We’re finishing off this tour of the weird plants of Alberta’s boreal wetlands with liverworts. Heard of them? I hadn’t either until I started working in northern Alberta, but I’m becoming increasingly obsessed. Get out your microscopes and dichotomous keys, because liverworts might be the weirdest plants we’ve covered yet!

First of all, what are liverworts, and why on earth do they have such a weird name?

Carnivorous plants cope with the scarcity of nutrients in peatlands by eating animals. Parasitic plants? They just steal.

It doesn't get much weirder than parasitic plants. The ghost pipe, Monotropa uniflora, could easily be mistaken for a mushroom. It's an almost translucent shade of white, with a bell-shaped flower like a ghost costume made from a sheet. Underground, its roots reach out to the threadlike network of mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi usually form a close symbiotic partnership with plants via their roots; the plants share sugars made by photosynthesis with the fungus, while the fungi contribute minerals extracted from the soil to the plant. Ghost pipe makes this relationship more one-sided, drawing on other plants’ sugars and the fungi’s nutrients without contributing anything in exchange. And because it completely skips photosynthesis, it has no chlorophyll, the pigment that makes plants green.

When you think of carnivorous plants, do you think of lush tropical rainforests? Or perhaps Little Shop of Horrors, with its failing neighbourhood florist where people keep breaking out into song? You probably don’t think of the cool, mosquito-filled wetlands of northern Canada. But in fact, Alberta is home to at least 12 species of carnivorous plants!

Peatlands are where carnivorous plants thrive. Because peat is made up of dead plants that have stopped decaying, their nutrients aren't available for other plants to recycle (see last Wednesday’s Weird Plant post about Sphagnum). Plants that live in peatlands have lots of strategies to cope with these nutrient-poor conditions and obtain scarce nutrients, but carnivorous plants have one of the coolest. Unsurprisingly, that strategy is...being carnivorous!