silvery bugs and puckered things
MBT1159@RIGEL.TAMU.EDU
Thu, 17 Feb 1994 19:57:58 -0600 (CST)
Ernest,
I think I know exactly what those silvery bugs you have are. I
had a pure peat terrarium for my VFTs and Sarracenia pur. pur. for a
while and I got tons of suh critters. Mine are called _Collembola_,
it's an order of primitive insects. They are more commonly known as
springtails. They are quite small and seem to scatter very rapidly when
you put your finger close to them or the soil they're on, not really
running, but just springing away like fleas. They can even move about
on the surface of water because of a little glue bar on their underside
and their obvious lightness. I changed my growing medium to about 30%
peat and 70% sand and their population decreased tremendously as did the
growth rate of my plants. (Not because of the bugs, however, just
better soil I think.) I keep that terrarium now with pitcher plants and
sundews (no VFTs) and the plants seem to have a rather nice source of
nutrition. :)
On the puckered things, I think I got exactly what you got and I
actually posted that recently. I was also told that it sounded like a
liverwort. It seems to be a very fleshy, but thin single "leaf" and
started out putting out spine-like things off it, but I now see that
those are roots.
There are just a LOT of them for the size of the plant. The plant grew off of
a piece of dried uncut sphagnum I had put in the terrarium. Sound familiar?
Good luck.
-Matthew