CHESTERVILLE – “I wasn’t exaggerating, was I?” said Robert Pachucki, leaning forward in his rowboat and heaving the oars out of Horseshoe Pond. Rising from the surface they looked startlingly like ...

Swollen bladderwort is an invasive, carnivorous plant that has been spotted in eight bodies of water in Maine. It eats insect larvae and water fleas, forming mats on the surface of the water. The ...

Flowers from the invasive swollen bladderwort are seen on Tilton Pond in Fayette, where Select Board members discussed the statewide threat during their Sep. 16 meeting. (Courtesy of the ...

We get a lot of press releases about photo contests, but this winning image from the Olympus BioScapes Imaging Competition (which I didn't even know existed) stood out for a few reasons: 1. The image ...

The evolutionary secrets of one of nature's marvels – the carnivorous bladderwort – have been uncovered by scientists. The aquatic plant has no recognisable roots and floats around, catching prey with ...

Take a look inside the bladder of an aquatic bladderwort plant. You can see the single-celled algae, called desmids, that it has consumed. They will be digested to provide the plant with needed ...

Bladderwort looks like a delicate little water plant, but it’s nothing of the sort once you pay attention to how it feeds. Hidden along its stems are tiny traps that pull in prey faster than you can ...

What is a Venus fly trap? The Venus fly trap is a carnivorous plant that is native to North and South Carolina. The plant gets its name from its ability to trap and eat flies and other small insects.

Great, wonderful, wacky things can come in small genomic packages. That’s one lesson to be learned from the carnivorous bladderwort, a plant whose tiny genome turns out to be a jewel box full of ...