This Plant Lurks Underground to Trap Prey in a Way We've Never Seen Before

Plants are often thought of as tranquil and can't help themselves. Some plants are not harmful to the environment.

The name suggests that the plants eat bugs and small animals.

These "ecologically unique" plants need our protection just as much as any other threatened organisms, and we're still finding examples of them we've never seen before.

Scientists have identified a previously unknown species of plant on the island of Borneo in the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan.

The Nepenthes pudica is a pitcher plant that consumes its prey in a way that has never been recorded before.

A buried shoot with underground pitchers. (Martin Dančák)

According to Martin Dank of Palack University Olomouc in the Czech Republic, there is a pitcher plant that is different from all the others.

The pitcher-shaped trap that N. pudica lays for its victims is unique to it.

Pitcher plants usually produce hollow cupped tubes above ground, or in trees, with the receptacle's slippery inner surface making it hard for insects to climb back out again.

We used to think that the insects were stuck inside the sarlacc and drowned in a well of digestion juices.

The scenery has changed a bit because of N. pudica.

The Nepenthes plants that strangely didn't seem to have any pitchers were noticed by researchers on a field expedition in North Kalimantan.

Subsequent investigations, which involved pulling up a layer of moss covering the ground, revealed numerous pitchers hidden in the underground soil, coming off shoots grown into the ground, as if to specifically target bugs that dwell inside the dirt.

The pitchers are buried in the ground. There is a person named Martin Dank.

Dank says that this species places its pitchers underground, where they are formed in crevices or in the soil, trapping animals.

This is the first time that a species with a pitfall-like trap has been found. The team found 17 such N. pudica and examined many of them.

For a plant predator that lays its trap underground, N. pudica lives the high life.

The researchers think that the altitude may be a factor in why this partly subterranean pitcher plant is so inclined.

The co-author of the study is a plant researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK.

People get trapped by something.

The findings are reported in a text book.