On the north coast of the island of Borneo, in a steaming, fetid place called the Pantu peat-swamp forest, I choked on a gnat as beads of sweat slowly rolled down my face. Between my right thumb and index finger dangled several legs that had previously been attached to the unhappy cockroach I held in the fingers of my left hand. I lightly crushed the disabled bug and dropped it into the red-lipped mouth of a Nepenthes bicalcarata plant, commonly known as the fanged pitcher because of a pair of thornlike appendages that protrude from the bottom of the pitcher lid. Then I got down on my hands and knees in the mud and rotting leaf litter and looked at the struggling cockroach through a large magnifying glass to see what would happen next.
Two sharp, saber-toothed fangs hang from the lid of the carnivorous plant Nepenthes bicalcarata, giving it a fearsome appearance. Spiny winged appendages that flank the stem serve as a laddered gateway leading unsuspecting insect prey to the mouth of the fluid-filled pitcher.
"That's cheating," said my companion, Ch'ien Lee, a young American field botanist.
"Enhanced food-chain dynamics," I replied, without taking my eyes from the crippled cockroach.
Ch'ien and I had ventured into the jungle to examine various species of Nepenthes, carnivorous pitcher plants whose natural habitat extends from southern China, Vietnam, and Cambodia to the Philippines, New Guinea, northern Australia, New Caledonia, India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and the remote islands of the Seychelles. But the most spectacularly colored and shaped species are found growing as vines on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, as well as in peninsular Malaysia. The ultimate goal of my journey with Ch'ien was to travel to the remote interior of Borneo in quest of Nepenthes campanulata, the rarest species of carnivorous pitcher plant on Earth. Until quite recently, the plant had not been seen for half a century. It had been collected only once, and the original habitat had been destroyed. Ch'ien discovered a new habitat in 1997, and until recently he was the only person to have photographed the species.
