Re: Insect-Eating flowers

DAVIDDOG@aol.com
Tue, 9 Jan 1996 19:15:27 -0500

There are to my knowledge at least four families of plants in which flowers
occur that trap and incidentally kill their pollenating insects ( but don't
digest them and so are not "carnivorous" ); the waterlily family
Nymphaeaceae, the arum or philodendron family Araceae, the milkweed family
Asclepiadaceae, and the pipevine family Aristolochiaceae. Less clear are the
trapping features of the orchid family, Orchidaceae, where many flowers
exsist that variously dunk, slap, tease, imitate, and do practicaly anything
but trap their insect. There was rumored to be a trapping orchid: Masdevallia
muscosa - if anyone knows anything of it I would be most interested.

Evolutionarily, there would be nothing stopping a plant from trapping for
consumption any and all non-pollenating insects as long as that did not
affect their target pollenator species.
Its a fascinating question: why haven't carnivores evolved to more directly
exploit the pollenating habits of insects? Or do the pitcher plants do this?

David

daviddog@aol.com

>Subject: Re: New CP???????????
>Message-ID: <960109102400_36209461@mail06.mail.aol.com>

>A webcrawler search on "carnivorous plants" turned up Sally & Co. Seeds
page,
>an online catalog which lists a "Chinese Fly-Catching Vine" Aristilochia
>plant with long, peculiar, insectivorous flowers." I'm just a novice in
this
>hobby, but in all of my reading, I've NEVER come across this cp, and I've
>seen stated repeatedly that pollination and fertilization are evolutionary
>separate functions in cps, i.e. you'd be more likely to find a 30'
man-eating
>Drosera than you would an insect-eating flower. Can somebody set me
straight
>on this?