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The International Carnivorous Plant Society and the International Union for Conservation of Nature Carnivorous Plant Specialist Group are stepping into Round 1 of the Uproar Conservation Challenge hosted by the Indianapolis Zoo And our opponent? Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing — Ornithoptera alexandrae Represented by the IUCN SSC Butterfly and Moth Specialist Group Everyone, We need your support. We are representing the Green Pitcher Plant — Sarracenia oreophila and we need to have this butterfly for lunch. Round 1 Details • Voting begins: 9:00 AM EDT (1:00 PM GMT) — March 16 • Voting ends: 11:59 PM EDT — March 19 • (3:59 AM GMT — March 20) The challenge is modeled after a U.S. basketball tournament bracket. • 64 threatened species compete head-to-head • Winners advance through five rounds • Only one species per matchup moves forward • The farther a species advances, the more conservation funding it earns Species eliminated in Rounds 1 or 2 receive $500, but we’re not here for $500…we want the $10,000!~ We’re here to win the whole thing. So carnivorous plant people… let’s show the world what happens when a pitcher plant enters the arena. 👉 Register and vote: https://www.indianapoliszoo.com/uproar-conservation.../ Let’s advance Sarracenia oreophila to Round 2. 🌱🔥

The International Carnivorous Plant Society (ICPS) is now accepting expressions of interest to host the 2028 ICPS Conference. By rotation, the 2028 conference is scheduled to be held in Australasia, and preference will be given to proposals from this region. We especially encourage carnivorous plant societies, universities, botanical gardens, and similar organizations in the region to consider submitting a proposal. Applications and questions should be directed to Board Member for Conferences, Brent Jones (brent@carnivorousplants.org) and Marcel van den Broek (marcel@carnivorousplants.org). Please address your proposal to both contacts. The expression of interest period will remain open until August 1, 2026 and the successful host will be notified shortly after the deadline. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, email us to request a Conference Manual, which provides detailed guidance for preparing a bid.

BIG new feature - We now support spreadsheet uploads to collecto.rs! For everyone with an existing spreadsheet, we've made it super easy to migrate on over without having to start from scratch. For the moment, we're testing things with a structured spreadsheet format. Here's how to use it: 1. Signup for a collecto.rs account and set your username. 2. Duplicate this Google sheet and copy+paste your data into the relevant columns. - Please choose from the drop-down options in those columns with pre-defined choices (don't edit the pre-defined options in these columns). - Any images you'd like included need to be hosted at a publicly-accessible URL. 3. Leave a message here with a link to this spreadsheet, or email it to me at david@collecto.rs when it's ready to be uploaded to your account. Alternatively, you can send your existing spreadsheet to david@collecto.rs and I can format it for you and get it uploaded to your account. We're working towards a user-facing feature that allows the upload of any spreadsheet, interprets the data in that spreadsheet, and then intelligently matches that data to the columns in our database that make the most sense.

If you are struggling to find a romantic activity for Valentines Day, the Los Angeles Carnivorous Plant Society has you covered. The next meeting will be February 14 in Woodland Hills, the Paris of California. Details: https://www.lacps.org/news/2026/02/02/february-meeting-woodland-hills

I tend to just let my plants just do there own thing, but gradually over the years the moss in the pots is starting to take over and appears to be smothering the plant's. Do i leave alone or tackle the problem when the plants come out of dormancy.

I'm back with a sequel. When I built Carnivorous Plant Resource, it was at a time when the community lacked modern, responsive tools to access free plant information online. The site evolved into a general-purpose tool for carnivorous plant folks, hosting growing info, club/society even info, and even a marketplace to access private collections. I've noticed a similar lack of modern tools in the growlist tracking space. I see friends using spreadsheets and forum posts - functional, but far from ideal. So, I built collecto.rs with some fellow hobbyists. Here's my example profile: https://collecto.rs/David collecto.rs supports a handful of features that outcompete spreadsheets and simple forum posts: • A web app that looks great and is easy to navigate across any sized screen - mobile, tablet, or desktop. • Plant images featured front-and-center in both grid and list views - way more visually appealing than a spreadsheet. • Powerful filtering, sorting, and searching making it easy to find the right plant/s in your collection, or a friend's. • Easy sharing of your full collection, a filtered view of your collection, or even a specific plant. Don't want to share? - Set your entire collection, or specific items to private. • Use our database of 300,000 plants (and growing) to quickly and easily build out your collection, or manually add your plant and the details that are important to you (CSV/spreadsheet import feature being worked on now). • Mark plants for sale or trade (trade coming soon!) • Light mode/dark mode for easy viewing. • LOTS more fun ideas in the pipeline. I'm hoping you give it a shot, setup your collection, and share it with me along with your thoughts on how we can build an even better tool. We're a small team building this as a passion project (yeah, it's free) with big goals to build the best growlist and collection tracking tool out there - and we want your input on the features and functionality that is most important to you!

A friend and I have created a website that lists all carnivore stamps. This site is currently under construction... Please feel free to leave us comments. Thank you. https://www.carnivorous-stamps.com

Awesome!! I hope I can be there 😊

Had my best season yet with Cephalotus 'Eden Black' growing outdoors in San Diego (Southern California USA). The color really started to show up as the temperatures cooled down.

Is anyone able to share where I would find the sarracenia in this location please? Spent a few hours wandering today and couldn’t find anything.

The Total Hardness (mg CaCO3/l) appears to have jumped from 11 to close to 27 but not sure if thats a typo

Just bumping this with latest water quality report for comparison. My sarracenia smoori has since passed away a few years now and i am assuming it wasn't the water. Thinking of getting another sarracenia but don't know whether to get one now as a near dormant or wait until spring time. Latest water quality Total Hardness (mg/l) 10.7 Magnesium (mg/l) 0.9 Potassium (mg/l) 0.5 Calcium (mg/l) 9.2 Total Hardness (mg CaCO3/l) 26.8 Clark English Degrees 1.9 French Degrees 2.7 German Degrees 1.5 NI Hardness Classification Soft Dishwasher Setting 0

Hi all, it's been a while. So, recently I got some news sars who sadly both succumbed to rhizome rot within a few months and this has left me paranoid. Now, my hybrid (Might be Barba? It's a purpura hybrid anyway) i've had for 19 years at this point, it's a very old plant and has been divided so many times i'm now drowning in divisions. Most of them are doing great, but after a very hot summer and a lot of sudden very wet weather following those 36C days i'm looking at some unhappy individuals. seems to be the middle sized divisions that are suffering the worst. The big ones I suppose have a big enough rhizome that gives them enough energy to just keep chugging along and the small ones don't have much at all but the middle ones apparently were the sweet zone for problems. yesterday I decided to lift each pot out of the water tray and give them all a bit of a late summer hair cut so their new growth had space and light to come through. A lot of them threw up very large pitchers over the spring and now those are dying back and looking a bit messy. They're also tangling into one another and deforming as a result. This was a good chance to get a really good look at each plant, remove all the baby snails, the slug eggs (Gross) and check for any other pests or disease. most of them look pretty normal. A few unhappy leaves here and there but that's again pretty typical with a big plant, some leaves end up too shaded by other leaves or get blocked and end up bending or twisting to try to find some light and space. But One particular plant when I grabbed at a dead leaf "rewarded" me with a whole chunk of rhizome and several leaves attached. Maybe I shouldn't "pluck" the leaves that look like they've died all the way back. (is leaf plucking/pulling a bad idea? It's what I have always done for pitchers that have died fully back. Should I cut them instead?) Uh oh, I thought. So I went over it with a fine tooth comb (so to speak) and while there are some yellowish looking pitchers, it's really hard to tell whether that's just normal. I mean a fair few of these pitchers have sunburn spots anyway. Certainly it's not as obvious as the two who died, those had blanched to a pale sickly yellow or white tone with brown splotches here and there and were wilting and dying back before the pitchers could mature. this isn't showing that at all, in fact it had new growth, but because i'm now paranoid, I pulled it out of the soil anyway to see. and we DO have some rot. it's not super mushy rot like the ones who died, but it's brown and in places a bit soft. Because i'm now paranoid about it, I decided it was better safe than sorry so I cut it away as best I could and ended up with four divisions in the process (and a chunk of rhizome with no leaves but roots. Drat. I planted it on the offchance but how much hope does a chunk without leaves actually have you think?) I mean my assumption is that if it's really mushy that's probably not a good sign. While if it's brown but still fairly firm it's likely just age but I wanted some clarification on that front because as I said, having lost two plants within as many weeks, i'm now paranoid about what's going on below the surface and losing my very old sars would be devastating. Let me add some pictures, see what the experts think. Because honestly, despite caring for this plant for so many years, I still don't feel like I really know what i'm doing. The "sick" plants are all currently on a table in the garden so I can keep a better eye on them. But i'm now concerned that there's something sinister sweeping through the shared water trays the big plants have. Is there any preventative anti fungal or something I should be using? What can I do to try to reduce the risk of rot?

Hi, I plan to move my carnivorous plant collection over to Bulgaria from the UK in October. Unfortunately I am finding it difficult to obtain pure peat, all the peat sold where our house is has nutrients and pH modifiers in it! I have contacted the peat manufacturer but they can only sell me a lorry load (300+ 250l bales) Can anyone suggest a supplier in Bulgaria please or neighbouring countries where I can obtain the peat for my plants? I have several hundred mainly Sarracenia gained over 30+ years so don't want to lose them. Kind regards Paul

Thanks, I've contacted the vendor in case he had more information. He told me that he’s going to remove the label while the matter is being investigated. I hope to learn more, but I’ll keep it labeled as an unnamed Dionaea. If I’m not confident about its identity, I prefer not to mislead other collectors in case of future sales or exchanges.

The point is that you don't even know what you received, it's likely that the plant is already circulating under another name. If it's yours and it is from seed do what you want. Then, to be honest, I do not see much of an issue anyway, but this is just my opinion and I'm definitely not a Dionaea collector. Registered or not hardly makes any difference, you could just use "name" instead of 'name' and everything would be correct. Anyway, the whole "cultivars" situation is messed up beyond repair at this point, they are all just named individuals. The real meaning of cultivated variety would be very different, but as the rules allow the registration of basically anything, it all results to be correct and valid. If something has to be propagated vegetatively then it has clearly nothing to do with a "variety". Selecting a "real" cultivar would require an enormous amount of time, space and work.

Thank Topfrog for your intels, So I can label and sell it as Dionaea muscipula (red and green margin, unofficial), but not as 'Bloody Green Saw' because it's not an officially registered cultivar or described in the literature? Or is it simply because its phenotypic stability has not been confirmed? From what I understand, a cultivar must exhibit a stable and distinct phenotype that can be consistently maintained through vegetative propagation. However, if a unique phenotype arises from a single seedling, how can its stability be demonstrated or validated without several cycles of clonal propagation confirming the consistency of its traits over time? Does this mean that if I acquire a Dionaea specimen without a label, I can never assign it to a particular cultivar, even if its characteristics appear to match those of an established one? I'm not sure if my questions are entirely clear.

Naming it for your own colection is obviously entierly up to you. But I would advice not to sell divisions with that name in the future.

Thanks, Pico! So I guess I’m free to name it however I like for my collection, ‘Bloody green saw’ is winning for now! Btw, i'm still looking for 'Akai ryu' 😉

It's definitely not 'Akai ryu' but you will never be able to know how it was labelled before (if it was), except if the previous owner acknowledges a mistake and is able to figure out what you received. There is nothing special about all those named clones (registered as "cultivar" or not), they are just individual plants to which someone attached a random name, mostly to inflate prices and sell them to label-collectors. If you are looking for a dark plant with saw-like teeth cross two plants which have those characteristics and you'll likely end up with a lot of different plants that looks exactly as you wanted. They are not hybrids at all, they are just different individuals. Whatever you got at least looks nice!

Hi Everyone, I've been lurking on this forum since some years, but today I need some help. I recently purchased this Venus flytrap, which was sold to me under the name Akai Ryu. However, I'm not convinced that's correct, as the plant clearly shows features that don’t match the typical Akai Ryu form. As you can see in the attached photo, the plant has: Deep red coloration throughout the traps and petioles and green on the lid. Very short, irregular, saw-like teeth (reminiscent of the Sawtooth cultivar) A compact, clumping growth pattern To me, it looks more like a Red Sawtooth or a similar red hybrid rather than a true Akai Ryu. I’d really appreciate any thoughts or confirmation from those more experienced with these cultivars. Thanks in advance!

Yes, it is going to be in The Netherlands! https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1a9U1xBDus/ Carnivora will create a page with information. We'll keep you posted.