{"id":74835,"date":"2021-08-30T22:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/on-the-trails-a-not-at-all-mythical-sticky-situation\/"},"modified":"2021-08-30T22:30:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T06:30:00","slug":"on-the-trails-a-not-at-all-mythical-sticky-situation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/on-the-trails-a-not-at-all-mythical-sticky-situation\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Trails: A not at all mythical sticky situation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t\t

By Mary F. Willson <\/strong><\/ins><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

A pretty little perennial plant (Triantha glutinosa) grows in many of our muskegs. It’s sometimes called sticky asphodel, after the flowers that were said to grow in the Elysian Fields where the souls of the dead resided. The basis for this name-transfer from the myth to a tangible organism is not clear; I presume the original name-giver had not actually visited those mythical fields…<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

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The stem of sticky asphodel earns its name by capturing tiny flies, which will be digested. (Courtesy Photo \/ Bob Armstrong)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

It bears white flowers on a sticky stem that often catches small insects. Sometimes ten or twenty tiny insects are stuck to a stem, all of them less than two millimeters long and most of them less than one millimeter long. This observation led to questions: is this plant maybe insectivorous, like the sundews, or do the sticky hairs somehow protect the flowering stem from herbivores? My colleague and I sometimes observed geometrid moth caterpillars on these plants, where they eat the seeds out of the seed capsules. But the caterpillars are not deterred by the sticky hairs; when experimentally placed on a sticky stem, they usually marched right up to the seed capsules. So those hairs did not defend against that herbivore, at least.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t