Control the insect population around your favorite water feature without bug zappers and dangerous insecticides. Add carnivorous plants to your backyard pondscape for beautiful color, texture and visual interest. These lovely carnivores prefer the boggy soil at the outer edges of your pond allowing the roots to stay constantly moist, but not waterlogged.
Pitcher Plants
The pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, available in many colors, is attractive for human onlookers and to the mosquitoes it loves for lunch. Insects slide into the "pitfall trap" formed by specialized leaves that have developed into tubes and are trapped by small hairs growing downward into the slippery tube, preventing them from crawling back out. Jan Goldfield, premiere water gardener, recommends they be set up in a bog area next to the pond and in partial shade or filtered sun.
Venus Fly Trap
Dionaea muscipula, commonly known as the Venus flytrap, produces sweet nectar that attracts insects to stroll across its leaves and stumble across the trigger hairs that cause the leaves to snap shut around their prey. Each leaf trap on the plant can capture and consume one to three insects before turning black and falling from the plant, having provided nutrients for continued growth of new leaves.
Sundews
Sundews, Drosera sp., attract their victims with glistening dewdrops of sticky liquid coating the hairlike tentacles covering their leaves. Insects believe the liquid is nectar, land on the leaves and are immediately stuck. Struggling only further entwines them in the hairy mess as the tentacles curl tightly around them.
Bladderworts
Bladderworts, Utricularia sp., are rootless and their stems nearly fully submerged in boggy soil or under water. Boasting over 200 species, this unique pond carnivore traps insects in tiny leaf bladders with one-way doors. These leaves can be as small as the head of a pin up to about one eighth of an inch wide. Aquatic bladderworts trap small insects, such as water fleas, Daphnia and mosquito larvae.
