Leaf litter capture in the carnivorous pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea: a preliminary study

ABSTRACT Diet breadth is a key life-history trait influencing range size, evolutionary trajectories, and ecosystem functioning. While diet breadth studies have traditionally been confined to animals, carnivorous plants provide an exciting conceptual extension to existing theory. We examine the possibility of diet breadth expansion in Sarracenia purpurea, a carnivorous pitcher plant, integrating field and greenhouse experiments with CHN analysis to quantify leaf litter consumption. Wild plants captured leaf detritus at levels comparable to insect prey. Pitchers fed leaf biomass in the field exhibited non-significant increases in foliar nitrogen, while the greenhouse experiment showed no effect of leaf litter. These results demonstrate that S. purpurea pitchers capture a substantial amount of leaf litter but show no clear evidence of nitrogen assimilation from this material. We found that short-term nitrogen acquisition from captured litterfall is minimal or absent in S. purpurea pitchers, especially relative to rapid nutrient assimilation from arthropod prey.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of Plant Interactions

• Publication date

  2025-09-23

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/17429145.2025.2551022
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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