My interest first started as a youngster when my parents took me to an
outdoor drive-in theater (CP eats man B movie-they would take me anywhere),
after which I ordered a VFT through a mail order house. I had to have one.
The plant did well for quite a while, but my interests took a detour and
it(the plant) finally succumbed to my inattentiveness.
While in College, although my main field of study was Marine Parasites, I was
blown away by the fact that certain mosquito larvae where able to flourish
within the pitcher of Sarracenia, seemingly unaffected.
A twenty year career as Marine Engineer ended with a bad landing in an
offshore storm, causing a nasty spinal compressing injury, and one of the
therapies that I underwent was spinal nerve blocks, of which one component
was an extract from Sarracenia!
My home is in Southern New England, where I live right on a good sized
pond/marsh/bog, that previously was a cedar swamp but was opened up in the
1930's by a fur trapper to raise and trap muskrats for pelts. Many visiting
friends have asked if there is a big insect problem in the warm summer
months. I would relate that around dusk there is an enormous amount of
swallow activity out on the pond, and that in the fourteen years that I have
lived there, I can't recall being bitten by mosquitos more than a handful of
times. I new that aside from an incredibly rich bird population, that there
would also be cp's in the wetlands. I recently began spending more time
studying this marsh and found that there is indeed a PROLIFIC population of
Sarracenia living at one end of the system(some of which are huge), along
with an as yet unidentified (to me) species of what I feel must be another
variety of cp.
I have not as yet studied the contents of the pitchers but are adult
mosquitos food? I wonder.
Thanks for listening; I enjoy this list immensly and-----
Have a Happy and Healthy Holiday!
Jon