Gently stick a toothpick past the stigma and try to collect pollen from the anthers.
WILD AT HEART DEADLY PREY GALLERY FULL
When a butterwort’s flower is in full bloom, look down its “throat” – you’ll find the stigma hanging in front of the anthers. But for others, you’ll have to hand-pollinate the flowers yourself in order to score some seeds. In order of decreasing difficulty, we’ll cover seeds, leaf pullings, offsets, and transplanting.Īll of these methods work best when completed in late winter, rather than during the growing season.Īdditionally, any water used in propagation should be distilled, gathered rainwater, or filtered via reverse osmosis, since these plants are pretty sensitive to the minerals and salts found in tap water. You can propagate these bad boys in a variety of different ways. Here, we’ll tackle indoor cultivation, starting with propagating new plants. In the 1970s, Donald Schnell and Jurg Steiger added new taxons to the collective body of butterwort knowledge.Īt the hobbyist level, green thumbs far and wide enjoy growing butterworts in their homes and landscapes. Scandinavian folklore and historical accounts dating back at least 150 years describe inoculating milk with butterwort leaves to create a Lactococcus bacterial culture for fermenting a yogurt-like dairy product known as tettemelk, långfil, or filmjölk, among other names.Īnd enzymes produced by butterworts were also commonly used by Scandinavians to tenderize meat and curdle milk, until the early 1900s when other sources of protease enzymes became available.īy the 1960s, German botanist Siegfried Jost Casper had monographed all the known Pinguicula plants at the time. Northern Europeans were aware of the antibacterial properties of these plants centuries ago, and rubbed butterwort leaves on cattle sores as a way to sterilize wounds. This nutritional demand spurred their carnivorous adaptation, which allowed them to obtain the nutrition they required from insects, rather than the soil. This process saves the plant energy in the long run – producing and maintaining leaves that secrete digestive enzymes can be metabolically expensive.īoy, that was a lot to digest! Cultivation and HistoryĪt some point in their evolutionary history, the predecessors to butterworts found themselves in barren soils and in dire need of nutrients. Select species of butterworts will develop non-carnivorous leaves during dormancy that solely carry out photosynthesis, as a way to stay sated while enduring the absence of edible bugs in cold weather.Ĭome spring, new insectivorous foliage develops.
These glands then reabsorb the insect slurry, which allows butterworts to obtain nutrients that they’re unable to take up through the typically barren soils in their growing environment.Īt this point, some species curl their leaves as a way to avoid enzyme runoff and protect their catch from the elements.Īfter digestion and absorption are complete, the bugs’ exoskeletons tend to remain in place on the foliage for the rest of the growing season, and are protected from bacterial rotting via a bactericide produced by the leaves. As all this is happening, a secondary set of glands coats the caught bugs with digestive enzymes, which effectively melt their guts into a nice, readily digestible paste.
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