|
Today
Increasingly used for
medicinal purposes
Venus flytraps
caught in shrinking natural habitat
||| 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
havent been seen in years.
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.
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.
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 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.
Most of the viable clusters are in nature preserves, yet
experts be-lieve some of those could be thinned by
encroaching humans.
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
Caro-lina line, and they're quickly re-treating to a
single nature preserve.
Flytraps are also 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.
Calls of
the wild West
Mike Stark | AP Writer
Rattlesnakes aren't to be
trifled with, but if you're trying to collect the sound
of every creature in the West that slithers, hops, flies
or flops, distance isn't a luxury you can afford. "You
get yourself in some strange situations," said Jeff
Rice, a soft-spoken University of Utah research
librarian who's trying to create the first comprehensive
and free to the public archive of natural sounds in
the West.
Minutes later he was squatting in the hills above Salt
Lake City, training his lightweight parabolic microphone
toward a Great Basin rattlesnake a few feet away.
The snake, caught by wildlife agents that day in a
backyard, offered a few doubtful quiet moments.
The recording, reduced to a short clip, will be added to
the Western Soundscape Archive, a Web-based sound
clearinghouse headquartered at the university library.
Although it's just a year old, the site already has more
than 800 recordings.
|
|
TODAY IN
HISTORY
The Associated Press
1571
Allied Christian forces defeated an Ottoman fleet in the
naval Battle of Lepanto.
1777 The second Battle of Saratoga began during
the American Revolution. (British forces under Gen. John
Burgoyne surrendered 10 days later.)
1858 The fifth debate between Illinois senatorial
candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas took
place in Galesburg.
1916 In the most lopsided victory in college football
history, Georgia Tech defeated Cumberland University
222-0 in Atlanta.
1949 The Republic of East Germany was formed.
1954 Marian Anderson became the first black singer
hired by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York.
1960 Democratic presidential candidate John F.
Kennedy and Republican opponent Richard M. Nixon held
their second televised debate, in Washington, D.C.
1979 Pope John Paul II concluded his weeklong tour
of the United States with a Mass on the Washington Mall.
1985 Palestinian gunmen hijacked the Italian cruise
ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean. (The hijackers,
who killed an elderly Jewish American tourist,
surrendered two days after taking the ship.)
1991 University of Oklahoma law professor Anita
Hill publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments when
she worked for him; Thomas denied Hill's allegations.
Thought for Today: "Character consists of what you
do on the third and fourth tries." James Michener,
American novelist (1907-1997).
|
