Botanists Identify New Carnivorous Plant
Triantha occidentalis is the first meat-eating plant to be identified in 20 years.
Beware of any delicate white wildflowers you see growing in a bog. They may look innocent, but they just might be meat-eaters.
The small flowering plant called Triantha occidentalis—a species of false asphodel—grows in nutrient-poor wetlands up and down the West Coast, from California to Alaska. Until recently, nobody knew it was carnivorous.
But according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have confirmed it is indeed an insect-eating plant. Triantha occidentalis, whose sticky blossoms lure in small pollinators to trap and eat them, is the first carnivorous plant to be identified in 20 years.
Qianshi Lin, a PhD student at UBC at the time of the study, and Tom Givnish, a professor in the department of botany at UW-Madison, decided to study Triantha occidentalis after previous research showed the plant was missing the same genes that were also missing in other carnivorous plants, such as sundews and Venus flytraps. To do so, they studied Triantha plants growing on Cypress Mountain in North Vancouver, British Columbia.
In order to show that nutrients passed from insect to plant, Lin laced fruit flies with nitrogen-15 isotopes and placed them on the stems of three different plants: the Triantha occidentalis, sundew (a known carnivorous plant) and wandering fleabane (a non-carnivorous plant). When he checked the plants’ nitrogen levels, the sundew and Triantha occidentalis had absorbed the isotope, confirming that the plant was indeed ingesting prey.
The researchers say their findings hint towards there being other carnivorous plants that have yet to be discovered.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Botanists Identify New Carnivorous Plant
by Shelby Vittek, Modern Farmer
August 10, 2021
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
The article is really helpful. Thank the author very much