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Carnivorous Plant Maniacs in Down Under (2001) In the last part of our Australia trilogy in 2001, we find many carnivorous plants with Kirstie Wulf and Greg Bourke near Sydney and in the Blue Mountains. We look for more sundews and bladderworts with Trevor Hannam in Cairns and film Drosera schizandra in the jungle of Mount Bartle Frere. In Port Douglas, we are invited by Helen and Michael Gabour to the great blues events at the Court House Hotel, dive on the Barrier Reef and encounter more carnivores and an impressive stick insect near Cape Tribulation. In the CP-paradise of the Kimberley near Kununurra, we film many plants and two bug-plant-mutualisms including a sundew with unusual characteristics, which we are delighted to find in cultivation on our return to Germany. We show it to an expert and Dr. Jan Schlauer explains the unique characteristics of the plant in an interview at the end of June. In December 2001, he describes the new species in Carnivorous Plant Newsletter as Drosera hartmeyerorum. This film offers an hour of exciting adventures on the successful search for carnivorous plants in Australia. It doesn't get much more adventurous than this!

Surprise: The Queensland sundews have been screened for their naphthoquinones before (Culham & Gornall 1994) but the chemical diversity within the group has prompted our (Jan Schlauer, Irmgard and me) investigation of the new hybrid ("D. x Andomeda") and, subsequently, a re-evaluation of the published data and comparison of their micro-morphology. Our study found that D. adelae and D. schizandra are both in regard of their chemistry as well as their indumentum clearly closer related than to D. prolifera, which as the only one in the group possesses still remnants of snap-tentacles. Enjoy Chemistry and surface micromorphology of the Queensland sundews (Drosera section Prolifera) . September CPN 48/3: 111-116 (click on title). Photo shows the examined plants:

Vegetarian sundews: Few people know, that carnivorous plants like also vegetarian diet, as long as it is rich in protein like flower pollen. To show this, we fed fresh stamens of a Sarracenia leucophylla with adhering pollen to four different Drosera species (photos). D. capensis and D. ultramafica rolled in the leaf as intensive as with animal prey. D. capensis x aliciae moved at least the surrounding tentacles to the protein pack and the tentacles of D. schizandra, which does not show any leaf movement even with mosquitoes, clearly dock on the pollen portion, enjoying the meal.