Predatory Plants: Lure of the Cobra Lily

[Music] Kobra lilies are devious plants in fact they're almost insidious in the way that they use the insects brain against it they lure the insect in and convince the insect to make all the wrong decisions [Music] we're here at butterfly Valley Botanical area in Plumas National Forest this fend that we're standing in is a place where water flows in spreads out it moves very very slowly fens are very difficult places for plants to live in because of the low nutrient level and so you get very specialized plants living in a site like this most people think that carnivorous plants must be found in Madagascar or the Amazonian rainforest but actually North America is a real hot spot for carnivorous plant biodiversity in fact we have several species of carnivorous plants here in California including the California Cobra Lily which is only found in California and Oregon the Cobra Lily earned this name because of the two fangs that descend from the top of the pitcher it's a very elegant name and very descriptive of how these plants look like reared Cobras ready to strike it's Latin name is darlingtonia californica it's not a lily at all it's a pitcher plant prey are attracted to darling Tony Adventures because they think that the pictures of flower and in fact on the fangs of the pitcher there's a lot of nectar insects eat the nectar and as they browse around they ultimately climb into the underside of the pitcher where they find themselves in a big chamber they can't figure out how to get out to add to their confusion the top of the chamber is illuminated by fenestrations these clear windows in the top of the pitcher the insect runs back and forth back and forth until it makes a mistake it drops down the descending pitcher to downward pointing hair is ensure that the insect can't escape and the insect ultimately drowns in the fluid in the bottom it turns out that cobra lilies don't actually do the digestion themselves inside the pitcher tube there are midge larvae slime mites and our bacteria these organisms are called commensals they do the digestion and they excrete the nutrients the darlingtonia plant absorbs the other kind of risk plant you're likely to find here in the valley is drosera rotundifolia the round leaf sundew this plant works by having a bunch of little leaves which are shaped like paddles and at the end of each paddle are a bunch of glandular hairs at the tip of each glandular hair is a little droplet of mucus insects land on the glandular hairs are stuck they can't escape it's like glue and then over a day the leaf curls around the bug digests it and then brings in nutrients into the plant plants need basic nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus in conventional plants can take those nutrients up from the soil through their roots in this habitat there aren't very many nutrients in the water and in the soils and so carnivorous plants have found a novel way to get those nutrients by just capturing insects and eating them directly animals eat to gain nutrients and energy carnivorous plants eat just to gain the nutrients there's still photosynthetic plants and so they gather all the energy they need from the Sun one of the greatest dangers that cobra lilies face today changes in hydrology how the water flows through the ecosystem we don't really know how that's going to change in the future with climate change but if the site like this dries up the darlingtonia will die what makes butterfly Valley Botanical areas so special is that it's one of the only sites that they're given a good conservation status and good protection there are other darlingtonia sites throughout the Sierra Nevada and up to Oregon but most of those sites do not have the same level of protection in habitats like this where there are very few nutrients carnivorous plants act as the top predator in the ecosystem and they'll eat just about anything that they can lure into them it seems strange to us that a plant can be carnivorous we've got used to what we think of as a natural order of things where people and animals eat plants not the other way around imagine sitting down at a salad and having a salad to eat you it's an inversion of how we think that the normal world should be [Music] you you

Channel: KQED SCIENCE

Views: 282,889

Rating: 4.8207946 out of 5

Keywords: science, nature, environment, KQED, Biology (Field Of Study), Ecology (Field Of Study), Carnivorous Plant (Informal Biological Grouping), Plant (Organism Classification), Insect (Organism Classification), Flowers, Flower, Darlingtonia Californica (Organism Classification), sundew, Drosera Rotundifolia (Organism Classification), Barry Rice, Josh Cassidy

Id: TJpC05V2EaE

Length: 5min 35sec (335 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/prospekt403]

Conclusion of this video: I NEED MORE PLANTS.