Carnivorous plants like the Venus fly traps, Sundews and Pitcher plants are something each one of us have read about in school books but have hardly come across in real life.
Recently, me and my colleague Girish went on an expedition to find these fantasy creatures and found lots of Sundew plants on a nearby hill where they were growing in small patches that had wet soil with lots of flowing fresh water.

This patch is where we collected our Sundew plants from. They're not visible in the image but there were at least around 100 of them in this patch alone. These were all Drosera Indica.

We were mainly looking for Drosera plants but to our surprise also found a few bladderworts. I brought the plants home and set them up in a terrarium where they don't seem to be doing great. They're quite high maintenance for something that brutally traps and digests insects. For starters, they only survive in RO water.

Here are a few pictures I took before bringing them home - In one of the pictures you can see the insects that the plant has trapped.



A few days after getting my sundew plant, I ran into something completely unexpected. It was the Foldscope 2.0!! Thanks to Vijay (K VijayRaghavan) who very generously surprised me with a kit.

I had the perfect specimen to look at under my brand new Foldscope 2.0 and it was my Sundew plant. Before we move on to the specimen, let me highlight what I felt is the best part about Foldscope 2.0 - it has three swappable lenses and it is incredibly effortless to switch them!
Here are the lenses:

In addition to the standard 140x that the Foldscope 1.0 had, the Foldscope 2.0 comes with a 50x macro and a 340x lens. These fit on to the foldscope and can be swapped like so:

Here are the images I took of my Sundew plant with the three lenses:

50x Macro
You can see the green leaf and the protruding red tentacles. At the tip of each tentacle is a gland that secretes a sticky substance that forms the dew which traps the insects and digests them.


140x
Tips and bases of the tentacles. These tentacles are actually glandular trichomes.


Leaf cells
Some more smaller trichomes (not sure what these do)


340x
Closer look at the glands.

Here's an image of the cross section of the gland from a different resource I found online:
http://www.sbs.utexas.edu/mauseth/weblab/webchap9secretory/9.4-4.htm

I can definitely spot the tracheids and secretory cells in my Foldscope images.
Lastly, I could see plastids inside the cells of the trichomes.

That's all for today and I can't wait to gather more data with the new lenses! And again, a big big big thanks to Vijay for getting me the kit :)

Best,
Mitali
NCBS, Bangalore