Carnivorous plants exhibition

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This video says about itself:

Venus fly trap – The Private Life of Plants – David Attenborough – BBC wildlife.

This week, like a few years ago, there is a carnivorous plants exhibition at the botanical garden. The exhibition, linked to a conference, is co-organized by the Carnivora society.

Many species were exhibited, including Sarracenia rubra, Sarracenia flava, Sarracenia minor, and Sarracenia alata. Sarracenia alabamensis is an endangered species now in the USA.

There was Drosera binata from Australia and New Zealand.

There were also tropical Nepenthes species, including Nepenthes albomarginata and Nepenthes ampullaria.

Heliamphora species included Heliamphora nutans from the tepui table mountains of Venezuela and Guyana.

Also Heliamphora chimantensis and Heliamphora ciliata, Heliamphora pulchella, and the tepui plant Heliamphora sarracenoides, all from Venezuela as well.

There was also a show how Venus flytrap plants eat. They were fed mealworms, which take the plants 24 hours to digest. They cannot eat comparatively big prey like butterflies and crane flies.

Various carnivorous plants were also for sale, including Utricularia longifolia from Brazil. This is a bladderwort relative; though it eats worms, not small freshwater crustaceans like European bladderworts.

Bladderworts are the world’s fastest trapping carnivorous plants – suck in prey in less than a millisecond: here.

Endangered Venus Flytrap Poached for Profit: here.

The Venus flytrap digests and absorbs its prey, but how does it coordinate digestion and absorption to maximise the efficiency of this highly evolved mechanism? A new study that combines direct recordings from cells within the trap along with molecular characterization of nutrient transport reveals a complex and coordinated suite of mechanisms that underlie this elegant process: here.

The Antibacterial Activity of Honey Derived from Australian Flora: here.

Conservation works! A flower, once thought extinct, will come off the U.S.’ endangered species list: here.

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