FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

see my post below.

This morning (around 9:00 am) I moved my sundew leaf from distlled water to a potting mix. (No roots have formed yet). I secured the leaf at the ends with pinches of potting medium. I had originally decided to wait a little longer for the plantlets to form roots before transplanting them, but part of the mother leaf was starting to decay and i didn't want to wait until the whole leaf to be decimated along with the plantlets It is currently under a LED grow light. The room is in the low to mid 70's. Humidity is in the high 30's to the low 40's/ I checked back at about 1:30 pm and noticed that the plantets look dry and there is no dew on the tentacles. (the tentacles look a little shriveled as well). II then proceeded to cover the leaf with a little plastic cup to give it a little more humidity.

1. is the lack of dew from the shock of moving it from distilled water to a potting mix ? (also, does anyone know whether sundew plantlets produce dew when it's floating in water...i never noticed, or consciously looked for it).

2. how long can the plantlet survive without dew ?

Yes, this is definitely most likely to do with shock. The plantlet has been living underwater and it was immediately exposed to open air without any kind of acclimation. The first thing that needed to be done was to bag it up. Give it 100% humidity as it settles in it's new environment and then after a few weeks, begin cutting a small hole in the Ziploc bag or plastic cup as you acclimate it to the lower humidity levels.

I have a capensis "Big Pink" cutting that's propagated via water tray method and the tentacles that are above the water has formed dew. The tentacles touching the water isn't which makes sense since water is polar and it dissolves many other polar substances or ionic compounds. But I'm sure once the tentacles are removed from the water, it'll begin producing dew.

Capensis are quite hardy so yours should most likely rebound. I've had sundews shipped bareroot that didn't produce dew close to a month and survived.

thank you for your informative answer. I didn't think of that whole "polar dissolves polar"...I'll check in on the dew in a few days and post an update.