Drosera micra — Vorstman's Guide to the Carnivorous Plants

No photograph of this species under a Creative Commons licence or in the public domain is in the guide yet.

Identification

The epithet micra comes from the Greek for 'small' and points to an exceptionally small plant, even by the standards of south-west Australian sundews. Which group within the genus the species belongs to — the pygmy sundews with their stipules and gemmae are the obvious candidate — we could not confirm in a source. Measurements, flower colour and flowering time are therefore left empty.

Similar species

Without the original description it cannot be established with which species D. micra is most often confused. With very small sundews from the south-west, identification in the field is generally impossible without flowers, a hand lens and the key in Lowrie (2013).

The trap and how it works

An active flypaper trap, as in all sundews: stalked glands with a sticky droplet catch small arthropods, after which the tentacles bend towards the prey and the released nutrients are absorbed. With a plant of this size the prey is the very smallest, such as springtails and mites.

Habitat and ecology

We found no published habitat description. The codes follow the general picture of small sundews in the south-west, in open sandy patches in heath (D1, B5), and are provisional.

Distribution and elevation

Endemic to south-west Australia. We could not verify a more precise description of the range.

Recorded (one-degree cells)

Distribution based solely on records at GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), not on TDWG regions — those are often far larger than the actual range. The light halo is the area around a record, the dark core the record itself. The darker cells are 3 one-degree squares — roughly a hundred and ten kilometres — in which the species has been recorded, from all GBIF records. This is coarser than for most species because hardly any record of this plant carries an accurate coordinate: the locality of poached species is obscured at source. At this scale that obscuring disappears into the noise. The cells show where it has been seen, not where it occurs: an empty square means nothing.

Forms and variation

No subspecies or varieties have been described.

Where and when to see it

For a species about which so little is known, every well-documented record is useful: photograph the plant from above and from the side with a scale, and report the record to the Western Australian Herbarium or a recognised recording platform rather than publicising the site.

Conservation status

The species has not been assessed for the global IUCN Red List (NE) and is not listed in CITES. Uncertainty: apart from name, authors and general area we could verify nothing; year of publication, section, morphology, habitat and distribution remain open until the original description has been consulted.

Scientific name

Drosera micra | Lowrie & Conran, 2013

Drosera micra was described in 2013 by Allen Lowrie and John G. Conran, in the reference work Carnivorous Plants of Australia Magnum Opus, volume 3, p. 1272. The holotype (PERTH 8989001) was collected by A. Lowrie (collection no. 4241) on 21 January 2012 in Western Australia, in black, winter-wet swampland soils; the precise locality has been deliberately generalised to a c. 10 km area in public conservation records (the species is listed as Western Australian Priority 1), so the exact site could not be established with certainty. The name derives from the Latin/Greek micra, the feminine form of mikros, "small". It is a descriptive name: D. micra is one of the smallest species in the genus Drosera.

World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), via Plants of the World Online (POWO), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.