Next day:
I met with Frank around 7:30 the
next morning. (We joked about the ticks--he had gotten them too, but
as it turned out later, no chiggers for him!)
Frank took me back
to the field, but instead of going to The Green Swamp, we
headed off to some other places that had particularly nice
populations of Dionaea along the roads.
As you can see from the photograph above, Frank knows what he is
talking about! We stopped at several roadside patches of
Dionaea that were intensely pigmented red. Notice that in
this plant, the red pigmentation spreads to the petiole. The edges
of the trap are not pigmented, but the marginal spines are.
Frank pointed out the presence of red monitoring flags in the
Dionaea patch. Unfortunately, these were evil flags. You see,
they were inserted by a local person who drives around looking for
roadside populations of flowering Dionaea. Then, he pays crews
to come back later in the season (when the plants have set seed),
and these crews cut all the seed stalks off the plants. He sells
countless thousands of seeds each year. (I have seen the
advertisements.) All this is illegal, of course.
It was interesting--when we stopped to look at the
Dionaea, if the monitoring flags were present, there would be
absolutely no fruiting stalks--they had all been cut off. But if we
stopped at unflagged spots that Frank knew about,
we would see lots of fruiting stalks.
Of course, at every stop I threw the poacher's monitoring flags into
the back of Frank's pickup truck. It was an impossible battle, I
know, but I had to do something.
