#heliamphora

Reworked Waiting for a bite to eat I: Botanical Conservatory. UC Davis, 12-13-18. (Reworked 08-20-22.)

First: good name idea, might chew on it. I am inordinately fond of wordplay and references, so unless welcome-to-the-jungle is already taken I may make an attempt with that, too.

Second: you have enabled me!

So, last time we talked about flytraps and sundews, yes? Well today we're gonna talk about waterwheels and heliamphora!

Waterwheels are cool, but also kinda weird even by carnivorous standards. To put it bluntly, they're the underwater version of the Venus flytrap. They snap shut on their prey when their sensor hairs get triggered!

They're also, to reiterated the above summary, odd. They don't have roots, per se? The junction where the trap meets the rest of the plant contains an air sac, and this basically lets the plant just... float along. Speaking of which, all those circular wheels? Every one of the round bits on the end is a mouth. They grow eternally on one end and die eternally on the other, and they do this very quickly. A healthy specimen will grow (and lose) a full wheel set per day.

(Apologies for the GIF quality here, there's precious few examples of the Waterwheel in action)

The wheel-mouths themselves are small, much smaller then their flytrap counterparts, but to make the whole thing even stranger, the strands can get up to over a foot long. Just imagine this long, algae-looking string just floating along, but all the 'leaves' are hungry mouths. Isn't it just fantastically bizarre?

Next, the heliamphora!

Now here, I must admit a mistake. The heliamphora's common name is Sun Pitcher, and this means that I forgot a pitcher plant in my original pitcher-plant-post. Even worse... guess which continent heliamphora are native to.

South America. That's right folks, pitchers evolved independently of each other on four different continents. Isn't that just wild?

Now, to talk about these darlings! They're unique among pitchers for their lack of a 'lid', or a hood on top. They're quite small, quite chunky, and they clump. They're also gorgeously colorful, it's my personal opinion that part of why they're named sun pitchers is because they look like they trapped sun colors in their bodies. In reality this is inaccurate, and it's a poor translation of the greek word for 'marsh', but I like to dream. Their throats are lined with stiff hairs that face downwards, which function rather like a Chinese finger trap - easy going in one direction, an absolute nightmare in the other. Three guesses as to how it keeps it's victims from escaping and the first two don't count!

Like literally all other carnivorous plants, heliamphora love to be wet - and, like their (inaccurate) common name suggests, they love sun. Fun fact, it's suspected that the heliamphora actually relies on a certain amount of sunlight each day to be able to maintain it's carnivorous status! I'm not certain of the science behind it, but I believe that sunlight triggers a certain chemical process that aids in the plant's 'digestion'.

Also known as South American pitcher plants, the twelve species that make up the Heliamphora genus have an extremely limited distribution range: they can be found on “the sandstone formations of the South American Guiana plateau in the border region between Venezuela, Brazil, and Guiana”. Heliamphora plants are notable for the way they “colonize infertile soils on sites that are kept constantly moist by fog, with high levels of sunlight.”

First discovered in 1838 by German naturalist Robert Hermann Schomburgk (who encountered the species now known as Heliamphora nutans), these plants have well-developed root systems and feature funnel-shaped pitchers that function as pitfall traps to capture insects. Unlike other types of pitcher plants, however, Heliamphora plants do not have any digestive enzymes of their own, and instead rely on the bacteria living in within the fluid of their pitchers to help break down captured prey.