Waterwheel: This Carnivorous Plant Invaded New York. That May Be Its Only Hope.
Source: New York Times
This Carnivorous Plant Invaded New York. That May Be Its Only Hope.
The waterwheel lives a double life: facing extinction in its native habitat even as it creeps into places where it doesn’t belong.
By Marion Renault
Aug. 13, 2019
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.”
-snip-
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/science/waterwheel-plants-carnivorous.html