In my ecology class our professor said that a lot of carnivorous plants are harvested in bulk from fragile & endangered wetlands ecosystems so it's not great to buy things like venus flycatchers from hardware stores. I was curious if you knew more about this since I've seen you post about carnivorous plants a lot
This is true, which is why you should always buy from a reputed breeder! usually what happens is that people think they’re widespread in their natural environments, so like, people wandering through the swamps in north and south carolina (yes, north and south carolina, USA. thats the native habitat of venus fly traps. not some remote jungle like you would expect. just…north and south carolina) are like ‘oh, a venus fly trap! i see them everywhere in stores, they must not be endangered in their natural habitat’ and take them/sell them without meaning any harm. there’s also, like you said, a certain population of criminals who raid these habitats for money, where the motivator is much more malicious. this is called poaching- an illegal process that is most widely associated with the trafficking of exotic animals, but happens similarly frequently in plants!
reputable breeders have gotten their stock from government expeditions, or, in the case of carnivorous plants not in the united states, have gone to the home country as a group of botanists and enthusiasts to take limited samples from the wild for breeding, and have gone through a LENGTHY process to get clearance for this. these expeditions are usually accompanied by scientists that study the condition of the habitats and take population counts and preform other tests to see the risk of the area for damage, and report the results to the government/to a public journal. many carnivorous plant habitats are already government protected areas.
this process- of a small amount of plants taken from the habitat by carnviorous plant scientists and experts working under their own passion and expertise, as well as local culture and laws, and taken these samples back to be bred for sale- has proven to be very affective against poaching. by selling the captive-grown plants legally, breeders tend to lower the market price of those plants dramatically, and because poachers are mostly looking for money from a one-off plant sale, plants with a smaller price tag just aren’t worth breaking the law for. this means that the poachers are more likely to leave the native habitats alone.
(its also important to note that poachers often don’t breed the plants; they just take and sell straight from the environment)
also, another thing to note: this goes for a lot of plants like orchids, who have a similar, if not greater, consumer base surrounding them demanding rarer and rarer species. this is why you hear about ‘rare orchids’ a lot, and orchids are…well, there’s 20,000 families of them, so it’s….a bit more dire.
the most reputable sellers are dedicated carnivorous plant greenhouses. the carnivorous plant reddit has a very solid and well-organized list of these here that you can buy from, although my favorite of these is probably California Carnivores. CC has been in business for a long time, and host one of the largest solely-carnivorous retail greenhouses in the united states. they’ve also funded SEVERAL research expeditions and maintains a formidable breeding operation (the owner, Peter D’amato, literally wrote the book on growing carnivorous plants in the 90s). Another big one is Native Exotics (you should see the community when NE updates their catalogue everyone looses their mcfucking minds for like 48 hours).
(sidenote here: generally, greenhouses and breeders keep a small private collection alongside their invintory to be sold. these are usually unlisted and used for breeding and keeping the gene pools of these species fresh, but are also seedlings being grown to maturity- sometimes over several years- to be sold as adults, used for more breeding, or used for education or for exhibits and shows. i just think thats facinating)
(side note AGAIN, yes these babs get taken to competitions and shows, for instance please behold the Borneo Exotics nepenthes greenhouse showcase at the 2011 chelsea flower show)
they’ve…..won the grand prize several times.
TRIPLE SIDE NOTE: Borneo Exotics- the same professional asian pitcher plant greenhouse shown in that pic- does a lot of wholesale. for the purpose of wholesale, they’ve developed a unique kind of packaging for their plants called a ‘Bio-dome’ that looks like this:
so if you see these at a local greenhouse, know that it’s from a reputable breeding operation and all that neat stuff.
another interesting thing in this industry talk to mention is how these research expeditions operate to get the plants legally accounted for and out of the country. one of my favorite plant lectures ever is one on the topic of conservation, sale, education, and poaching given at an International Carnivorous Plant Society conference in 2010 called ‘Nepenthes conservation through cultivation’. at the end of this talk, the presenter- Robert Cantley, the main director of Borneo Exotics- gets up and shows all the paperwork, taped end to end, that has to be filled out to get a single shipment of a single species through CITES, the international commission that polices the movement of endangered speices-both animal and plant- throughout the world. to move plants in and out of many countries, CITES officials must be contacted and an EXTENSIVE review process conducted, which is optimized for animals, not for plants. this poses some unique problems that he goes into depth with; basically, endangered plants tend to be neglected while in government custody, and can remain in that custody for an extended period of time while the paperwork is brushed aside as ‘not as important’ as the paperwork for endangered animals.
i would HIGHLY recommend watching the talk here, it’s like 40 minutes long and SUPER interesting.
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