FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

OK, tell me if this is normal:
Three of my typical VFTs now have leaves and traps growing out of a fork in the flower stalk! On two of them, the fork is about two inches above the soil. On the other one it's about an inch off the ground. They almost look like they're turning into little trees or something! Two of them have lost all of the leaves coming from the ground, and only have the ones on the stalk now. The other one has new growth coming from both the ground and the stalk.

When the stalks dry out, I wonder if they'll stay green up to that point, so the upper leaves and traps can continue to grow. I also wonder if they sometimes reproduce this way in the wild, by essentially "running." Maybe the upper plant will grow its own roots and live independently, if the stalk eventually falls over and makes contact with the ground. Or maybe the rhizome will just "move" up the stalk when it falls over, and abandon the old one.

I just added some pictures:

Man, a lot of people have been seeing this happen and I've yet to see it happen once even though I have hundreds of VFTs that flowered this year. Here's someone else that posted photos of it the other day:
http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/first ... tml#p63386

The phenomenon is called false vivipary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vivipary

You can take the plants off the flower stalk before the flower stalk dies and plant them up and they'll grow just fine. Steve had a Red Piranha that grew plantlets on the flower stalk last year and he potted them up after flowering was done and they grew well evidently.

Hmmm . . . That's interesting, but a little different from mine. Mine aren't growing where a flower should be, but lower on the stalk in one of the forks. Same phenomenon, I guess, just a little different. I also had some of the thickest and largest flower stalks I've seen this year. The largest one was as thick as a pencil, and had a ridiculous gob of flowers. I need to count how many. It was like a little bouquet!
I think I'm going to just leave the plantlets and see what happens. Maybe if the stalks start turning brown below them, I'll snip them off and plant them before they die, though. (Hate to waste a potential plant.)

I took some pictures today and added them, since mine are a little different from the other ones. Is it the same phenomenon?

heathenpriest wrote:Is it the same phenomenon?

Yep, it's the same phenomenon. Thanks for the updated photos. It's a really cool thing to see.

(in southern accent) hehe cool

That is very weird and sorta scares me.

Very nice!!