Nicotiana insecticida, one of the newly-discovered species, is remarkable in its insect trapping abilities.
Nicotiana insecticida uses a sticky substance to trap and kill insects. Image credit: Maarten Christenhusz.
Nicotiana insecticida has sticky glands covering all its surfaces that regularly snare and kill small insects such as gnats, aphids and small flies.
Although the glands look similar to carnivorous sundew plants, the botanists do not think that this tobacco species is truly a carnivorous plant.
This activity is probably only defensive, but it could be seen as a preliminary step along the path to becoming truly carnivorous.
“Nicotiana insecticida was collected near a truck stop on the Northwest Coastal Highway, north of Carnarvon in the Gascoyne region, Western Australia,” said Professor Mark Chase, a botanist at Curtin University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
“We were surprised to find species new to science in such barren land, including Nicotania insecticida, which has sticky glands covering all its surfaces to trap and kill small insects.”
“This is the first time a wild tobacco species has been reported to kill insects, so it is very significant.”
Professor Chase and his colleagues cultivated the seeds of Nicotania insecticida in the greenhouses at Kew Gardens, where the plants continued to kill insects in the greenhouses.
“The arid areas that dominated the Australian continent had been considered almost barren with limited plant diversity, but in recent years these under-studied areas had been found home to many new and unusual species,” said Dr. Maarten Christenhusz, a botanist at Curtin University.
Among the other six newly-described species is Nicotiana salina, which grows along salt lakes that mark the border between the Western Australian wheatbelt and the central region that is too dry for crop cultivation.
“Another of the new species, Nicotiana walpa, from Kata Tjuta National Park in the Northern Territory was given its name from the local Aboriginal word for ‘wind’ because it appears only when there have been storms in the desert,” Dr. Christenhusz said.
“If the rains do not appear, as is often the case, this species remains as seeds in the soil.”
A series of papers about Nicotiana insecticida and other six new species was published in the Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.
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Mark W. Chase & Maarten J.M. Christenhusz. 994. Nicotiana insecticida: Solanaceae. Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, published online August 10, 2021; doi: 10.1111/curt.12402
