Meat-Eating Plants Losing Their
Dining Room
By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI
News staff
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| The North American pitcher plant, which is native to New England, feeds on crawling insects. (New England Carnivorous Plant Society photos). EDITOR'S NOTE: Pitcher Plants are available for sale at Charlestown's Umbrella Factory |
Carnivorous plants,
such as the Venus flytrap, made famous in the 1986 film “Little Shop of
Horrors,” don’t thrive in New York City flower shops. In fact, Venus flytraps
are only native to a small area that straddles the border between North and
South Carolina.
But, like their
carnivorous cousins, such as butterworts, sundews and pitcher plants, they are
falling victim to habitat loss. There may be fewer than 40,000 Venus flytraps
left in their native habitat, according to the National Wildlife
Federation.
Across the United
States, including here in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the preferred
habitats of carnivorous plant species — acidic bogs and wetlands — are being
filled in and built upon.
The two insect-eating
plants that can be found in New England are round-leaved sundew and the North
America pitcher, according to Sackett. This region’s pitcher plants dine on
low-crawling insects such as earwigs and ants; sundews trap mosquitoes, gnats
and other small flying insects.
Like pollinators and
amphibians, carnivorous plants are sentinels of environmental quality. One of
the first things to disappear when a bog or wetland degrades is its population
of carnivorous plants.
These plants, which
typically grow in places where the soil is nutrient-poor and have adapted to
glean some of their sustenance by consuming insects, spiders, and even rats and
mice, are telling us something about current environmental conditions. The
message isn’t good, and it’s largely being ignored.
Since it’s decidingly
easy to destroy carnivorous plant habitat, from filling it in, to draining it,
to paving it over, some 95 percent of this sensitive habitat in the United
States has been destroyed, according to the NECPS. Much of the habitat that
carnivorous plants need to survive is now buildings and parking lots.
The
nursery industry, which uses sphagnum and peat moss, supports the mining of these
natural resources from bogs, contributing to the destruction of a habitat where
carnivorous plants once thrived.
Typically small and
low-lying, many carnivorous species also are being shaded out by taller plants
as their habitat is altered by human activity, such as large-scale agricultural
operations. Poaching also is a significant threat to rare carnivorous plants.
North Carolina lawmakers recently voted to make the theft of Venus flytraps a
felony in the four counties there where it grows wild.
Some preservation
attempts, such as the law enacted in North Carolina, are being made, but most
efforts — plant rescues, for example — are time-consuming and expensive, and
often lead to the protection of just a few fragmented stands of carnivorous
plant habitat.
“There’s a bunch of
small organizations that lack funding trying to protect these great plants that
have survived for so long,” Sackett said. “There are few protections in place,
and there is no political will to do anything about it. We’re losing these
plants.”
The NECPS was founded
more than a decade ago by John Phillip Jr., who started keeping these plants on
his dormitory windowsill in 1974, when he was an undergraduate at the
University of Rhode Island studying agriculture and plant science. The first
meeting of the organization was held in January 2003 at the Charles H. Smith
Greenhouses at the Roger Williams Botanical Center in Providence.
Since then, the
1,000-member NECPS, partnering with such organizations as the North American
Sarracenia Conservancy, has been working to conserve carnivorous
plant habitat.
“The organization was
built by getting people together who have an appreciation for these plants,”
said Sackett, who has been involved with the NECPS since its inception. “These
plants and their habitat need to be protected. Our goal is educate people about
how to properly grow and propagate these plants, and how to help protect their
vulnerable habitat.”
To engage the public,
the NECPS holds various plant shows, including one next month in Salem, N.H.
The organization’s 11th annual Fall Carnivorous
Plant Show will be
held Oct. 4-5 at the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center.
The Providence show
will feature pitcher plants from Malaysia with traps the size of softballs that
are capable of eating lizards and mice. There also will be ever-popular Venus
flytraps, sundews from Australia ranging in size from a dime to 12-plus inches
high, and hundreds of other carnivorous plants.
There are about 630
identified species of carnivorous plants — and another 300 or so
protocarnivorous plants that trap and kill insects and/or small animals but
lack the ability to digest or absorb nutrients like carnivorous plants.
According to the NECPS,
there plants use five basic trapping mechanisms: pitfall traps trap prey in
cup-like leaves, which fill with rainwater and the digestive enzymes produced
by the plant; the leaves of flypaper traps consist of glands covered with a
sticky substance that looks like nectar; snap traps suddenly close when trigger
hairs are stimulated by an insect; bladder traps have small openings with a
door-like structure; and lobster-pot traps capture their prey as they are easy
to enter, but difficult to leave.
"These are
some rare plant species," Sackett said. "We're hoping they don't get
obliterated."