Stories

Carnivorous plants have a wild array of adaptations that help them flourish in nutrient-poor environments, which include strategies to lure prey to their traps. John Horner, TCU biology professor, is an evolutionary ecologist with research interests in plant-insect interactions. Here he answers some in-depth questions about these fascinating plants.

Biology graduate student, Kimberlee Whitmore, biology alumna, Maddy Hannappel, and Matt Chumchal, biology professor and director of the Pre-Health Professions Institute, worked with a team of high school students and their teacher, Andrew Brinker, from the Texas Academy of Biomedical Sciences. They collected dragonflies for the Dragonfly Mercury Project at the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge.

Matt Chumchal, TCU professor of biology, along with eight coauthors, recently had a paper, "Use of Riparian Spiders as Sentinels of Persistent and Bioavailable Chemical Contaminants in Aquatic Ecosystems: A Review," published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (ET&C), an international scientific journal. The article reviews the use of riparian spiders as sentinels of environmental pollution, and suggests the development of national-scale programs to monitor chemical contaminants in aquatic ecosystems using spiders.