y’know, when i look at new plants i always like to think of and consider my own first impressions. Philcoxia was a genus i’d heard of in passing in terms of carnivorous plants, but because it’s so rare and i’d never seen it cultivated or talked about extensively in any of the hobbyist things i’ve ever attended, i honestly kind of forgot about it until tonight, when i stumbled across it on the (technically incomplete as of right now but eh) ‘list of carnivorous plant species’ article on wikipedia.
the article gave a brief overview, but didn’t have any images or in-depth explanation, so i ended up stumbling across the actual paper that first described it’s carnivory (in the species Philcoxia bahiensis) back in 2012. for those curious, a carnivorous plant is only considered carnivorous if it can be proven that it’s using materials (usually nitrogen) from a freshly dead animal or plant to directly influence it’s growth, so usually scientists will put radioisotopes of nitrogen on the parts they suspect to be killing and eating things and check back in a couple days with imaging equipment to see if the plant has absorbed it and moved it around, and if it has, then they have support for potential carnivory. on a related note, a plant is considered ‘protocarnivorous’ if it kills things but hasn’t started to eat them yet, and these plants are considered to be on the evolutionary path to carnivory.
anyway. so i look at the paper, and in the introduction they’re describing this typical nitrogen testing process, and they’re very certain about their resulting data confirming their hypothesis, which surprised me because there’s usually a lot of hemming and hawing in these papers in recent years over wether or not the plant is Valid or not. i think it’s a matter of low-hanging-fruit; we’ve seen all the venus fly traps in the world, and now we’re in the age of finding really, really weird and unexpected ways that other plants are eating stuff, and usually they’re plants we wouldn’t expect, or haven’t expected so far in science, and it’s a lot less clear cut what we should and shouldn’t technically count. ‘holy shit,’ i think, ‘this must be like, a real, traditional-style carnivorous plant. like this isn’t beating around the bush here’.
now until this point, i’d only done a google image search for it, to which i was jarred by the results and thought ‘no, that can’t be it’, because google images can easily return the wrong plant you’re looking for when you search it. i assumed that was what happened. so i scrolled down, waiting to see what kind of plant could return such a result so certainly.
but you see lads, it was true. and as i scrolled down from the paper’s abstract and saw it, real photos of this plant eating nematodes with underground carnivorous leaves in the brazilian desert, and realized that it was really true, for whatever reason my immediate and persisting first impression is and was, ‘oh my god, it’s a dumbass thot. this plant has dumbass thot energy’. i cannot shake this very specific impression. lets take a look
these are from the article. you see, much of the plant is buried underground, being carnivorous to nematodes and living it’s life. but lets take a look at what evolution made here, lads. a mature plant uncovered in it’s full glory
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
