Outdoor Elements
Sundew: Tiny Plant with a Big Appetite
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Outdoor Elements is a local public television program presented by PBS Michiana
Outdoor Elements
Sundew: Tiny Plant with a Big Appetite
Special | 2m 50sVideo has Closed Captions
No description
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipSunny bags are filled with amazing plant life, and this one that I'm in is no exception.
There's a very tiny plant that you have to look very closely for, but it has a big appetite.
Check this out.
Can you see this little plant?
It's a really tiny.
This is a round leaf sunda.
And some dos are carnivorous plants that actually eat insects.
They live in bog habitats.
And they're one of the largest groups of carnivorous plants.
If you look closely, there are hairs coming off of each of the round leaves and they look like they have little sticky fluid on the end.
That's what traps the insect.
The little gland at the tip of those hairs.
And the insects that fly by or crawl around, get stuck on those little sticky hairs and then the Sun Dew plant uses enzymes to digest the insect.
Once an insect kind of gets stuck on that leaf, the nearby hairs kind of curl around and trap and smother the insect.
Sometimes an insect can be trapped in about 15 minutes, but it may take several days or even several weeks for the Sun due to completely dissolve the insect.
So why do sand dunes trap insects?
Well?
Bugs are very low in nutrients.
The water is acidic, and the substrate or the growing material, which has lots of moss, has very little in the way of nutrients for plants to use.
So the plants that live here are very specialized.
I happened to find another species of sun do growing very close to the round leaf sun do.
This is a spatula it leaved sun do.
And if you look here, you can see the leaves are oval shaped instead of circular.
But it works the same way.
It simply traps insects on its sticky hairs and then dissolves them over time.
Both of these plants are really tiny.
So if you're walking along a bog, maybe on a boardwalk to look around, look closely because you just might find a sun do.
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Outdoor Elements is a local public television program presented by PBS Michiana