On Saturday, I attended a local workshop on doing tissue culture in your home. The workshop was organized by a local GWAPA member, but was conducted by Dr. Carol M. Stiff of Kitchen Culture Kits, Inc. The nice thing about her workshop was that she custom-tailored it to have an emphasis specifiBAPcally on culturing aquatic plants, in addition, to things like orchids, house plants, and more. You may be asking why tissue culture is at all relevant to the aquatic plant hobby. There are, in fact, a number of reasons:

1. To propagate large quantities of otherwise slow to grow species.
2. To propagate rarer species so that more hobbyists can try them.
3. To preserve plants for long periods of time without keeping them growing in an aquarium or emersed setup.
4. To discover new variants that may popup when using various growth hormones.
5. To clone identical copies of those variants if they popup.
6. Just for the fun of trying something new.

Since cloning has such a high-tech connotation, let me walk you through some pictures from Saturday which demonstrate how feasible it is to do tissue culture in your home.

First, you need to mix up the sterile solutions from which the plant cuttings will be suspended and gain their nutrition. These solutions contain some trace and macro nutrients, sugar, plant hormones, and agar as a thickening agent. The pH should be adjusted using vinegar and baking soda to between 5.5 and 6.0 degrees.

Put 3 tablespoons into suitable jars, and sterilize them in a pressure cooker or microwave to ensure that no bacteria or fungus could contaminate your mini-environment. By the way, food coloring is used to visually seperate solutions with slightly difference ratios of ingredients. For example, some plants do better with 1ml/L BAP hormone (blue jars), while others do just fine with none (green).

In make-shift sterile hoods made from PVC pipe and garbage bags, we sprayed down the area with isopropyl alcohol. The plant cuttings themselves are sterilized in alcohol, then bleach, and rinsed in water. From there, we further dissected the plants into smaller pieces, suitable for culturing.

In the end, we placed the sections of plant into the agar-filled jars, sealed the jars with plastic wrap, and labeled them. At home, I’ve placed the jars under modest light, and will soon find out if I’ve been successful or not.

We cultured Proserpinaca palustris, Staurogyne sp. ‘Porto Vehlo’, two types of orchids, an African violet leaf, and a few other plants that attendees had brought to try. Overall, it was a very enlightening class, and I hope to try some of the techniques we learned on my own.

On Saturday, GWAPA held their March meeting at Dave’s house. Dave, also known as ingg on the plant forums, has a basement full of beautiful tanks, and has previously been featured on the APC Tank of the Month. The topic for this meeting was a series of DIY demonstrations, showing how to setup a yeast CO2 system, a duckweed surface cleaner, and a nano-tank auto-top off system. Since GWAPA will be starting our 2.5G aquascaping contest next month, the auto-top off system was of particular interest to me. Hopefully I’ll be able to build of these in the near future.

Dave's 75G

The duckweed surface cleaner is a clever idea involving a powerhead and the top half of a soda/water bottle. Attaching the lip of the bottle to the intake of the powerhead, the powerhead creates a vacuum to suck anything on the surface down into a vortex formed in the bottle. If you put some filter floss in the bottle, all of the duckweed/trimmings will get stuck there, and you’ll have a clean surface. Pretty neat, huh?

Dave's Oceanic 30G

And of course, we had another huge auction with over 100 bags of plants present. I came away with some nice stuff including Cryptocoryne usteriana x walkerii, Lilaeopsis sp., Rotala sp. ‘Sunset’, and a couple others. GWAPA is pretty lucky to have some rare plants available in every auction. Overall, it was another fun meeting on a rainy Saturday in Maryland.

GWAPA’s February meeting was at Rick and Mary’s house in northern Virgina. Rick gave an excellent presentation about the various lighting options available for planted aquariums. He showed some charts which compared the various types of lighting (T12, T5, MH, PC, etc) and how efficient they are in terms of lumens per watt. From this, he described how the watts/gallon rule breaks down on deeper aquariums. Another member, Jim, discussed how he actually calculated the light produced in terms of lumens per square inch, which is a much better rule of thumb when comparing different light sources. Finally, Sean showed off a LED light strip that he uses, and discussed the benefits, downsides, and future of LED lighting in the aquarium hobby. Right now, it’s largely cost prohibitive to light your tank exclusively using LED lighting due to the cost of producing LEDs that can equally produce white light and light that can be used in photosynthesis. That said, when he’s replaced roughly 70 watts of PC light with a 17 watt LED strip, I’m looking forward to seeing LED technology become more prominent in the hobby.

Rick has a nice 75G aquarium, which features a huge stand of Bacopa monnieri growing emersed, and even flowering up and out of his aquarium. After the auction, Rick demonstrated his automatic water change system, which is why the water levels in this picture are a little bit low.

Mary maintains a nice ADA aquarium setup, but unfortunately had a lush foreground of Utricularia graminfolia melt about a week before the meeting. She said that it had completely covered the foreground, and was looking great for months, but then a brown patch formed, and 2 days later, nearly all of it had melted away. I’ve experienced Utricularia taking awhile to get established, but haven’t had it melt away this dramitically. Has anyone else experienced this misfortune?

Rick and Mary also maintain an impressive rack of smaller aquariums, which they use to raise guppies, shrimp, bettas, and live food such as daphnia cultures. All in all, it was another great club meeting with almost 100 items in our auction, and a great gathering of aquarists.

My wife and I hosted GWAPA’s October meeting at our home. We had around 30 folks show up on a very rainy day in Maryland for a meeting about photographing your planted aquarium. I did my best to give a talk structured after this post, and hopefully the other members came away with a little bit more knowledge than when they arrived about how to get a semi-decent picture of their tank.

We also asked for nominations for the 2009 board of directors. It looks like the board will remain largely the same, with just the recording secretary slot being new. The auction wasn’t as large as some of them have been lately, but a number of relatively new plants to the hobby showed up at this meeting. A new Glossostigma, Lindernia, and Rotala all made an appearance. Hopefully they’ll soon make their rounds to more and more folks.

After the meeting was over, I fished out my Jewel cichlids, and sent them to a good home with another member who already keeps some Jewels. They were wonderfully personable fish, but were too aggressive to keep with much else. In the end, I plan to tear down a couple of my smaller tanks, so I needed to find a home for them. All in all, a great meeting!

On Saturday, GWAPA had another packed meeting at Kevin’s house in Silver Spring, MD. This month, over thirty folks showed up to hear about soil substrates in the planted aquarium. One of our members, Sean, is the originator of the soil substrate recipe that so many people are starting to use in the hobby. It was popularized by AaronT and others on Aquatic Plant Central, and we got to hear the soil method straight from the source.

In addition, we had another large auction — just look at all the bags of plants! I came away with a few things, such as Polygonum sp. ‘Porto Vehlo’ and Rotala verticillaris, and sold off a few things myself. We also debuted GWAPA’s new logo design, which you can see above.

All-in-all, it was another great meeting!