How Do Venus Flytraps Reproduce In Nature

Many people think Venus Fly Traps are tropical species when, in fact, they are native only to a small region of North Carolina and a little bit of South Carolina. This is where you’ll see the white dots of their flowers scattered over the landscape. People are often surprised to find that their flowers, while lovely, don’t strike you as anything remarkable or unusual, considering the rest of the plant is the one plant that lives on dry land and has snap traps. So, of course, that’s the thing that’s going to garnish all the attention. An immense amount of research has been done on these traps, but there is very little research about how they actually reproduce in their native environment. Most of what we know about them comes from laboratory and greenhouse situations, but these other aspects of this ecology are essential. Especially now that there’s concern about its conservation status.

They grow within a 70-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina, which is currently threatened by urban sprawl and overdevelopment.

Venus flytraps depend on fire. So without fire, the Venus flytrap gets overgrown by taller plants, and in unmanaged areas that might not be getting the regular fire it needs, they start to disappear.

Another problem they face is poaching. Many people still go out and collect these plants, and subsequently, it’s now a candidate for listing under The Endangered Species Act.

So researchers have recently started trying to answer two main questions:

  • What pollinates Venus flytrap because there was no information to date on that.
  • The second thing they wanted to know was, do they ever eat their pollinators? While this idea sounds a bit self-defeating, you’d think plants would evolve to avoid eating things responsible for their reproduction.

The natural terrain in the 70-mile radius of Wilmington is just an enchanting and beautiful environment; the cool thing about this habitat is it has one of the most diverse habitats in the world. It’s known for having a very high concentration of species in such a small amount of space, many of which you can’t find anywhere else in the world. 

Researchers started out by collecting samples of insects in this area that were collecting pollen and nectar from flowers. They also collected insects from inside the Venus flytraps by prying the traps open with a pair of forceps and scooping out what was captured. They then took all of those samples back to the lab and swabbed the pollen off their bodies to see if Venus flytrap pollen was present. 

Venus flytrap pollen is large and multi-lobe, very distinctive from other kinds of pollen. A few top candidates, such as the green sweat bee and a couple of species of flying beetles, were thought to be the primary pollinators. But there was minimal overlap between the species caught collecting pollen on the flowers versus what they pulled out of traps.

How The Venus Flytrap Does Not Eat Its Pollinators

They followed up to see if more pollinators would result in more flytraps in the next generation. So they hand-pollinated certain flowers with extra pollen and checked back to see if they produced additional seeds. And they did, which means that more pollinators would mean more seeds. This reinforced the idea that these plants should not eat their pollinators, considering that the number of pollinators at their flowers is already limited.

But that still leaves the question of what the mechanism used for how they pollinate is?

There are two main hypotheses or trains of thought for this.

  • One is that the Venus flytrap’s long flower stalk creates enough distance between the flowers and the traps, which could be a strategy to avoid eating their pollinators. So research is now being done to test this hypothesis by manipulating model Venus flytraps so that the flowers are closer to the traps and seeing if you get a subsequent overlap in the pollinator and prey communities.
  • The second hypothesis is that the difference in scents or the differences in color of the Venus flytrap’s flower and traps attract different species.

How Do Venus Flytraps Reproduce In Nature​ Conclusion

There are cases where a rare plant is so rare that it fails to attract pollinators, and there are cases where a plant may become rare because the pollinator community itself is threatened.

So, plant conservation and insect conservation kind of goes hand in hand. Regardless of the cause, be it overdevelopment, lack of naturally occurring fires, poaching, or the loss of its pollinators, it is vital that we do more research on this charismatic species and its environment to save them from extinction.

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