the world eat mostly flying insects, who have less nutrients. (Im not sure if i write well the word nutrients but you know what i mean).

So i beleive that feeding vfts seedling with worms is much better than flying insects.
And most growers feed their vfts with flying insects.
So, by using dryed blood worm or spider, as i do with my seedlings, i have a strong nutritional advantage.

Maybe :)
 
  • #44
That could be. But I've seen other flytraps fed blood worms early on in their life and they've not grown that quickly, especially the first 4 to 6 weeks. That's what I find most unbelievable. The photos you show where you say the plants are one month old (4 weeks), they look like they are at least 8 months old and perhaps closer to 12 months.

It will be interesting to see if you're able to repeat the results, especially for the growth in the first 4 to 6 weeks after germination.
 
  • #45
In my experience, feeding Dionaea dried bloodworms is rarely successful, since the plants tend to reject the offering after about 24 hours. (IE: the trap opens within a day or less, indicating the bloodworms have not been successful in triggering the "eat" response) Have any of the rest of you observed this same behavior?
 
  • #46
It's the continued movement of an insect in the trap that causes a flytrap to seal up and begin it's digestive process. You can fake this by squeezing the outside of the trap lightly. This moves the trigger hairs against what you fed it, and simulates a struggling insect.
 
  • #47
they don't appear to like dry unhydrated foodstuffs. I see traps opening next day quickly in my tests with dry pelleted fish foods....
 
  • #48
Like a said earlier in this thread:

"My seedling produce cotiledon(?). i mean seed leaves. After that, the seedling produce traps. Very tiny traps, and if i remember, the traps was odd, mostly 'square' trap. And i fed the first traps with dryed blood worm. I take some dryed worm, i add water. and i made a ball of meat. After that, with a toothpic, i take a tiny piece of meat with my toothpic, and put the lil piece in the tiny trap. The trap doesnt close that way, i have to take 2 toothpics, and gently close the trap, and with the toothpic i gentle push each side of the trap to help them seal. By doing this, i simulate the moves of the living insect inside the trap. One hour later, i open again the terrarium and i push each side again very softly with the toothpics to be sure the trap is sealed. Each feeding session take me more than 1 hour, but was fun for me."

If the trap reopen 24hrs later, this is because you need make them seal more. And of course, rehydrate the DBW before using them lol.

For me, all this thread is only a matter of feeding, and feeding technics. And i think you need to provide almost perfect growing conditions(terrarium with strong large spectrum lights) to improve the digestion. Specialy on the firsts traps. Light = energy.

And in my (little) experience, i feed always bigger and bigger pieces of meat, so the traps became bigger and bigger.
If i stop feeding my plants for 2-3 weeks, the next trap will be half the size of the precedent one. They are still seedlings. Maybe no flower for the next 2 years, and im wondering if i will let them skip another winter in dec 2013.
 
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  • #49
As Maiden said, to use dehydrated stuff, it should be rehydrated first. And when fed to the plant, the sides of the traps need to be smashed shut and massaged a few times to make the digestion process begin.
 
  • #50
That's an advantage to growing them outside: no hand feeding required. :p I sort of disagree with the assumption that ground insects are more nutritiuos than flying ones. One of my vfts has an appetite for these black, burrowing wasps that live in the ground. They're good size and I have never been stung by one but assume they hurt like any wasp. It does tend to kill that trap that eats it but the plant goes kind of crazy shortly after.
 
  • #51
"(...)Another study,[19] this time appearing in the New Phytologist, presented evidence for the evolution of snap traps of Dionaea and Aldrovanda from a flypaper trap like D. regia, based on molecular data. The molecular and physiological data implies that Dionaea and Aldrovanda snap traps evolved from the flypaper traps of a common ancestor with the Drosera; the living evidence of a link between Drosera and Dionaea is D.*regia and its remnant characteristics.

In this evolutionary model, pre-adaptations to evolution into snap-traps were identified in several species of Drosera, such as rapid leaf and tentacle movement. The model proposes that plant carnivory by snap-trap evolved from the flypaper traps driven by increasing prey size.

Bigger prey provides increasingly higher nutritional value, but large insects can easily escape the sticky mucilage of flypaper traps; the evolution of snap-traps would prevent escape and kleptoparasitism (theft of prey captured by the plant before it can derive any benefit from it), and would also permit a more complete digestion.

Larger insects usually walk over the plant, instead of flying to it,[22] and are more likely to break free from sticky glands alone. Therefore, a plant with wider leaves must have adapted to move the trap and it's stalks in directions that maximized its chance of capturing and retaining such prey - in this particular case, longitudinally. Once adequately "wrapped", escape would be more difficult.[22]
Then, evolutionary pressure selected the plants with shorter response time, in a manner similar to Drosera burmannii or Drosera glanduligera. The faster the closing, less reliant on the flypaper model the plant would be.
As the trap became more and more active, the energy demanded to "wrap" the prey increased. Therefore, plants that could somehow differentiate between actual insects and random detritus/rain droplets would be in advantage, thus explaining the specialization of inner tentacles into trigger hairs.
Ultimately, as the plant relied more in closing around the insect rather than gluing them, the tentacles so evident in Drosera would lose its original function altogether, becoming the "teeth" and trigger hairs — an example of natural selection hijacking pre-existing structures for new functions.
Completing the transition, at some point in its evolutionary history the plant developed the depressed digestive glands found inside the trap, rather than using the dews in the stalks, further differentiating it from the Drosera genus.(...)"
 
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