So it's been 10 days since I made my second attempt at tissue culture.  I counted the number of vessels with plant tissue in them, and originally there were 34 of them.  I'm down to 27 as of this morning.  On the 18th, I noticed one contaminated culture, and then yesterday on the 19th, I noticed 6 more!!

I'm not terribly surprised at all of the contamination.  I purposely went easier on the sterilization of the tissue this time because on my first attempt, I killed all of the tissue by over sterilizing it.  I'm hoping this time that I'll at least have one culture that takes.  I'm pretty sure I will.  I can't imagine bacteria escaped the alcohol, hydrogen peroxide and bleach on every piece of tissue.

So far, the majority of the contamination has been on leaves.  I did about half of the cultures with leaves and the other half with flower stalks. There was one contaminated culture that was a flower stalk, but the rest have been leaves. Also, it seems like most of the contamination thus far has been on the blue media, and I think that's due to the fact that the blue media has no PPM in it.

Below are some photos of the contaminated cultures just so people have an idea of what they look like.

Below is the one flower stalk that has been contaminated.  This was a teeny flower stalk that I pulled out of the center of one of the plants.  I probably should have cut the end off, because, as you can see, the contamination started on the end that was in contact with the soil.  As you can also see, there is a small leaf next to the flower stalk that doesn't appear to be contaminated, but I went ahead and dumped the whole culture and didn't try to save them because the tissue is just from a typical Venus Flytrap.

I'm not sure if it's clear from the photos, but nearly all of the contamination started with the rhizome end of the leaf.  Seeing this makes me think that perhaps next time I'll trim a bit of the end off of the leaf to help prevent this.

I also put some Dionaea seeds into culture and so far I don't see any contamination on those.  Seeds are pretty easy to sterilize, so I might not have any contamination on the seeds.