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Route won't disturb the pitcher plants
By BILL COATS
Published September 1, 2006
KEYSTONE - The next link of the Upper Tampa Bay Trail will cross the road with its own traffic light. It will be elevated above wetlands on a boardwalk. But it will detour around patches of pitcher plants. That's because the odd, tubular, insect-eating plants are a threatened species protected by federal and state law. Trail users won't be banned from the vicinity of the pitcher plants; they'll just have to walk to the eastern flank of the Montreux neighborhood to take a look. The plants are in the Brooker Creek Headwaters Nature Preserve, which already is open to hikers. "We're going to have an area where people can drop their bikes off and go hiking in there," said Richard Ross, the environmental scientist who serves as the preserve's live-in park ranger. For insects, a visit to a pitcher plant can be a one-way trip. The hoods of many pitcher plants secrete nectar; the insides emit an odor that attracts insects. But woe to a bug that takes this bait. The tube's inside is slick, with downward-directed hairs that impede an insect from climbing out. At the bottom of the tube waits a liquid pool, its elevation limited by the plant's hood. The bug drowns in a liquor of rainwater, enzymes and digestive acids. Pitcher plants grow in frequently flooded areas such as bogs and ditches, in soil that is nitrogen-poor. Insect corpses turn the liquor inside the plants' tubes into a nitrogen-rich fertilizer. - BILL COATS, Times staff writer
[Last modified August 31, 2006, 09:59:49]
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