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Listen dragons
Unicorns
Human headed beasts
But few more strange than mysterious plants that eight people in the
19th century
explorers described the Ottavio tree from Madagascar
they said it had tentacles like great green serpents with the savage tenacity of
anacondas
Of course the yacht FAO tree was only Victorian fiction, but like all good fiction they contained the germ of truth
when Victorian naturalists explored the slopes of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo they found something just as bizarre
Plants bearing huge pictures
And one of these contained the partially digested body of a rat
The discovery caused the sensation
It far the imagination of the greatest Victorian naturalist Charles
Darwin
Through painstaking
Experiments he showed that many kinds of plants captain killed insects and then digested their bodies
And they did this with methods as macabre as any cleaned up in Victorian fiction
To be carnivorous plants must catch and kill prey and they've evolved three ways of doing this
Many work like flypaper covered in sticky blocks that simply glue insects to their leaves
Others have leaves shaped into pictures
The pictures are full of liquid which drowns and digests trapped insects
Some of these plants have evolved traps of elaborate design
The third method snap traps like old-fashioned mousetraps they snap shut on their prey
When first discovered these plants caused uproar
Do plants really catch and kill insects
A specimen was sent to the greatest botanist of the time
Swedish botanist Colin s. Thought it was an abomination
Blasphemy it went against the way God had ordered the world
The nurse created the system of classifying all living things that we still use today
But he flatly refused to believe that plants could be carnivores
More than a century later Charles Darwin would prove him wrong
He cultivated lots of carnivorous plants for his detailed experiments
But he worked mostly on a little plant called Sun Dew or drosera
Darwin is most famous for explaining
How new species originated but was so fascinated by these extraordinary plants that he said I care more about?
Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world
The sundew is one of the sticky flypaper traps
It gets its name from the tiny droplets of sticky liquid a kind of mucus on the end of stalks on its leaves
Insects get stuck in this blue, but at the time most people thought this was just an accident
Darwin showed it was far more sinister than this his results both astounded and frightened him
He put different substances on the leaves milk
Meat
Paper stone
Even urine and recorded the pulse reactions
Milk caused the tentacles to fold over
So did meat and urine
But the planter didn't react to stone or paper
Darwin showed that any substance containing nitrogen triggered a reaction
He also found that the plant absorbs these mutants through its leaves it was a real carnivore like an animal
But why have some plants turned carnivorous
most of them live in places like this
bogs swamps or marshes with soils poor and nutrients like nitrogen
Yet, there's plenty of nitrogen here
It's just walking around on six legs
All the plant has to do is catch and kill bugs, and it has plenty of fertilizer
Just as Darwin saw the sundew leaf reacts when an insect gets stuck
Over half an hour or so the closest tentacles curled towards the struggling insect gluing it more firmly
Then the leaf folds white over the victim
This holds the prey against the glands on the leaf the release chemicals to dissolve and digest the insect
On seeing this Darwin wrote by Jove. I sometimes think Asura is a disguised animal
In any way he was right
In the swamps of Florida some do's compete with other predators with animals for prey
And places the ground is carpeted by pink sundews for most of the time
There's no shortage of prey the sundews have plenty to eat
But the plants have competition
a wolf spider
The spider builds a network of threads over the forest floor
Anything walking on the web sends vibrations back to the spider hiding in a burrow at its center
The attack is lightning-fast
When food gets scarce the spiders respond by building bigger webs
Which catch more insects and deprive the Sundays of food?
And
the plants face competition from other creatures
It takes time for a Sun due to kill and digest its prey and a struggling insect attracts attention
An oak toad, they're common in these wet forests and often still prey from some news
The sticky traps of sundews take many Falls
From flat carpets to plants and grow two or three meters Holly
Sticky traps worked so well that other kinds of plants have evolved similar techniques
This is original, which grows in just a few places in South Africa
Like a son do it's covered in sticky blobs though unlike sundews these props are a type of resin
They're much stickier than the Sandia's mucus blobs and trapped bigger and stronger insects
But ver it Allah has no digestive glands on its leaves, so how does it digest its prey?
It needs help from this a tiny bug called Pomerania
Meridia spends its whole life on a curricular plant
The bug has a nonstick wax coating so it can walk round this forest of superglue without getting stuck
Tomorrow there is a predator and there are hundreds of them on a big plant more than enough to process all the insects
original contract
The bugs of cautious rule Ridge a little trap prey that might be big enough to damage an unwary bug
So over the next 10 minutes or so pamorah deer just probes and waits for the struggling fly to weaken
Now Janka bugs emerge from the sticky forest waiting for the feast
At first the bugs won't tolerate each other and fights breakouts, but
Now the fly is almost dead and the serious business of feeding begins
Pamorah dia has a sharper bosses like a hypodermic needle
That it stabs into the dying fly to suck out its juices
Even newly hatched bugs join the feeding frenzy
After they fed the bugs leave their droppings on brood to those leaves a ready-made
predigested fertilizer for the plant to absorb
Original and pamorah deer have evolved a toast symbiotic bond
Without the bugs were Riddler can't be a carnivores plant and pamorah deer bugs are only found among these sticky branches
Sticky leaves provide all the nutrients these plants need to survive in wet forests and swamps
But one plant has taken this further
In
The wild it only lives in the small patch of wet pine forests in North Carolina
The Venus flytrap
It's evolved from the sticky travelers undo that slow curl of the sundew leaf is
Transformed into a reaction so quick it can trap an insect
Darwin was sent specimens, which he grew in his greenhouse to study in detail
On post examination he saw that as well as spines around the edge of the leaves
There were three fine hairs on the surface of each lobe
He assumed they were triggers to close the leaf to find out he touched one likely
But this didn't always far the trap
But touching a second hair the trap always fired immediately
There's a good reason for this
Following the trap needs energy
In the wild they live where it rains hard and often
The last thing the plant needs is for the trap to fire when hit by nothing more than a raindrop
If two hairs must be touched it's less likely that the trap will fire by accident
The spring will trap two of the hairs must be triggered within 20 seconds of each other
The bug triggers the first hand now the time bomb is ticking
Just one more touch
And the trap snaps shut insects have fast reactions, but the flytrap is even faster
Slowing down the action 80 times shows the trap closing in around a third of a second
The spines along the leaf edge slam closed like a prison gate, but the gate isn't tightly closed not yet and
There's also a good reason for this
The trigger hairs are sensitive enough to be triggered by even small insects
Too small to make a decent meal for a growing flytrap
But the gaps in the prison bars are wide enough for a small insect to escape
And over the next few days with nothing to keep cutting the hairs the trap is reset
But more substantial meals are locked in and this struggling continues to stimulate the leaf hairs
Over a few hours the sides of the trap squeeze together and cells on the inside release chemicals
To kill and digest the insect
It's easy to see why Darwin called this the most wonderful plant in the world
The familiar flytrap has a lesser-known relative an aquatic flytrap
the waterwheel plant
It gets its name from the spoke like arrangement of branches, but the paddles on this waterwheel are lethal traps
Each trap is fringed with sensitive trigger hairs
The traps are only a few millimeters long and work just like the flytrap
But the waterwheel planter targets tiny creatures like seeds shrimps and copy pots
Touch the fringe of hairs and the trap fires nearly as quickly as the Venus flytrap
Even more amazing because this trap operates in water, which is much denser than air
Caught this copy pod will be slowly digested
Dunwyn studies of sticky traps and snap traps proved that these paths for true carnivores
But there's a third way to trap insects and Darwin was less sure about these
the pitfall traps of pitcher plants
He thought they might be carnivorous, but we know now that they include some of the most elaborate and sophisticated traps of all
Preachers evolved separately several times in the Americas
In Australia
And in Southeast Asia
They're all beautiful, but it's a deadly beauty
Hiding fiendish devices to attract and kill the unwary
Such design seemed too perfect for Darwin could something so complex really evolved by natural selection
Leyland of learned the answer lies in the swamp forests of tropical America
The trees here are laden with bromeliads relatives of the pineapple
Many growers epiphytes clinging to the branches and trunks of trees high off the ground where they're bathed in sunlight
But with their roots tangling so high in the air they can't absorb water nutrients from the soil like normal plants
Instead their leaves form a well at the center of the plant which fills with water when it rains
The well also catches leaves falling from the trees
So the plant can absorb all the water and food it needs from its own private reservoir
Or not so private
Many creatures see bromeliad wells as miniature ponds
In
South America poison dart frogs search from plant to plant
looking for a well not yet claimed by anyone else a
safe place to rear tadpoles
But some bromeliads are not so welcoming
Like most bromeliads
Bro Kenya has a central well deep in the heart of the plant
Now this one is acid and full of digestive enzymes
Its leaves are coated in wax making them slippery as ice
Pants exploring these leaves can't get a grip slipping and sliding towards the deadly pit
Where they'll be digested and turned into plant food?
From such simple beginnings natural selection has created more elaborate trucks
Several of the most elegant are hidden in remote areas of swampy pine forest in the southeast of the United States
The sarracenia pitches
Stuart McPherson is a botanist and Explorer who's discovered many new species of pitcher plants
He Stremme stand squelched through miles of these swamps to find some amazing places
These are the North American pitcher plants the sarracenia they produced these tall upright pictures
And they attract insects by having honey sweet nectar and as they try and get to that nectar then and then slip inside
The prey then falls straight down to the bottom the trap, but it can't escape from that
They simply can't climb out up on the inside of the picture
So it dies and then the plant secretes enzymes and acids and breaks up the bodies of those trap terminals
This is the yellow pitcher, but in this particular swamp not all of them live up to their name
This species in particular is incredibly variable every population pretty much is a bit different
But there's many different varieties, and here's one over here
Which is red with a yellow lid conceal these red veins and patterns this
Advertises the trap to its insect prey and that's what attracted us over here is even another one
And this third one within just a few meters is pure blood red
And it really stands out from all the other surrounding plants makes the perfect advertisement for that deadly trap
The different bite color forms of these pictures work like flowers I
catching patterns that advertise sweet nectar and
Standing out from the rest the white topped pitcher
In a few very precious places they cover the landscape looking like some unearthly flower meadow
A purple haze of blazing stars grows up through the pitches drawing countless insects to these bogs
potential prey for the bridges
You
Beads of tempting sweet nectar stand out on the underside of the lip
Which is also covered in fine downward pointing hairs?
That make it hard for an insect to keep its footing
The tall conspicuous pictures advertise the nectar drawing insects as would any bright flower
They're so busy gorging themselves on the nectar they don't notice that it's getting harder to hang on
The slippery sides of the pitcher mean, there's no escape as a plant secretes digestive
enzymes to slowly dissolve its victim
The meal more than repairs the costs of making all that sweet nectar, but sometimes the effort is wasted
The sweet droplets are stolen by swallowtail butterflies far too big to fall into the trap
And
Many pictures have a resident green links spider waiting to SAP smaller prey before they're caught by the plant
There are eight or so different kinds of sarracenia pitchers growing mostly in the warm and humid southeast corner of the United States
But this the purple picture goes all the way up into Canada
The purple picture is unusual for another reason it doesn't produce enzymes to digest its prey
Yet, it's still a carnivore
Its lid produces nectar and is clothed in downward pointing hairs
It's just as lethal and efficient as its relatives
But like regular the purple picture relies on help to digest its prey
Trapped insects drown and sink to the bottom
Where the snake-like vaviiova mosquito called material nemeth chew and shred the bodies?
releasing small particles into the water
Floating above meta Nima's are other mosquito larvae. Why am I er?
These have mouth parts like brushes that create strong currents of water drawing in the small particles
Both mosquitoes release their waste products into the water full of nutrients that the plant can absorb
The purple picture is a unique habitat, this kind of mosquito larva is only found inside these pictures
All North American picture plants live in wet places and sometimes that can be a problem
Heavy storms are common here during the summer
The parrot headed picture has a lid that forms a hood covering the picture and stopping it filling up with rain
But it lives in swampy hollows that often flood during downpours
Its hood can't stop it being completely submerged
But this doesn't mean it can't catch prey
The hood creates a narrow entrance hole leading to a tube lined with backward pointing hairs
This picture works like a lob support in miniature
There are no miniature mobsters here, but there are temples
They graze on the surface of the picture
But if they enter the trap they can't back out the only way is onward to the bottom of the picture
There are relatives of the sarracenia pictures elsewhere in the new world the largest variety is found in South America
But to find them means climbing to the tops of vast blocks of ancient sandstone
Rising thousands of meters into the air above the jungles of Venezuela Brazil and Diana
These isolated mountains are called tip we a local word meaning house of the gods
The tops of the trees are flat plateaus lost worlds high above the rainforest
This is the only home of the Sun pictures
Like all-american pictures the trap is formed from a leaf
In some pictures it looks like a flat leaf that has simply rolled up to form a tube with a seam
Still visible down the front
But that doesn't mean that they're primitive they're quite the opposite. They are beautifully adapted to life on these isolated mountaintops
Moisture from the rain forests below is forced to rise by the sheer cliffs releasing torrents of rain
It rains nearly all the time up here giving the Sun pitchers a problem
Unlike their North American relatives they don't have a lid to act as an umbrella
So the pitchers could overflow with water washing out valuable nutrients or making the pitcher so heavy it falls over
But even as it rains the water level in the pitcher starts to drop
The seam down the pitcher hides a small hole that drains water into a flat channel a
Drain pipe that carries water safely away to the base of the pitcher keeping the water level just right
One other kind of pitcher has evolved in the Americas it lives in the mountains of California and Oregon
Where it grows to nearly a meter at all?
the cobra Lily
The entrance to the pitcher is hidden underneath a bulbous wood
The back of which is covered in delicate
Transparent windows through which the outside world is visible all of which fools
unsuspecting insects
a
Fry can sense sweet nectar on the entrance rim and on the back of the hood too tempting to resist
But one since only its instincts will be its downfall
Finished feeding it tries to fly towards the light
Only to find its way blocked by a very slippery surface
Of all the new world pictures Cobra leaders looked the most alien
But in the old world a different group of plants has evolved pictures of astonishingly elaborate designs
The rainforests of Southeast Asia home to Nepenthes pictures
These plants grow as fines often tens of meters long trailing through the trees and
Their exquisite pictures grow from tendrils are the tips of their leaves
There are around a hundred and thirty different kinds of Nepenthes pitchers their diversity is amazing
The most spectacular lives here on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo a
Mountain time many times by Stuart McPherson in his search for new kinds of carnivorous plants
This is Nepenthes Rajah, it's actually the largest of all the picture plants in the world
This is a juvenile trap, and they can actually get to about twice this size
And this species is known only from four small sites like this one each site consists of maybe
Three four five hundred plants so in total the entire world population is just about 2,000 flies, and that's it globally
Like the North American pictures these elaborate structures have evolved to trap and digest insects, but in the last few years
Botanists have realized that Nepenthes pictures are more than just predators
This is the found picture named for two snake-like fangs projecting down beneath the lid
The fangs produce nectar to attract insects which then slide off the pointed tips into the pitchers digestive juices
But there are also incites living in the pitcher four species of ants
They have no problem walking on the slippery walls and help themselves to the plants prey
They even swim in the pictures fluid to steal food
But there's no such thing as a free lunch
The ants congregate beneath the ring and every now and then emerge to clean the rim of the pitcher which keeps it slippery
So the ants help the pitcher catch food and later they get their own show
In return the picture provides downs for the home a hollow loop in its stem
The ants chew an entrance hole and build their nests inside
Only one species of ant lives with the family picture like this all ovens are merely dinner
And other pictures have formed partnerships just as close, but with a more sinister outcome
The white band pitcher named for an unusual band of white hairs just below the rim
Chin Lee is a botanist who knows East rich forests intimately he's discovered several new kinds of pitcher plants
And now knows how this one collects its food
This is Nepenthes alba marginata, it's one of the most unusual pitcher plants
It's got a very distinctive white band around the edge of the parastone here
Which is unique in the entire genus and only recently did we find out that this white band is?
Attractive to termites they feed on this band and in so doing a lot of them fall inside the pitcher so it's a termite specialist
It's very difficult to observe in the wild you see pictures that have missing bands, and you'll find termites inside them
But actually witnessing them doing it you have to be quite lucky
One reason is that the picture specializes on just one kind of termite, which is mostly active after dark
Millions of termites fan out from their nest across the forest floor moving in flowing columns that never seem to end
If the Scout finds a white band picture it recruits other workers, and they crawl up the side of the picture
The white hairs are irresistible and they gorge themselves
As long termites swarm onto the pitcher the first arrivals get pushed towards the slippery rim of the pitcher
It's not long before the inevitable happens
It's purely chance if termites find a white band pitcher so not all pitchers have a successful night
But it's not hard to spot the ones that have feasted well
Oh look at this here's one right here missing the white band actually so this is definitely gonna have some termites inside
Let's have a look
Look at that there's hundreds of drowned termites inside these look like that
They've been already partially digested by the plant. It's a hearty meal for this pitcher plant
Some pitcher plants have given up being carnivores. They've turned vegetarian
This is the flask shaped pitcher it has a tiny lid
Bent back to expose the flask to the forest canopy above
The gaping mouths of the flask have evolved to catch leaves and twigs that drop from the trees above
Inside the pitcher a whole varied community of creatures helps break down the leaves
releasing nutrients for the plant to absorb
Different kinds of mosquito larvae even tadpoles
These belong to the matang
Narrow-mouthed falls the speeches which prefers to breed in the sanctuary of these pilot poems
But it's not entirely safe here
This is top serving tities another mosquito larva, but this one's a predator
It devours other mosquito larvae
Even young toxo rink I t's are fearsome tackling prey bigger than themselves
It only takes a few minutes for top sobering Chi T's to eat its way through an entire mosquito larva a
Miniature world hidden inside the pitcher
Far from just being carnivorous
Nepenthes pictures have formed all kinds of complex relationships with animals and the most astonishing
Has only just been discovered?
Whilst working in the rainforests on mount kinabalu in borneo jin
Realized that the biggest of all pictures the john roger pitcher had some unusual visitors
What makes this pitcher plant unusual is not just that it's carnivorous, but it also
Attracts mammals to visit the pitcher
There's nectar secreted on the undersurface the lid here and you can see all these glands on the under surface here
And they're constantly secreting nectar actually both day and night and very recently the first research was done on this species
And that's when we got footage and photographs proving that these animals are actually visiting the pitcher
The creature TM saw was the mountain tree shrew
They balance on the rim of the picture and reach up to lick off the nectar
Each tree shrew knows where all the pictures are there's territory and visits each one in turn
But what's in it for the plant?
As it feeds the tree shrew urinates and defecates into the picture and these nutrients
supplement the plants normal diet of insects
Tree shrews are only active during the day the nightfall doesn't mean an end to the Roger pitchers. Supply of fertilizer
After dark it continues to produce nectar
Which now feeds the summit rat
Just like a tree shrew it straddles the pitcher to feed and drops its cats into the bowl
These pictures are enormous and summit rats are small if it slips
It will end up trapped inside the pitcher where it will become the path snakes meal
Though as a Stewart Macpherson explains, that's not the plants intention
The truth of the matter is there that it's not quite as dramatic as that the plants didn't evolve to catch vertebrates
They evolved to trap and kill insects. It's just under certain
circumstances the same bait or stir tracks larger prey and mainly through accident they just simply slip inside
in the very biggest of pitchers the traps are so big than the verse approach like rodents and mammals they just can't climb up and
So drown and they're digested within the plant and in some cases you can even find skeletons within the pictures
So that's original discovery of a dead rat on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu was probably an accident
But a happy one at least for our understanding of carnivorous plants
It caused a sensation and inspired Charles Darwin to reveal the remarkable lives of these plants
Times have hardly changed recently Stewart made a similar discovery a rat trapped in a giant pitcher
He took this photograph, and he caused just as much of a sensation I
Was literally amazed and surprised because this image went viral it went on newspapers all around the globe and on websites
And it really goes to show you that people really are fascinated by these plants
capturing and killing animals just like back in the Victorian days when when that first report and discovery was made
It seems our fascination with these strange plants is just as great now as it was when they were first discovered
and there are certainly even more surprises hidden in these mountains I
Plant about 200 or so mountains in search of new species and found about a dozen or so in the last few years
But there are literally hundreds and hundreds more mountainous still to be explored so there must be dozens and dozens more species awaiting discovery
It's also these incredibly complex relationships with different animals and other organisms
That we're only beginning to understand so it's an incredible chapter of new exploration