I F%$#ing Love Nature

It appears that there is a flower that has been hiding its carnivorous nature from us puny humans.

I'm considering cross breeding it with Marijuana, and creating Cannibal Sativa:

This wildflower looks innocent. Found in wetlands not far from major cities in the Pacific Northwest, it lures in pollinators with white blossoms atop a long, sticky stem. You can even buy seeds of the Western false asphodel in garden stores.

But according to new research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, botanists have overlooked a distinguishing feature of the perennial: It is the world’s newest and most unexpected carnivorous plant.

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While the Western false asphodel is found in the sorts of environments where other carnivorous plants turn up, Dr. Lin said, nobody suspected it might be carnivorous, too. “This plant has long been ignored, because they don’t have any uses and people just don’t know much about them.”

During the summer flowering season, Western false asphodels produce leafless flowering stems up to 31 inches tall, which are covered in sticky hairs. While herbarium specimens often have small flies or beetles stuck to those hairs, it was generally believed that the hairs were part of the plant’s defense strategy, killing insects that might attack the leaves and flowers, Dr. Lin said.

The first clue that the plant had an appetite for insects came when T. Gregory Ross, also at the University of British Columbia, noticed markers in the plant’s genetics sometimes associated with carnivorous plants. That was enough for Dr. Lin and his colleagues to take another look.

To prove that a plant is carnivorous, you have to show that nutrients travel from animals to plant. To test this, Dr. Lin and his colleagues laced fruit flies with nitrogen-15 isotopes and placed them on the false asphodel’s stems, as well as on the carnivorous sundew and the more innocuous wandering fleabane.

When they checked all three plants’ nitrogen levels, Dr. Lin said, they found that the sundew and the false asphodel had absorbed roughly the same amount of nitrogen isotopes. And to clinch it, the hairs on the false asphodel’s stem secreted a phosphatase, a digestive enzyme many carnivorous plant species use to pull phosphorus from insects. The Western false asphodel was indeed digesting prey.

This cool as hell, and just a little bit creepy.