Dec 14 2019
Sarracenia pitchers are home to countless commensal animals. They eat the insects that the pitcher captures and help the plant digest their food. (More on that here.) They should be deep inside the pitcher eating, but sometimes they congregate on the lip of the pitcher. In this case a virtual army of slime mites (Sarraceniopus I believe.) is hanging out on the lip of my tallest S. Leucophylla.
I've seen mites on the lip of the pitchers of all of the species that I have. Usually it is on "opening day" when pitcher first opens, the mites are there to colonize the new pitcher. These Leucophylla pitchers are quite mature, so initial colonization isn't whats happening here. Mites commonly hangout on Leucophylla. On this day there were mite armies on half of the Leucophylla pitchers. Just milling about.
Not sure what they are up to. Are they mating? Are they preparing to migrate to a different pitcher? I don't know but i hope to figure this out eventually.
The lip of a S. Leucophylla with the camera pointing down into the pitcher. All of the white blobs are slime mites. The video is a little shaky. At half a millimeter these little guys are very hard to film. I can't get them to smile and wave for the camera. Plus wind was shaking the pitcher. Please bear with me.
The video is taken of the tallest pitcher in the picture.
