Sir David Attenborough You Just Made My Day!

Normally when I am working on developing an educational program or an exhibit I keep detailed bibliographies on all my sources, since the end product has to go through some serious critiques. But the one time I slip and find something truly cool I forget to write down the source and then spend the next 13 years trying to find it. 

The whole problem started when I set out to write a plant fact sheet about the Nepenthes gracilis.  This is an extremely large species of carnivorous pitcher plant which lives in tropical jungles of Southeast Asia. Unlike the pitcher plants most of us are used to seeing in swampy areas of North America these pitchers grow to close to twelve inches long and hang from a creeping vine.  Now a pitcher that large has to be catching and digesting something really cool, so to the literature I went.  A researcher went through a forest dumping out pitchers into a pan to inventory what the plant was digesting. In one pitcher he found half of a large dead rat.  Cool plants which can ever so slowly EAT A RAT!!!  What could be cooler than that?  For months I stuck to my guns telling everyone I hadn’t made it up while trying in vain to find the copy of the research paper.  No luck.

Fast forward 13 years and I am watching PBS’ Attenborough's Life Stories and who but Sir David Attenborough himself should say, while taking about Nepenthes gracilis, “they have even been found to be able to digest things as large as a rat.”  I backed up the DVR about three times just to make sure I had heard him right.  So for all you people who had doubted that I was right take it from Sir David Attenborough.

Scientists have discovered even more cool things about the Nepenthes sp. over the years, such as there are more than 150 different species of animals which will live inside the plants pitchers. Also the shape of the pitcher’s cover helps to drop insects into the digestive liquid when it rains.  The underside of the pitcher’s cover is coated in a flaky waxy like substance and when rain hits the top side it causes the insects to lose their grip and fall.  Also scientists have found a whole new species of Nepenthes which appears to be much larger than all the other known species. Also during this trip scientists found a species of Nepenthes which had been thought to be extinct.

Want to know more:

http://www.botany.org/carnivorous_plants/nepenthes.php
http://www.sarracenia.com/faq/faq5400.html
http://www.sccarnivorousplants.com/troppitch.html
http://www.kew.org/plants-fungi/Nepenthes-rajah.htm