Birds and Nature, Vol. 08, No. 5, December 1900: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and Nature, Vol. 08, No. 5, December 1900: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
Another group of carnivorous plants consists of the sun-dews which
grow in swampy regions and are quite common in our sphagnum swamps.
While the pitcher plants depend upon luring insects to their death
by drowning, the sun-dews depend upon stickiness. The leaves form
small rosettes on the ground and are of various shapes. In one of the
most common forms the leaf blade is round, and the margin is beset by
prominent bristle-like hairs, each with a globular gland at its tip.
Shorter gland-bearing hairs are scattered over the inner surface of
the blade. All of these glands secrete a clear sticky fluid which
hangs to them in drops like dewdrops, and since these dewdrops are not
dispelled by the sun the plants have been called the sun-dews. If a
small insect, in flying or creeping across the plant, happens to touch
one of the sticky drops it becomes entangled, and then there follows
a curious scene. If the insect is small, the single bristle-like
hair, in whose sticky drop it has become entangled, will begin to
bend inwards and will finally press the captured insect down upon
the body of the leaf where the short glandular hairs receive it. If
the insect is strong enough, however, to escape from a single sticky
drop, neighboring hairs will bend toward the one which has captured
the insect, and by adding their mite of strength and glue, succeed in
detaining it until they all bend inwards and press it down upon the
leaf. In some cases the whole half of a leaf will roll inwards in this
attempt to secure an insect. In this position the captured insect is
gradually digested and its nutritive substances absorbed.
Perhaps the most famous and remarkable of the fly-catching plants
is the Venus fly-trap, known only in swamps near Wilmington, North
Carolina. This fly-trap does not depend upon drowning the insects, or
upon sticking them fast, but upon its quickness of movement. Of course
this seems most wonderful in plants, which are not ordinarily endowed
with powers of quick motion. Dionaea, for this is the name of the Venus
fly-trap, has a cluster of small leaves rising from the marshy ground,
just as is the case with pitcher plants and sun-dews. The lower part of
the leaf is like any ordinary blade, but above becomes pinched almost
in two, and then suddenly flares out again into a round blade-like
expansion which is constructed like a steel trap, the two halves
snapping together and the marginal bristles interlocking like the teeth
of a trap. A few sensitive hair-like feelers are developed on the leaf
surface, and when one of these is touched by a small flying or hovering
insect, the trap snaps shut and the insect is caught.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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