Thursday, July 11, 2013

Spatulate-leaved Sundew (Drosera intermedia)

Occasional on wet sand flats and abundant in sphagnum bogs, sundews are plants that capture insects and eat them! Well, they don't actually chew them up and swallow, but they do absorb nutrients from the bodies of the bugs they trap. The bugs get caught in the sticky liquid on the leaf hairs and the rest is history. In northern Indiana, sundews should begin producing small, white, 5-merous flowers in the next week or so. This video shows a variety of insectiverous plants, with a time-lapse of the closely-related Round-leaved Sundew at 1:10.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYGwgzehf6c  


1 comment:

Brent Kryda said...

A very resilient and versatile species. I've seen one on a log in the everglades sitting under the towering majesty of a Royal Palm at the edge of a hammock, a tiny miracle that looked so very much like the sundews we have in spruce bogs up north.