Growing Wild Water Lily from Seeds

00:00 Growing Wild Water Lily from Seeds
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00:05 I spotted beautiful blooming water lilies growing in forever wild parts of Staten Island.
I don't want to disturb anything in the lake by digging for the plants bulbs.
Colorful fall season is the time for picking up Water Lilies fruits.
I pick floating around Water Lily fruits with seeds.
00:38 Wild samples always come with wild bacteria and small critters.
I see pond snails and some aquatic bug here.
Wild samples need to be quarantined.
00:58 I just reset my 29 gallon aquarium preparing it for Eastern Newts.
So, I can drop the fruits right here instead of using small quarantine jars.
It would be nice to have a winter aquarium for imitating the full natural cycle.
Let's see if seeds would sprout this way.
I also have some other wild caught aquatic and terrestrial plants in this tank.
Here you can see the same aquarium already populated with Blue Star Endlers fish.
Most of the seeds stay afloat.
01: 40 My fish enjoy nibbling on soft parts of Water Lily fruits.
Big mama fish gets excited when she scored a large piece of the fruit :)
A seed of Water lily covered in some thick transparent layer sank down.
Ramshorn snail is feeding on it.
02:08 It took about 2 months for some seeds to sprout.
Let's take a closer look on them.
The seed on the left is very soft - it's dead now.
The other four seeds I placed in the order of their development.
02:31 I tried to anchor sprouted seeds between gravel.
It did not work well with small sprouts - newts knock them out all the time.
Newts like to dig in the gravel looking for scuds and such :)
I added larger rocks in the aquarium and use them for anchoring sprouts.
03:05 Only a couple seeds sprouted out of 3 Water lily fruits.
Here I used a driftwood for keeping the plant in a place.
Water lily sprouts grow pretty fast toward water surface.
Leaves of this Water lily plant already protrude above the water surface.
The stems of this type of Water Lily grow much taller in the pond where I pick them compare to the size of my tank.
04:02 Shortly later I noticed snails eating stems...
Here is my largest Water lily plant at about 7 month since I picked the seeds.
For growing full potential this Water Lily needs more space than my 29 gallon tank.
Have fun and happy aquariums :)