Arizona honeysweet survives brutal heat by cooling its leaves below desert air.Botanists are still proving Charles Darwin right with their recent identification of a new carnivorous plant growing in China’s mountainous forests.
Saxifraga candelabrum is a small, yellow flower with a taste for flesh that may one day help protect endangered crops, and researchers have revealed their detailed analysis of the carnivorous plant, conducted both in the field and the laboratory, in a recent paper published in Nature Communications.
The carnivorous plant attracts, traps, and finally digests prey, typically consisting of fruit flies and other small insects, breaking them down with a caustic enzyme that it produces.
Although it was philosopher Herbert Spencer who actually coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” it was Charles Darwin who developed the concept behind it in his work on natural selection. With an eye towards survival in a harsh natural world, Darwin suggested in 1875 that some plants in the genus Saxifraga may be more than just beautiful flowers—they may also be very patient hunters.
Darwin’s suspicion centered on Saxifraga species other than S. candelabrum, the plant examined in the new study. However, the basis for his hypothesis holds true: the father of evolutionary biology focused on the microscopic hairs covering the plants’ surfaces, a feature shared by both the species he studied and the newly confirmed carnivorous plant.
Darwin suggested these hairs acted as a trap, capturing insects drawn to the flowers and holding them in place as the plants slowly absorbed nutrients from them. He was right.
Most carnivorous plants rely on highly specialized structures to capture prey. The iconic clamping leaves of Dionaea muscipula, better known as the Venus flytrap, are one example. Another is Low’s pitcher plant, which lures insects into its pitcher-shaped trap before digesting them.
S. candelabrum, however, employs a far subtler strategy. Rather than relying on elaborate trapping structures, it uses innocuous-looking hairs covering its flowers and stems. Once insects land on them, they discover the bristles are exceptionally sticky, trapping them until the plant can digest them.
“The discovery of Saxifraga candelabrum reminds us that many inconspicuous carnivorous plants, or plants with partial carnivorous traits, may still exist in nature,” said lead author Hang Sun, a botanist at the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The team’s research involved a great deal of fieldwork, observing S. candelabrum consuming insects in the mountain forests of China. However, it was their detailed genetic analysis in the lab that later showed how similar the plant was to other carnivorous species, despite its unusually benign appearance.
As part of their laboratory experiments, the researchers fed the plants fruit flies while closely monitoring their behavior. These observations allowed the team to identify digestive enzymes secreted by the plant to break down nitrogen-rich nutrients from its prey.
Identifying a new carnivorous plant species is an uncommon achievement for botanists, with the last such discovery occurring only five years ago. Even more remarkable is that the finding so closely aligns with Charles Darwin’s century-old prediction.
The researchers say the discovery is more than a botanical curiosity. A better understanding of how carnivorous plants digest insects could eventually aid the development of natural pesticides and other agricultural tools, potentially transforming these tiny predators into allies for protecting the world’s food supply.
The paper, “Identification of Carnivory in the Flowering Plant Saxifraga Via Multidisciplinary Evidence,” appeared in Nature Communications on August 4, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.
Scientists have confirmed that a flowering plant native to the mountains in southwest China is carnivorous, supporting a prediction made by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago.
The species, Saxifraga candelabrum, grows at elevations above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) in the Hengduan Mountains, which connect the southeast portions of the Tibetan Plateau to the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.
The plant has stems and branches covered in sticky hairs that can trap small insects, predominantly nonbiting midges. However, scientists were unsure if these insects were being ingested by the plant. In a new study, researchers showed that S. candelabrum can digest and absorb nutrients from insects after capturing them, proving that the plant is carnivorous. The scientists published their findings Tuesday (Aug. 4) in the journal Nature Communications.
This is the first demonstrated case of carnivory in the saxifrage plant group, said study co-author Douglas Soltis, a distinguished professor of biology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Other carnivorous plants typically grow in moist, boggy soils, but S. candelabrum is found in dry alpine areas, Soltis told Live Science in an email. "These are all nitrate poor soils — that's why this carnivorous habit has evolved a number of times" to supplement the plants in vital nutrients, he said.
In 1875, Darwin theorized that two species closely related to S. candelabrum that also have sticky hairs — S. rotundifolia and S. umbrosa — may be carnivorous, based on their ability to catch insects. But the 19th-century naturalist couldn't show that the plants digested their prey or reused the nutrients in insect tissues — two conditions that are key to confirming carnivory in plants. Without these conditions, a species is considered simply "protocarnivorous," meaning it catches and kills insects or other small animals but doesn't digest or absorb them, according to the study.
"Although untested at the time, Darwin’s hypothesis provided an important inspiration for our study," study co-author Hang Sun, a researcher in the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Botany, told Live Science in an email.
The researchers conducted field observations and herbarium surveys of S. candelabrum, which revealed that mature plants with more numerous and longer branches had an average of 71 trapped insects on them. In the herbarium surveys, the team found that 43 out of 45 specimens had caught insects, suggesting that insect-trapping is a widespread phenomenon in this species.
Next, the study's authors showed that S. candelabrum possesses phosphatase, a digestive enzyme commonly found in carnivorous plants. They did this by labeling the phosphatase enzymes with fluorescent molecules to visualize them under a specialized microscope, a technique known as fluorescence tagging.
To determine if S. candelabrum digests and absorbs nutrients from insects, the researchers labeled fruit flies with a stable form of nitrogen before feeding them to the plants. This led to a marked rise in stable nitrogen in S. candelabrum and in a different, known carnivorous species, which the team used as a control group. By contrast, a non-carnivorous plant that formed a second control group did not show an increase in stable nitrogen, indicating that S. candelabrum is carnivorous.
Finally, the researchers performed a genetic analysis, which revealed that S. candelabrum has genes in common with known carnivorous plants that are linked to prey attraction, digestion and nutrient absorption. Together, the results showed that S. candelabrum evolved carnivorous traits to cope with its nutrient-poor environment, adapting its hairs — which were initially used for herbivore defense — into insect traps, according to the study.
Larger insects, which S. candelabrum requires for pollination, rarely get stuck to the hairs, the researchers noted in the study, suggesting that the species has perfectly balanced its needs through evolution.
Other Saxifraga species and plants belonging to the same lineage could turn out to be carnivorous, too.
"Many members of the Saxifragaceae, which includes genera other than Saxifraga, have sticky glandular hairs and are often covered with insects," Soltis said. "I would not be surprised if other members of the family are also carnivorous — as Darwin predicted."
The study broadens the scope of carnivorous plant research, Sun said. "Carnivory may therefore be far more widespread among flowering plants than previously recognized," he said.
Charles Darwin quiz: Test your knowledge on the 'father of evolution'
Aspen trees could provide a natural buffer against wildfires, as new research shows that areas of forest where these trees dominate burn less intensely than those made of conifers.
The findings suggest that planting more of the right kinds of trees, such as trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides, also known as quaking aspen), could be an effective strategy for protecting communities as devastating wildfires become more common and intense in a warming world, researchers reported June 15 in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.
Individual aspen trees burn easily because of their thin bark, but large "stands" — contiguous communities of trees that are uniform in species, age and structure — of them are more resistant to fire than stands of conifers and can act like a firebreak.
The reasons for aspen stands' resilience are not certain. However, researchers think it likely stems from a combination of factors, including the high moisture content in the aspens' leaves and the undergrowth, the trees' lack of highly flammable resin, and the leaves' height, which makes it harder for fire to spread to the canopy and leap from tree to tree.
Flavie Pelletier, who conducted the research as part of her doctorate at McGill University in Montreal, wanted to see whether aspen stands have been able to maintain their fire-resistant properties as climate change makes fire seasons more intense and destructive.
She combined new maps of dominant tree species in forests across Canada with satellite maps of wildfires from three recent years, including 2023, which was the country's most destructive wildfire season ever recorded. She noted which tree species tended to be inside the fire zone and which were more common at the edges. She found that aspen trees were more than twice as common at the perimeters of fires than inside them, while conifers like spruce and pine were equally present in both locations.
Having more aspen trees in a particular area also decreased the amount of forest that burned each day during a fire, so it also appears to help slow the spread of the fire. Notably, the trees still resisted fire spread even in the spring, before their leaves had fully sprouted.
"This is proof that aspen has an impact on fire perimeter formation and can slow fire progression," she told Live Science.
Anthony Taylor, a forest management specialist at the University of New Brunswick, said the study, with its use of large datasets on real fires, does a good job of analyzing and quantifying a phenomenon that Indigenous peoples and foresters have understood for a long time.
"The idea that deciduous trees burn less has been known for millennia, but knowing something through experience is different than testing it," he told Live Science.
The research supports the idea that planting aspen or other deciduous trees around vulnerable communities can help protect them from fires. Taylor said this buffer strategy is being considered or implemented in many areas.
A single line of trees will not do the trick. The stands must be deep enough to stop the flames from blowing over the top — probably 300 to 1,000 feet (100 to 300 meters), Taylor said.
Aspens can also play a role in fire control at larger scales. Pelletier first became interested in this topic when she learned that forestry companies often spray the forests they manage with the herbicide glyphosate to kill deciduous trees like aspen so they can grow monocultures of more economically valuable conifers, leaving those forests at much higher risk of fires. She hopes her work will help convince the companies and regulators to change their practices.
"There needs to be less of a war on aspen in commercial forests," she said. In the long term, it would actually benefit the companies, because it would reduce the risk of losing large numbers of trees to fire, even if it slightly reduces the value of the forest in the short term.
Taylor agrees that in places like New Brunswick, a province with a large forestry sector, officials should be promoting more mixed and hardwood forests, and less of the softwood monocultures that the forestry industry relies on.
"That would go a long way to making our landscape more resilient to wildfire," he said. "And that's what would have been here anyway, before we started converting the forests to a more industrial forest."
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