Ertiocx's assorted carnivores

Ertiocx

Ertiocx

Carnivorous Plant Addict
I guess I need to start a thread here. At first I was all like "I'll only collect nepenthes" but I guess that stance fell apart near instantly.

My other photo threads:
  1. Nepenthes
  2. Hoyas, tropicals et al.
  3. Caudiciforms, succulents et al.
I'll start this thread off with a Drosera sp. "Lantau Island" received as a kind gift from @Lloyd Gordon.
I'm real surprised at how quickly this plant can move. It's completely digested a fruit fly within 36 hours.

Pics show t+0 m, +18 m, +9h, +12h:

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Here's the shriveled husk of the same fruit fly being spat out at 36h:
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Some of the dew left on the trichomes has become cloudy or yellow. I assume that it's all digested fly juices.
 
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Here are progress pics for a handful of already germinated D. oreopodion gemmae that then spent 10 days in the mail bagged up with a wet paper towel.

It turns out that D. oreopodion gemmae are super tough and had no problems surviving.

The roots had grown into the paper towel fibers by the time I received them, resulting in a single mass of gemmae and paper, so I submerged the whole thing in water and used a pair of tweezers to tease the gemmae out. Then I poured the floating gemmae onto the surface of the potting medium.

Here they are immediately after planting:
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  • The gemmae look like little sesame seeds
  • The sprouts are etiolated, having spent at least 10 days in the dark.
2 days after planting:
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  • The tips quickly reverted to normal compact growth
  • The cells in the white etiolated areas are huge compared to those in the new growth
5 days after planting:
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  • Starting to form some rosettes
1 week after plating:
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  • The first traps have started to emerge
 
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The first of D. oreopodion's traps are open for business 9 days after planting.
They are absolutely tiny. The tips of the trichomes are even smaller than the individual cells in the sphagnum. I can barely resolve any detail even with a macro lens at 1:1.

I might need to sacrifice a couple of the plants to fix and image under an epifluorescence microscope.
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Here's a whole D. oreopodion plantlet under 365 nm excitation, seen through a 5x objective:
The cell walls fluoresce blue. Chloroplasts fluoresce red. You can see that there are no chloroplasts in the etiolated length of stem to the right.
In terms of scale, the full width of this image represents 4057 um, or about 4 mm.
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Here's a single leaf at 20x:
There's an interesting structure at the tip of each tentacle. The tentacles don't show up very well in this image, since the leaf contains many more chloroplasts and fluoresces much more brightly. Some stomata are visible on the leaf stalk also.
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Here's are tentacle tips in greater detail (20x):
The structure on the tip of each tentacle is a ball made up of 5 cells. I'd imagine they're some sort of secretory cell.
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63x showing the tentacle tips from the side and back:
Each tentacle looks like an oven mitt holding the cluster of 5 cells.
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Here's what the remnant of the gemmae looks like after sprouting (5x):

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If anyone's interested in technical details:
  • Microscope: Zeiss Axio Observer Z1
  • Software: Axiovision
  • Camera: AxioCamHR3
  • Channel (Red): Cy5 (Ex 649/Em 670)
  • Channel (Blue): DAPI (Ex 359/Em461)
  • 5x: Plan-Neofluar 5x/0.16 Air
  • 10x: Plan-Neofluar 10x/0.30 Air
  • 20x: Plan-Apochromat 20x/0.8 Air
  • 63x: Plan-Apochromat 63x/1.4 Oil immersion
  • Mounting medium: MOWIOL
  • Staining: N/A
 
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I'm bored at work so here are some more micrographs. I'm not a botanist, feel free to jump in if you know something I don't.

I've found at least 3 different kinds of trichome on D. oreopodion:
  1. The one that looks like an oven mitt. These emerge from the leaf margin, particularly at the distal end.
  2. One that looks like a match head. These emerge near the leaf margin from the adaxial surface.
  3. Big club shaped ones. These have very short stalks and are present near the center of the leaf.
Here they are up close:
  • These were imaged using a Plan-Apochromat 63x/1.4 Oil immersion lens
  • The filter sets are indicated for each colour channel
    • DAPI: Ex 359/Em 461
    • Cy5: Ex 649/Em 670
    • Cy3.5: Ex 580/Em 598
    • FITC: Ex 495/Em 519
  • A scale bar is indicated for the colour merged image
Oven mitt trichome:
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Cell walls show up in the DAPI channel, chloroplasts show up in Cy5. Some other sort of intracellular structure appears in Cy3.5 and FITC. They look like vesicles of some sort to me. The cluster of cells making up the ball at the end of the trichome contain no chloroplasts (Cy5), but fluoresce very strongly in Cy3.5 and FITC. I would imagine that these are secretory cells and that the secretory vesicles are what's showing up in these channels.


Match head trichome:
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Pretty much the same as above but with some morphological differences. Very large vesicles are visible in the head and in the stalk.


Club trichome:
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The heads on these trichomes are massive compared to the previous two, and are made up of a much larger mass of cells (10+, rather than 5-ish). I imagine that these trichomes are responsible for digesting any captured prey since they're located in the middle of the leaf, where prey gets pulled after getting stuck. The stalks of these trichomes, visible as the long pillar-shaped structure to the right, are jam packed with Cy3.5/FITC positive vesicles.
 
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Here's the last image of this set:
This image consists of 54 fields of view deconvolved and tiled together. All three types of trichome are visible here.

This leaf was clipped off a D. oreopodion plantlet and stored in ddH2O + 0.1% NaN3 until I got bored at work.
Then it was transferred to MOWIOL mounting medium and centrifuged at 2000 rcf to ensure that there were no bubbles trapped between the trichomes. Finally, the leaf and mounting medium were pipetted onto a glass slide and covered with a #1.5 coverslip.
These images were obtained using a Plan-Apochromat 20x/0.8 Air objective with DAPI/Cy5 filters and processed in FIJI.
Since the leaf is quite a large 3D structure, parts of it are out of focus even though the images were captured as Z-stacks spanning about 15 um. I also limited the images to two colour channels since it'd have taken too long to include FITC/Cy3.5. The leaf stalk is slightly damaged where I handled it with ultra fine tweezers. Some chloroplasts can be seen leaking out of the wounded area.


D.oreo tiled 10x.jpg
 
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N. veitchii x edwardsiana secretes nectar very quickly. It's only been 12 hours since I washed and potted it, but there's already nectar pooling on the peristomes.

There are some neat <<<<< shaped structures on the peristome visible under UV light. I wonder if they're rows of tiny nectar glands?
I'd love to get this under the microscope, but I don't really want to clip a chunk out of peristome. Maybe later when the pitchers start to fade.

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This one reason I also like corals..they look something like the Picts you took but in many other colours of the gamut. With the new fandago reef led lights, corals all glow/ fluorescent that digital cameras cannot capture. One has to do post Lightroom/Photoshop or use an orange filter to capture the coral true to eye colors. Check out a reef store to see what I mean
 
I was passing by an aquarium supply and saw some Bug Pro. It's mostly pellets of dried black soldier fly larvae and krill so I figured I'd try feeding some plants with it.

The Drosera all seem to love it so far.

D. oreopodion
  • I never realized how many mites were running around in the sphagnum until just now
  • At least they don't bother the plants


















D. sp "Lantau Island"
  • I'll check back in to see how much of the pellet has been digested some time tomorrow.
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I think it likes it.

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Regarding the different tentacle types in the microscopy images above (link post 40031); apparently the tentacles attached to the leaf margin are non-sticky snap tentacles. The match head and club looking tentacles are glue tentacles responsible for prey capture and digestion. This would explain the relative lack of secretory vesicles in the oven mitt trichome images. You can see the same variations in tentacle morphology in the photos of D. sp "Lantau Island"

Images and examples here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458893/
 
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