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Vegetarian Carnivores. The first video in our new series "Siggi's CP Info" Is it possible to grow your carnivorous plants with vegetarian diet? Our first film from the new “Siggi’s CP Info” series provides the answer. Carnivorous plants predominantly capture and digest arthropods like insects, spiders or little crustaceans. Some of the largest tropical pitcher plants are even known to eat real meat, mostly small vertebrates like mice or reptiles. But what happens if you feed vegetarian food to the carnivores? Even Charles Darwin pointed out that in times of high pollen abundance the sticky traps of sundews and butterworts accumulate large amounts of pollen. Does that mean carnivorous plants are also happy with vegetarian food? Here are the results of a survey on Facebook and YouTube prior to this upload: Is it possible to feed carnivorous plants with vegetarian food? YES: 52% - NO: 36% - ONLY TEMPORARY: 12%

Never fear! You do not need a chemistry book to understand this film. Showing a bunch of beautiful sundew species and hybrids, we explain really briefly and clear why particular chemical ingredients of the sundews are not only interesting as cough medicine for homeopathy, but also as traits for taxonomy, in a manner as comprehensible for laypersons as possible. The featured chemical analysis (TLC) is helpful for the description of novel species and gains an additional dimension by the fact that most true species produce only one naphthoquinone or none, while hybrids show the chemistry of both parents combined. That means, if the parents produce different quinones, the hybrid shows both of them and both parents as well as the hybrid can be distinguished chemically that way.

How to film sundew snap-tentacles. When filming sundew snap-tentacles, some simple measures can be helpful to prepare the recording correctly and to avoid disturbing shaking by unnecessary poking of the tentacle heads. That needs some understanding on their different response times and motion patterns. Since many years, we experimented with catapulting sundews and summarized our experiences now in this brief movie description, providing hints how to proceed with moderate and rapid catapult-flypaper traps. The idea for this film came up after some requests on Facebook how to film such tentacle motions. Good luck when filming your Drosera.

Amazing results: Pygmy sundews capture minute prey like springtails with rapid catapult action. Our experiments for this film (English subtitles) show that Drosera glanduligera is not longer the only sundew with a catapult-flypaper trapping mechanism. Also the snap-tentacles of several pygmy Drosera act with the speed of a closing Venus flytrap and fling walking prey from the periphery of the plant onto its sticky leaf. Therefore they turn out to be actually comparable with the amazing Drosera glanduligera, however, their catapults are multifunctional and possess a mechanism to avoid unessential movement: Like Venus's Flytrap. Under our microscope we examined 22 Drosera and received surprising results. Furthermore we were able to film many pygmy Drosera in situ on field trips with Allen Lowrie, Greg Bourke and Kirstie Wulf (1991 & 2001), providing these shots now for the first time on YouTube. We are happy to introduce Gideon Lim from Malaysia, who showed the first video of the rapid snap-tentacles of D. pygmaea "New Zealand, all green" on the internet even in 2014. In addition, we recommend a visit at "Andy Landgraf Makrofotografie" on Flickr and on Facebook. Andy kindly provided some of his impressive macro-shots for our film, to feature some more minute prey and predators in "Pygmyland".