Double, double root and trouble: the witchy ways of carnivorous plants
Bladderworts, butterworts, sundews and sticky asphodels. This may sound like the forgotten line of the Witches' Chant, but it’s actually a list of Alaska’s carnivorous plants and the topic of a spooky science webinar on Oct. 2. To celebrate the spooky season, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service is hosting weekly webinars on the weird, the creepy and the extraordinary. To kick it off, they invited Bob Armstrong to talk about insect-eating plants. Bob Armstrong is a naturalist with a deep interest in entomology, an associate professor of fisheries and ornithology for the University of Alaska and the author of various books on Alaska’s natural history. Despite loving the prey of these plants, he agreed to share his knowledge about these fascinating carnivores. Bladderworts are aquatic plants that float near the water’s surface with no roots but a network of spindly leaves that are covered with bladders — the catching and digesting appendage of the bladderw
