Meat-eating plants losing ground in U.S.

QUINCY, Calif. —

"This is the easy part," says Barry Rice, half-sliding, half-falling down a ravine through a latticework of dead branches.

Decades ago, lush stands of Darlingtonia californica — emerald plants coiled like fanged cobras ready to pounce — grew at this spot in the northern Sierra Nevada.

Deep in the ravine, the air is hot and dead. Pieces of bark that have sloughed off trees make every step a danger — nature's equivalent of a thousand forgotten skateboards cluttering a driveway. Slate tinkles underfoot, and the ground feels like stale angel food cake: stiff yet porous.

Rice, a botanist at the University of California, Davis, is not the first to hunt the cobra lily in Butterfly Valley. In 1875, amateur botanist Rebecca Austin fed the plants raw mutton and carefully observed how they digested it.

Yet, much of the plants' biology and habitat still remain unknown — which is why Rice is here, trying to find established populations.

Near the bottom of the crevice, the ground becomes moist. The air cools and softens. This is where the cobra lilies would be. "When you see them, they look almost like animals," Rice said.

But none are to be seen.

Rice does find meat-eaters in other places on this July weekend. But the plants have vanished in three of seven places where they used to be. It's a sad story that is playing out across the country in the valleys, bogs and bottoms where carnivorous plants once thrived.

The cobra lily, also known as the California pitcher plant, is comparatively lucky: Its stocks may be dwindling, but its broad habitat affords something of a safety net.

Many of its brethren are faring far worse: insect-devouring butterworts, bladderworts, sundews, other pitcher plants and, most famous of all, the Venus flytrap. The bulk of their U.S. habitat has disappeared, especially in the Southeast, mostly because of human encroachment: development, poaching and suppression of naturally occurring wildfires.

Woodland fires remove taller foliage that keep the stubby meat-eaters from receiving enough sunlight. Yet, because of development, allowing fires to burn in their habitats is often out of the question.

In California, alders have grown tall enough in some places to shade out the cobra lily.

In Georgia, botanists have hacked through thickening Appalachian forest in an effort to save the state's last remaining colony of mountain purple pitcher plants.

In North Carolina, of about 250 Venus flytrap sites that existed in the 1930s, about two-thirds are left and only 32 have a good shot at survival, said Rob Evans, coordinator of the North Carolina Plant Conservation Program.

What plants remain often are plucked from swamps and bogs by poachers and hawked at roadside stands, farmer's markets, nurseries or on the Internet.

"I remember visiting (one site) for the first time 30 years ago and there were probably 50 acres where you couldn't take a step without there being a flytrap, and 30 years later, not a flytrap to be found," said Johnny Randall, assistant director for conservation at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. "Literally hundreds of flytraps had been poached out of there."

The Venus flytrap possess a notable trait bequeathed by as much as 125 million years of evolution: the ability to capture and digest insects (and reputedly rats, in the case of Nepenthes rajah of Borneo, which can grow more than 3 feet high). Because they draw nutrients such as nitrogen from the carcasses of bugs instead of relying on roots to extract minerals from the ground, they can live in the poor-quality soil found in bogs.

Most meat-eating plants passively trap prey, relying on a bug's clumsiness or carelessness. Sundews exude a sticky substance that traps insects; the many varieties of pitcher plant just wait for bugs to fall into their vases.

Some, like the cobra lily, have downward-pointing hairs to prevent insects from climbing out, and transparent patches on their leaves to trick bugs into heading for false exits.

The Venus flytrap is one of the few that actively traps its prey. When an unsuspecting fly, lured by scent, lands on a trigger vein in the leaf, the leaf snaps shut like a jaw, caging the victim with sawtoothlike spines.

Carl Linnaeus, known as the father of modern taxonomy, at first dismissed reports of the plant. Charles Darwin, in his little-known work "Insectivorous Plants," said that, of all plants, the Venus flytrap was "one of the most wonderful in the world."

Its native habitat is limited to a few parts of North and South Carolina, where as few as 35,800 are left. Many more survive "in captivity," flytraps being one of the few carnivorous plants grown for a wider market.

Plants cultivated legally can be purchased in nurseries or the garden sections of hardware stores and supermarkets.

But taking carnivorous species from protected areas is illegal in many states. Law-enforcement officials in the Southeast have learned to look for telltale signs of poachers: A pickup parked on the side of the road bordering swampland is a giveaway.

Sgt. Jeremy Wall recalls heading into North Carolina's Green Swamp one day in fall 2007 after receiving a call from members of a hunting club. They had spotted a Nissan pickup on the side of the road in the middle of the 16,000-acre swamp.

Wall suspected drugs: The swamp provides cover for anyone looking to grow marijuana. A man then emerged from the woods with a backpack, and Wall knew what he was dealing with. The pack was stuffed not with pot, but with purple pitcher plants. The man and two companions had uprooted 500 of them, Wall said.

Still, they faced minimal punishment: The typical fine for a first offense in North Carolina is $100, plus a $125 court fee.

If the risks of poaching are low, so are the returns. The plants sell for 25 cents each on the black market, said Ron Robertson, an enforcement officer with the North Carolina commission.

Nevertheless, poaching "is in an upswing," said Lt. Matthew Long, one of Robertson's colleagues. "Because of the economy, people are more desperate. ... Even people who are scared to death of snakes — that's what they're willing to do."

Most law-enforcement agencies don't have the resources to pursue poachers aggressively. Instead, federal and state officials and conservation groups focus on keeping secret the locations of remaining sites and on educating the public on the need to respect and preserve meat-eating plants.

In Oregon, officials have set up a site dedicated to the preservation of the cobra lily.

In North Carolina, the Nature Conservancy operates the Green Swamp, home to at least 14 species of carnivorous plants, as a preserve. When poachers are nabbed, conservationists and government officials help replant the confiscated species in secret locations on protected property.