Scientists Identify New Carnivorous Plant that Traps Prey Underground

This photo taken on Oct.28 shows pulling weeds from a bed of plants at a park in Baguio City, north of Manila. (AFP)
This photo taken on Oct.28 shows pulling weeds from a bed of plants at a park in Baguio City, north of Manila. (AFP)
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Scientists Identify New Carnivorous Plant that Traps Prey Underground

This photo taken on Oct.28 shows pulling weeds from a bed of plants at a park in Baguio City, north of Manila. (AFP)
This photo taken on Oct.28 shows pulling weeds from a bed of plants at a park in Baguio City, north of Manila. (AFP)

During a several-day trip with Indonesian colleagues to the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, botanist Martin Dančák of Czech’s Palacký University noted plants which were undoubtedly Nepenthes but produced no pitchers.

After a careful search, they found a couple of aerial pitchers, which led them to discover a strategy so far unknown from any other species of carnivorous plant: catching the prey in the soil.

The Nepenthes plant is widely spotted in southern China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Australia, India, and Siri Lanka.

It has modified leaves known as pitfall traps or pitchers, whose inner walls are covered with a waxy substance and hairs or folds that lock the prey insects in. The pitchers also contain glands that secrete a liquid that fills a part of it.

One of its sides produces a nectar that attracts insects and traps them after they fall in. The prey is then consumed using digestive enzymes, and the plant uses the resulting nutrients to grow.

While most of these plants’ pitchers are found above the ground, Dančák and his colleagues discovered that this species places its up-to-11-cm-long pitchers underground, where they are formed in cavities or directly in the soil and trap animals living underground, usually ants, mites and beetles.

The findings were announced in the journal PhytoKeys on June 29.

The newly discovered species grows on relatively dry ridge tops at an elevation of 1,100-1,300 m. According to its discoverers, this might be why it evolved to move its traps underground.

"We hypothesize that underground cavities have more stable environmental conditions, including humidity, and there is presumably also more potential prey during dry periods," adds Michal Golos of the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, who also worked on this curious plant.



Rancho Palos Verdes Declares War on Peacocks

A peacock (Getty)
A peacock (Getty)
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Rancho Palos Verdes Declares War on Peacocks

A peacock (Getty)
A peacock (Getty)

Spotting a trademark colorful and elegant bird on the Palos Verdes Peninsula can be exciting for visitors or vacationers, but as the peacock population has rocketed, officials say some of those birds have got to go.

The Los Angeles Times wrote Wednesday that this fall, Rancho Palos Verdes will restart a rarely used program to trap and relocate peafowl from the peninsula in an effort to curb the growing population and limit the animals’ nuisance behaviors with a goal of trimming the numbers by about 30%.

Although some residents are still enamored by the fowl - Rancho Palos Verdes resident Efran Conforty told KCAL News they are the “best neighbors” - the birds have also attracted a lot of haters.

City Council members said they received many letters in support of the trapping and removal program, some that even asked the city to expand it.

“They’re running across the road all the time - it’s dangerous,” said Council member George Lewis at a May meeting.

The council voted unanimously to reinstate the program in the three neighborhoods where officials recorded the highest number of birds.

“It is not the city’s intent to eradicate the peafowl population, but to manage the population at levels identified in 2000 and to educate the public on how to coexist with the birds,” Megan Barnes, a spokesperson for Rancho Palos Verdes, wrote in a statement.

In Rancho Palos Verdes, the peacock population is the highest it’s been since 2014, when city leaders first decided to look into taking action to curtail the number of the birds due to growing complaints about their noise and other nuisances.

Peacocks make a number of sounds, including a piercing and distinctive scream during mating season and when they perceive a threat.

They also clamber on rooftops and through landscaping, causing damage and leaving waste.