When someone mentions endangered species, polar bears, tigers or sea turtles might come to mind. Not to degrade the importance of these species, but there is a tremendous list of other endangered species that are equally (or maybe even more) important to the biosphere.

 

Take plants, for example. Have you ever cared that a plant other than a big beautiful tree was in danger of extinction? Did you even know that plants were on the endangered species list? 

 

There are so many plant species out there, and they are all pretty much the same -- green leaves, flowers, roots -- that it won't matter if a few of them disappear. There will be another closely related species that will be able to fill the extinct plant's niche, right? No way!

 

Plants, like all organisms in an ecosystem, occupy a specific niche. A niche is the ecological role an organism plays in its community, i.e. what it eats, where it lives, what eats it, what nutrients it supplies to the system and so forth. Many niches overlap, but through the process of evolution, organisms have evolved to play different, yet important roles in their communities.

 

This might be stretching it a bit, but some plants are just cool!

 

The mountain sweet pitcher plant (Sarracenia rubra ssp. jonesii) is a federally endangered carnivorous plant found in the Southern Blue Ridge Escarpment that lines South Carolina's western border. The Blue Ridge Escarpment includes several unique habitats not found in any other places in the world and is home to 40 percent of South Carolina's rare plant species.

 

Mountain sweet pitcher plants are only found in one of these unique habitats: mountain bogs. In Pickens and Greenville counties in South Carolina, these plants are found along the edges of cataract bogs where water that has seeped up through the ground flows down granite outcrops. This constant supply of water provides essential moisture for this pitcher plant.

 

Watch this beginning of this video of Patrick McMillan's "Mountain Bogs: On the Verge of Vanishing" episode to see the plant in its habitat.

 

This plant earned its name from the purple, sweet-smelling flowers it produces from April to June. The flower isn't the attention-grabber on this plant, though. It's a leaf that has morphed into a tube or "pitcher." The pitcher is a passive trap that lures insects into the tube with a sweet odor, where they get stuck. Tiny downward pointing hairs prevent the insects from escaping, and the insect will decompose in the liquid at the base of the tube so the plant can absorb the nutrients. Pitcher plants have developed this mechanism to make up for the nutrients that their bog habitat lacks.

 

There were only 10 populations of mountain sweet pitcher plants left as of 2008. Six of these populations were located in South Carolina. The major threats to this species are consistent with the general trend among all endangered species: habitat loss, poaching and loss of genetic variation through small populations.

 

Yes, plants can be poached, too. Carnivorous plants are cool, so there is a good market for them in the nursery trade. With such small populations, just taking a few from the wild can be devastating to the species.

 

Mountain sweet pitcher plants can reproduce sexually through pollination and dispersal of seeds, but the easiest way for them to spread is asexually through a rhizome. That means within a population there is very little to no genetic variation. With such low genetic variation, it is very difficult for a species to adapt to a changing environment.

 

These plants have are very specialized to survive in the unique habitat of mountain bogs, so when these bogs are lost, the plants have nowhere to go. Bogs on private land can be filled in to make the land more suitable for development, or they can dry up from altering its water source. Most of the remaining populations are on protected land, and the ironic thing is that the act of protecting the land from human influence is actually detrimental to the bog habitat. Mountain meadow bogs need open sunlight to flourish, and grazing has traditionally prevented woody trees from establishing and shading out the bogs. New management strategies need to be implemented to maintain the mountain meadow bogs.

 

The biggest threat to these plants' habitat has been climate change. "The fact is the mountain climate is completely out of sync," Patrick McMillan, naturalist from Clemson University said. The severe drought that has set in over the last few years has dried up the bogs in the South Carolina mountains.

 

"The decline of the mountain sweet pitcher plant is a classic example. I've been working for nine years trying to revive one of the best sites for the plant in Pickens County. Because of the tremendous surge in drought conditions during the past two years I've lost four of the five populations," McMillan said.
 

The mountain sweet pitcher plant isn't the only plant in trouble. Experts agree that right now the Southern Blue Ridge Escarpment is experiencing the largest plant extinction since the end of the last ice age. "There are probably plants gone now that weren't even on the radar as endangered," McMillan said.

 

Hopefully, with the wet fall we are experiencing these wonderful bog habitats and what is left of their inhabitants will be able to make a comeback.