New England Carnivorous Plant Society

Pitcher plants-carnivorous flora that can be found across the world-have long been known to dine on living things, usually small insects and spiders. These plants have occasionally been spotted preying on larger vertebrates, but scientists believed these were rare occurrences. Canadian researchers were therefore quite surprised when they repeatedly observed pitcher plants snacking on baby salamanders.

In August 2018, Alex Smith, a biologist at the University of Guelph, was conducting field work with a team of undergraduates in Ontario's Algonquin Park, a vast stretch of hills, forests and lakes. Smith peered into a pitcher plant, expecting to find some small insects decaying in the liquid that pools inside the plant's pitcher-shaped leaves. Instead, "I see a juvenile yellow spotted salamander," Smith tells CBC Radio. "And I say, 'WTF?'"

Smith consulted with Patrick Moldowan, an ecologist at the University of Toronto who studies the salamander biology. Moldowan recalled that a 2017 survey had observed eight salamanders-six still living and two dead-inside pitcher plants living in a naturally acidic, fishless bog in Algonquin. Pitcher plants have evolved to thrive in such hostile environments. Bog soils are poor in nutrients like nitrogen, so pitcher plants use nectar to entice prey, which get caught in the plant's liquid pool and are eventually broken down by digestive enzymes.

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Across their kayaks, the three men passed the green shoot back and forth. Occasionally, one of them would cradle it in one palm and bring a hand lens to it with the other, inspecting the carnivorous plant that was their bounty.

By day's end, the group - Seth Cunningham and Michael Tessler, biologists at the American Museum of Natural History, and John Thompson, coordinator of the Catskill Regional Invasive Species Partnership - filled eight vials with the plant, Aldrovanda vesiculosa, also known as the waterwheel.

The plant shouldn't be in this small, privately owned pond in Orange County, N.Y., and it presents an ecological conundrum.

Around the world, the waterwheel is going extinct. But from summer through late fall, the carnivorous, rootless, wetland-loving plant is plentiful in this swampy body of water near the Catskill Mountains.

"It's either site zero for saving a species," Dr. Tessler said, "or site zero for a really big problem."

Think of the waterwheel as an underwater Venus flytrap. Its whorled shoots are tiny, typically shorter than eight inches and less than an inch thick. But for a plant, its diet is impressive: seed shrimp, shell-less crustaceans, insect larvae, and occasionally even tadpoles and small fish.

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