<head><style>body{font-family: Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:9pt;background-color: #ffffff;color: black;}</style></head><body id="compText"><div style="font-weight: bold;" class="newsTitle"><font size="3">Venus flytraps caught in shrinking natural habitat</font></div>
<div class="newsPubDate" style="padding-top: 6px;">October 05, 2008 2:53 PM EDT</div>
<div class="newsBreakingHeadline"><p>GREEN
SWAMP PRESERVE, N.C. - Laura Gadd pauses at the edge of a pristine
savanna, delicately lifting her feet to avoid trampling any venus
flytraps hidden underfoot.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"Let me mark these - this is a good cluster," she says, crouching in the shadow of a longleaf pine.</p>
<p>One of nature's most recognized wonders, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The flytrap's natural habitat exists only within a hundred miles of
the Carolinas' coast, where much 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 still exist in the wild.</p>
<p>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 believe some of those could be
thinned by encroaching humans.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>In South Carolina, flytraps were once found in as many as four
counties. But experts there now believe populations exist only in Horry
County, on the North Carolina line, and they're quickly retreating to a
single nature preserve.</p>
<p>Flytraps also are being wiped out by logging and efforts to suppress
wildfires in their slim stretches between dry Carolina savannas and
mucky pocosins, a type of wetland. As forest personnel dig firelines to
prevent frequent savanna fires from spreading into the pocosins, where
fires can rage for weeks in the sandy, peaty soil, they often trample
the fragile flytraps.</p>
<p>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 take a higher priority.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>North Carolina officially considers the plant a "special concern,"
but the state laws protecting the flytrap are lax. The North Carolina
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.</p>
<p>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 less than 20 populations remaining in the state. The flytrap has
more, although only 16 are graded with "excellent" or "good" viability.</p>
<p>"When you look at the grand scope of things, all of those populations are in one small corner in the whole world," Gadd said.</p>
<p>Some of the healthiest flytrap populations include tens of thousands
of plants clustered in well-protected spots, including the vast 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.</p>
<p>Sgt. Charles Smith, of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources
Commission, said repeated flytrap poachers face only misdemeanor
charges and are generally fined less than $200. On rare occasions,
they'll 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 only a dollar or two each.</p>
<p>"What I understand is that him and his crowd are still at it," Smith said.</p>
<p>Smith and his staff of five cover four counties, where they are
tasked with enforcing fishing and boating laws while keeping track of
more than 250,000 acres of gamelands. "You could spend 60 days working
this and maybe one out of 60 days be in the in the right place and
right time to contact these individuals," he said.</p>
<p>Rarely used federal laws provide a little more protection, limiting
interstate transport and sale of flytraps. But the plant's not
considered an endangered species, lost behind hundreds of others on the
waiting list.</p>
<p>Rep. Carolyn Justice, a Republican who represents the Wilmington
area, pushed last year to begin regulating flytraps in the same fashion
as ginseng, a plant used in a variety of herbal and Eastern medicines.
The state has a permitting process that requires ginseng dealers to
document where they acquired their crop, and North Carolina law makes
harvesting ginseng on someone else's land a felony.</p>
<p>But Justice's proposal stalled in a legislative committee after the
state Department of Agriculture said they didn't have people in place
to enforce it.</p>
<p>"Our population down here is exploding," Justice said. "And as we
encroach on these forests, we encroach on (the flytrap). We just need
to be real careful monitoring how these are harvested and sold."</p>
<p>Some of the most delicate flytrap populations are found on the edges
of civilization, just feet from schools or corridors for electrical
transmission lines. Misty Buchanan, a botanist with the North Carolina
Natural Heritage Program, worries about a small patch of flytraps in
the heart of Wilmington next to playground blacktop.</p>
<p>Only this year did the state recategorize the population from "fair viability" - not under threat - to "poor viability."</p>
<p>"It's being kept alive only by people who care and want to keep the natural habitat of the coastal plain," Buchanan said.</p></div>
<div class="newsCopyright">Copyright
2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</div> </body><pre>
Robin Alton Suggs
MoonBranch Botanicals
5294 Yellow Creek Road
Robbinsville, North Carolina 28771
USA
Telephone: 828.479.2788
moonbranch@earthlink.net
www.moonbranch.com
Member:
American Herbalist Guild
Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project; Farm Partner
Co-op America
Green Products Alliance
National Network of Forest Practitioners
North Carolina Consortium on Natural Medicines
North Carolina Goodness Grows/NCDA&CS
North Carolina Natural Products Association
Southwestern North Carolina RC&D Council
United Plant Savers
"What people do not understand, they do not value; what they do not value, they will not protect, and what they do not protect, they will lose...."
~Charles Jordan</pre>