Killer plant found in far north

The trigger-happy species was once found worldwide but has disappeared from 42 countries and almost everywhere in Australia.

Aldrovanda vesiculosa. Picture: Curtin University

Charles Darwin adored Australia’s carnivorous plants and when he conducted the first scientific tests to prove the plants captured and ate insects, his chosen plant was the world’s fast-closing “flytrap” Aldrovanda vesiculosa.

The trigger-happy Aldrovanda species was once found worldwide but since Darwin’s day has disappeared from 42 countries and almost everywhere in Australia. In a remarkable find, a ­scenic Kimberley billabong has yielded a bounty of plants to carnivorous plant hunter Adam Cross, who spent a decade searching for it.

“I’d almost given up hope of finding one, and it was just by chance that we ended up at this billabong,” said 29-year-old Dr Cross.

The discovery came during a botanical survey on Theda Station, east of the rugged Mitchell Plateau, with fellow researcher Thilo Krueger from Curtin University School of Molecular and Life Sciences.

“We came to a beautiful oasis, and when I looked down into a pool, I saw it. I got down on my hands and knees and saw there were traps at the end of its leaves. And there were thousands.”

Closely related to the Venus flytrap, the aquatic plant has the fastest closing trap in the world, snapping shut and dooming its insect prey. “It takes 0.1 of a second to shut — a very avid Japanese scientist actually timed it,” Dr Cross said.

The discovery has been made in the remotest corner of a state renowned among botanists as global hotspot for carnivorous plants. Western Australia alone has 150 of the world’s 700 species.

Aldrovanda survived the last ice age and found its way to every land continent, but in the last 200 years the species has been exterminated from almost all of them. “It’s very sensitive to changes in water quality, so agriculture and cities have affected the wetlands they live in,” Dr Cross said.

Ironically, until his Kimberley find, it was thought the biggest number of remaining plants lived in the shadow of Russia’s Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

“This plant is wonderful in so many ways,” he enthused. “It dies at one end and grows anew at the other. And every individual plant on the planet has identical DNA, which means a single plant conquered the world long before ­humans.”