10-06-08: Venus flytraps are fast disappearing

(c) 2008 Raleigh News & Observer

By Mike Baker, Associated Press

GREEN SWAMP PRESERVE - Laura Gadd pauses at the edge of a pristine savanna, delicately lifting her feet to avoid trampling any Venus' flytraps hidden underfoot.

Buried below wisps of wire grass, a few of the plants advertise their presence with a single white flower -- perched atop a long stem like a flag of surrender. Gadd finds a half-dozen this day, enough to warrant a spray of glue and inconspicuous powder used to identify the plants and track down poachers who pluck them.

"Let me mark these -- this is a good cluster," she says, crouching in the shadow of a longleaf pine.

The Venus' flytrap's ability to snatch living prey makes it a favorite of elementary school science classes everywhere. Yet the flytrap is falsely ferocious: It's hardly the man-eating Audrey Jr. from "The Little Shop of Horrors," but a tiny plant only a few inches tall with leaves no bigger than a thumbprint.

These days, the little plant is more vulnerable than ever. And despite its popularity, the people who could protect it seem focused on other problems.

The flytrap's natural habitat exists only within a hundred miles of the Carolinas' coast, where larger and more territorial plants have always held forth. Booming growth and development along the coast threatens to overrun the few sensitive and thin populations of Venus' flytraps that exist in the wild.

Long survival odds

An Associated Press review of state botany records found that nearly 80 percent of the 117 identified wild populations of flytraps in North Carolina have little chance of surviving, have been wiped out altogether or haven't been seen in years. Most of the viable clusters are in nature preserves, yet experts think some of those could be thinned by encroaching humans.

"When you go out looking for these populations that have been recorded, you find you're either in a golf course or a subdivision, or a road or a shopping center," said James Luken, a professor at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C., who studies wetland ecology. "It's a biological hotspot, but it's a development hotspot. These areas are being transformed as fast as the bulldozers can roll."

South Carolina experts now think large Venus' flytrap populations exist only in Horry County, on the North Carolina line, and they're quickly retreating to a single preserve.

Flytraps also are being wiped out by logging and efforts to suppress wildfires between dry Carolina savannas and mucky pocosins, a type of wetland. As forest personnel dig firelines to prevent savanna fires from spreading into the pocosins, where fires can rage for weeks in the sandy, peaty soil, they often trample the fragile flytraps.

Poachers also target the carnivorous plant that's a big seller in nurseries, at roadside stands and on the Internet. Flytraps are especially popular overseas, and they're increasingly used for medicinal purposes, but poaching prosecutions are rare because other plants and animals are a higher priority.

"Plants are a challenge because they don't have big brown eyes and fur," said Tom Chisdock, an Asheville-based special agent with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "So, when you're trying to get people excited about doing enforcement and prosecuting them, sometimes that can be a challenge."

Protection is difficult

North Carolina officially considers the plant a "special concern," but state laws protecting the flytrap are lax. The N.C. Plant Conservation Program, part of the state Department of Agriculture, has long desired stronger protections but admits that with a staff of three it wouldn't be able to enforce stricter rules.

Gadd, a botanist with the program, said the state considered upgrading the flytrap's protection status to "threatened" but decided against it because the designation is largely reserved for plants that have fewer than 20 populations remaining in the state. The flytrap has more, although only 16 are graded with "excellent" or "good" viability.

"When you look at the grand scope of things, all of those populations are in one small corner in the whole world," Gadd said.

Some of the healthiest flytrap populations have tens of thousands of plants clustered in well-protected spots, including the Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg military bases. There, the plants are dependent on programs of prescribed burns that clear out competing vegetation like wildfires would normally do.

Sgt. Charles Smith, of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, said repeated flytrap poachers face only misdemeanor charges and are generally fined less than $200 and sometimes get a few days in jail. He recalls catching one poacher more than a dozen times digging up "thousands upon thousands" of flytraps on state land to sell for a dollar or two each.

Smith and his staff of five cover four counties, enforcing fishing and boating laws while keeping track of more than 250,000 acres of gamelands.

"What I understand is that him and his crowd are still at it," Smith said.