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.



Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.