Experiment: Anubias Snow White Petite

Happy new year guys! I've ordered a shipment of 10 anubias snow white from APF (link) for less than $50, not to mention the $20 discount I got after spending $100 on my purchase. This is SUPER dirt cheap, as I recall the price per anubias snow white was $150 per piece 2 years ago! Can you imagine that?

Anyway, I've been reading up a lot about this type of anubias online, and to my horror 95% of the folks who purchased it can't keep them alive.. So, I better come up with a solid plan, or else I'll end up to have the same fate..

Anubias snow white struggles to thrive because of the lack of chlorophyll in its leaf. Plus, they're freakingly tiny (I'm talking about the size of pinky finger), so their rhizomes is non-existent. In other words, this means that it has little or no energy storage to support it if it doesn't get optimum growth condition.

So after reading a lot about growing them, I came up with a few grow conditions that I want to test.

Group 1: Grow it in high lighting. Although lacking of chlorophyll, anubias petite white still has some chlorophyll in it's leave and stems. So the idea for Group 1 is to provide them more light so we can overwork these little chlorophyll to provide energy to the plant.

Group 2: Grow it in med lighting. The idea of growing it in med light is to encourage the growth of green leaf. When a variegated plant does not get's ideal growth condition, it'll start sprouting green leaves to capture more light. So this method is to encourage the growth first and let the plant build a large energy storage first, before focusing on the white aesthetics. This is to provide the best chance of survival. 

Group 3: Grow it in sugar water. Concept similar to keeping albino plants that cannot produce their own sugar. It acts like a parasitic plant which absorbs sugar from external sources. There were research done throughout the last 100 year about keeping albino plants, and one simple method is to force feed the plant with 0.1-0.3 Molar sucrose water. It can be done either by soaking the leaves into the solution, or via root uptake.

Group 4: Float it on aquarium. I always set things up and forgot about them, only to find them dead a few months later. So I just want to keep some Anubias in my no maintenence set up in the event of my laziness/forgetfulness. 

The anubias will be arriving later today, I'm so exited to test them out~

Till then, and wishing you a happy new year!