White Collared Pitcher Plant - Nepenthes albomarginata

Nepenthes Albomarginata, from the Latin: albus = white, marginatus = margin, or the White-Collared Pitcher-Plant, is a pitcher plant of the genus Nepenthes , also known as N.Tomentella Miq or Penang, is a fairly wide spread native of Sumatra and Borneo, as well as the Penang region of the Peninsular Malaysia. These are interesting, frost-tender, insectivorous perennials that are mostly epiphytic, and with some of the leaves forming a dangling, lidded, colored pitcher to trap and digest insects. Typical for Nepenthes Albomarginata is the white collar of velvety hairs directly beneath the peristome. The red pitchers can be up to 15 cm high, and their texture is velvet-like due to very short hairs. N. Albomarginata has a unique morphological feature: a rim of living white trichomes directly below the peristome. The rim's hairs tend to be missing from pitchers that have caught termites. Researchers say "For several days, nothing would happen, then, after a single night, the pitchers would fill with termites and their rim hairs would disappear." They investigated this phenomenon by placing fresh intact pitchers, together with pitchers with their white rims removed, near to the head of foraging columns of the termite Hospitalitermes bicolor. When the column found the pitcher, termites grazed on the rim. While grazing, many termites (both workers and soldiers) fell into the pitchers. Once in the pitcher, they were unable to climb out. They counted up to 22 individuals per minute falling into the pitchers and noted that the capture rate could easily exceed this for denser columns. After about an hour, the hairs were all gone and the pitcher was evidently no longer attractive to termites (and was filled with termites trying to escape). It is not known how the trichomes lure termites to the plant. They detected no long-range olfactory attraction during his experiments and noted that "all contacts seemed to happen by chance, with termites often missing pitchers less than 1 cm away from them." They also point out that N. Albomarginata is the only plant species to offer its tissue as bait. Hardiness zones: 11(4c/40f) The plants can be found in Kerangas (heath) forests on poor, sandy soil, in summit vegetation of lower mountains or in open areas with peat, limestone or sand soil, from sea level up to 1000 m. They are easy to grow but rarely found growing together with other Nepenthes species. Nepenthes should be misted regularly in order to simulate the humidity of their natural habitat.

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