Dragonfly Lunch

This picture was published in the Mexican conservation journal, Especies, Mar-Apr, 2010 in an article on carnivorous plants.


I talked so much about the "little bog of horrors" that my seventeen year old son decided he had to see it too. Yesterday, after he finished school for the day, I took him there and we spent several hours photographing the several different species of carnivorous plants. I had my DSLR but he had only an inexpensive point and shoot, since the camera he usually uses wasn't available. While there he came up with the brilliant idea of sticking the lens of the camera into the tubular openings of the pitcher plants and in doing so discovered this dragonfly which had been captured by a pitcher plant, had drowned, and was now floating on top of the liquid in the plant. He was very proud of the picture and to tell the truth, I was a bit envious. In any case, here it is. You are looking down into the sunlit tube of a Purple Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea) at the remains of a dragonfly and his watery grave. The pictures below show the water in one of the "pitchers" and a small clump of pitchers growing in a mound of sphagnum moss.