Animals and Pitcher Plants

Volume 28, Number 4, April 2016

Weblinks

Animals and pitcher plants

Liz Sheffield

For a movie showing Sir David Attenborough explaining the relationship between tree shrews and some pitcher plants, as featured on the back page of this issue, see

To read more about this relationship, and some of the most up to date research on pitcher plants, see the following website: This site also has information about other animals that associate with pitcher plants without coming to harm, including bats that use pitchers as places to roost during the day. The plants have structures that reflect the bats’ ultrasonic calls back to them. This makes it easier for bats to find their plant partners in the cluttered forest, see and watch a movie of a bat locating and entering a pitcher here:

has some classic footage of a young David Attenborough in the ‘headquarters of the pitcher plants’ and some superb footage of crab spiders that live within pitchers — these spiders use the pitchers to catch their prey instead of making webs.

The rims of pitcher plants are most slippery after a shower of rain — see New Scientist, No. 2659,
4 June 2008, which includes a movie showing how this works ( We now know how this on–off mechanism functions in a lethally effective way with the biology of social insects such as ants — see Recent research has also shown how the lid of some pitchers can act as a springboard to bounce prey into the pitcher during showers of rain. See the movie here:

In August 2015 it was reported that some pitcher plants can help certain insects, by trapping and killing their predators — see for the story of how a North American pitcher plant might come to the rescue of European bees threatened by invading Asian hornets. If research reveals what attracts the hornets to the plants, we may have a chemical weapon that can be used against these invaders.

The following photographic series shows the beautiful range of different types of pitchers that plants can produce: and the following site has some excellent pictures of a range of carnivorous plants: For time-lapse footage of pitcher plants and other carnivorous species growing and using their traps see but what for me is the best time lapse of pitchers developing can be found here: (more tree shrew footage on this site too).

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