It Hides Under the Soil With a Bottomless Appetite for Meat

The first pitcher plant known to grow working traps underground is a new discovery.

While hiking in the rainforest in North Kalimantan, a province of Indonesia on the island of Borneo, Martin Dank and Wewin Tjiasmanto found a covert predator.

Some of the climbing shoots that the group members came across were pitcherless. The hikers were certain that they were part of Nepenthes, a group that includes hundreds of pitcher plant species. The pitchers were found in the air. A group member found a cluster of maroon pitchers strung on a white shoot at the base of a tree.

Dr. Dank of Palack University Olomouc said they were surprised. Nobody would think that a pitcher plant with underground traps existed.

There are pitcher plants that grow traps that are covered by leaf litter or moss, but they are usually not functional. Nepenthes pudica has evolved to grow underground traps that are specialized to lure and catch underground insects.

The pitcher plants have different sets of pitchers. The survey found that N. pudica's traps catch a lot of prey, mostly ants. Thousands of insects were found in five underground pitchers.

Douglas Darnowski, a plant physiologist at Indiana University Southeast, was not involved with the work. Only the smallest of prey can be caught by the plants known for their traps. The largest underground traps can be up to four inches tall. The team reported last month that the walls of the traps were thicker than those of the upper pitchers.

The Latin word for bashful was used to describe this species. Maybe the plant is more devious. It may be possible to escape the intense competition for food near the forest floor by growing pitchers underground. Plants tend to grow on dry ridges and it may provide a wet environment that sustains them.

There are probably other pitcher plants that grow underground. He said that people may have looked at other species.

It may be rare. According to Dr. Dank, the team has only seen 17 of the plants on a single mountain, prompting the team to suggest treating the species as critically threatened.

The plants might face threats from illegal logging and the expansion of oil palm plantations. Many species of pitcher plants are popular with plant enthusiasts and may pose a greater threat to the environment than illegal logging. Some Indonesian species have been killed to satisfy the demands of overseas buyers.

One of the world's most rapidly vanishing environments is the Bornean tropical rainforest. We may lose organisms forever with everyhectare of this forest. Organisms that have existed here for a long time.