Aquatropic Tissue Culture Plants!

We have an excellent selection of tissue cultured plants here at Aquatropic. A large portion of you have heard enough and are off to the product portion of our website to find new goodies for your planted tanks (found here: https://www.qualitymarine.com/aquatropic/plants/p... ) The rest of you may have some questions like “what is tissue culture” and we're here to answer some of this stuff for you today.

Tissue culture is a way to propagate plants (grow more of them). It's a sanitary process with a ton of benefits to the home aquarist (this means you!) On a very basic level, a culture facility selects a plant and removes a bit of it like a leaf, or stem or even a root tip, this is called an explant. Every effort is made to make sure this original cutting is as clean as possible, and then it goes through a sanitation process to remove any potential pests, eggs, and other bacterial or chemical contaminants. The explant is then put into a sterile liquid or gel that contains all the stuff, like nutrients, minerals and maybe rooting or plant growth hormones that the cutting will need to grow into a new plant. This sterile environment is the key to making this process work, preventing infection from bacteria, fungi and other organisms. This medium also provides a consistent, moist environment, ideal for the explant's development.

At this point, the cutting starts to grow rapidly and will go through several steps, first forming some cells called a callus, and then into shoot and root development and finally into plantlets (baby plants basically). These will continue to grow, develop and reproduce and slowly be introduced to more and more light. Once strong enough, they can be either sent to our retail partners and thus become available to you, or they can be transplanted into pots and then sold as rooted plants. Through this process our aquatic plant farm partners can grow large quantities of disease free, identical plants, of consistent quality.

The obvious benefit to you as the home aquarist is the quality and cleanliness of the plant, you're bringing home to grow in your home aquarium. No other growth mechanism offers a better guarantee that your plants will not bring other hitch hikers into your display and thus ensuring a clean and healthy start for your planting project. They are also generally faster to acclimate to your aquarium and grow better from the start. These plants are almost always a fraction of the price of potted plants of similar species and offer an even greater selection of species than other ways to buy plants.

The remaining benefit is that these plants are really easy to prepare and plant in their new homes. Step one, go to any Aquatropic retail partner like your Local Fish Store or favorite online outlet and pick out your plants. Always make sure the plants you are picking are good choices for your aquarium type and size. Next set yourself up a prep area on a clean table with a small open container and spray bottle both full of aquarium water. Remove the plants from their container and then thoroughly rinse off the growing medium in the container. Fluid mediums will rinse off very easily. The gel mediums will also rinse easily but will take a little more persuasion; gently squeeze and move the gel around until it disintegrates. If your purchase holds several plants (which is common) you can now manually, and gently separate those. If you bought many different species, or the work is going slowly, just keep everything you're working on nice at wet with an occasional spritz from the spray bottle. You can also cover these plants with a bit of paper towel and keep it damp (again, with the spray bottle) until you can get them into the aquarium.

Washing the gel off the plants is a crucial step, not to be skipped. The temptation is to think “well, the gel was good enough to grow the plant in, why not just add that to the aquarium?” While the gel was perfect for growing the plants in the carefully sanitized and sterilized environment they were grown in, once exposed to the air and the aquarium, the gel can become a very good growing environment for other, less desirable things like bacteria and fungus. Removing the gel also encourages new root growth into your tank's substrate. Lastly, as if you needed more convincing, the gel just doesn't look that nice in your tank.

The only thing left is to get these Aquatropic Tissue Culture (TC) plants into your tank. They can either be planted directly into substrate, or into pots meant for aquarium planting. Be sure to rinse off all the gel before adding to your aquarium. You'll need to pay attention to exactly how your plant likes to be grown in an aquarium, so do a quick google search on the species you're planning to buy and grow. We offer our partner stores a wide variety of plants and unsurprisingly, they have a similarly broad spectrum of needs in regard to light, carbon dioxide and substrate. Your aquarium should already be tuned to these conditions before your planting happens. There are other articles here on our site about a variety of these topics as well as a few on good plant choices for those you just getting started on the journey into planted aquariums.

We think there is no better way to get a wide variety of high quality and clean plants into your planted display tank. Aquatropic Tissue Culture plants are affordable and safe. Ask your favorite Aquatropic partner store about getting your TC plants from us today and enjoy your foray into the wonderful world of planted aquaria the right way!