A new type of carnivorous plant is found in mountain bogs...

[DGUtley]

A new type of carnivorous plant is found in mountain bogs... False asphodel, a flower that grows in the high-altitude wetlands of western North America, gets much of its nutrients from eating insects.

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If you hike through a mountain bog along the West Coast of North America in midsummer, there’s a decent chance you’ll run into a false asphodel (Triantha occidentalis), an unassuming flower that shoots up dark green stalks with white blooms. As it turns out, the false asphodel, found from Alaska south to California, has been hiding a secret from the human race: It’s a carnivore.

Recently, botanist Qianshi Lin heard from a fellow student at the University of British Columbia that the plant had structures on its flower stalk that looked a little like the sticky traps that other carnivorous plants, such as sundews, use to catch insects. So Lin decided to figure out if the same might be the case for this flower. Lin’s research shows that, indeed, false asphodel, a plant known to science for over a century, traps and digests small insects. As much as two-thirds of the nitrogen—a vital nutrient—in its leaves comes from these animals, according to a study published August 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/a...rce=reddit.com