Ethiopian Review

Tropical pitcher plants are among the planet’s stranger species, digesting ants and other insects that slip and fall into their bowls.

But Nepenthes lowii, a pitcher plant found in Borneo, is stranger still. It gets its nutrition not from insects but from tree shrews, which use the plant as a toilet.

Jonathan A. Moran of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Charles M. Clarke of Monash University in Malaysia and colleagues describe this “novel nitrogen sequestration strategy” in a paper in Biology Letters. Using isotopic analysis, they estimate that shrew feces deposited in N. lowii’s pitchers are a significant source of nitrogen for the plants.

N. lowii is found at higher elevations where ants and other insects are less abundant, said Dr. Moran, who has studied pitcher plants for two decades. In its immature stage, the plant grows a bowl that is near the ground and makes do with the few ants available. “When you start small, you have to catch something,” Dr. Moran said.

But the mature plant grows pitchers that are in the air. Tree shrews visit the plants to eat nectar that oozes from the bowl’s open lid, positioning themselves directly over the bowl. “Form follows function,” Dr. Moran said. N. lowii’s bowls “even look like toilets,” he added, “though we were too polite to say that in the paper.”

By Henry Fountain | nytimes