The round-leaved sundew is an interesting plant for a couple of reasons.

For one, it grows in remote, wet environments like somewhere hidden on the side of a mountain.

And secondly, it's carnivorous, so it eats bugs like a Venus flytrap.

The Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves recently and unexpectedly discovered this plant for the very first time in Kentucky.

And with their help, and in as intensive an adventure I've been on in a long time, our Kentucky Life crew got the chance to go find it for ourselves.

Botanist Devin Rodgers and Toby Shea were in the Daniel Boone National Forest in November of 2023 when they came across a remarkable find.

The round-leaved sundew can be found throughout the Eastern United States and Canada in bogs or environments with mossy crevices or damp sand, but it had never been seen in Kentucky.

So, the day that you made this discovery, what were you doing that day and walk me through that eureka moment where you came upon the plant and realized what it was?

I always have my eyes out for things that, you know, could be there and, you know, like it could be very unlikely things.

But this creek had all these indications that there was a high possibility for significant discoveries.

And basically, it didn't seem like very many biologists or botanists had ever been there.

So, you looked at the area, you thought, "Maybe this is it," and you walked over to check it out, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, Toby and I walk over together and he just points down and sure enough, there's a sundew and there's just hundreds of them.

I mean, I was like immediately started screaming.

I was so excited.

And then a couple seconds later, I was like, "Wait, like this isn't any known species from Kentucky.

Like this is something different that we haven't documented before."

That had to be a remarkable experience to have happen.

It was.

It's really special.

It's special anytime you encounter like a state record, which is the first time somebody's documenting a given species for a state, but for it to be a carnivorous plant and like, we love our carnivorous plants, all of us nature lovers or just plant lovers in general, they're such fascinating organisms.

So, yeah, it was quite a discovery.

So, we of course wanted to go see the sundew.

Now, Devin warned us ahead of time.

It was a 3-mile hike in a remote area of the forest that really didn't have trails.

We were going to go several hundred feet down into a gorge and the last quarter mile was through a rocky creek bed.

And that's not to mention who might be there waiting for us.

You have to be more concerned about the ticks and stinging, biting insects and black bears.

I'm sorry, bears?

Did you say?

That's right, yes.

Okay.

Okay, so there's bears there.

Yeah, we've got some bears in Eastern Kentucky.

There's not as many in Mercer County, but they're definitely down there and I've definitely seen some tracks on some times that I've been there before.

And after the long trip there, we finally got to take in the discovery.

Oh, there it is.

Oh, wow.

And how does the plant eat?

What's the mechanics of how that actually works here?

Yeah, so each one of these little leaves is covered in these sticky hairs.

Right.

And what you see that looks actually like dew, that's actually these complex sugars that are very sticky and a bug will land on the leaf and get trapped by those glands.

And then the leaf will curl in on itself to get the bug closer to the center.

So, the question remains, how did the plant end up there?

Devin thinks it may have been there all along and just no one found it.

He thinks it could have existed all the way back into the ice age, millions of years ago.

As the glaciers retreated and the climate warmed, some of the plants hung on, but only in what he said were the luckiest and coolest microclimates, much like where the plant was found in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

So, the theory is it didn't get deposited there miraculously.

It may have been there literally for millions of years, just never left and we're just now finding it.

Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, that's correct.

There are still discoveries to be made, but it says something that it took us, you know, up until 2024 to actually have the first confirmed documentation in Kentucky and yeah, it is really neat that it presumably could have been there for a really long time.

The plant is now officially listed as endangered in Kentucky.

That affords it a number of protections, and you can rest assured Devin and his crew are already back in the woods looking for whatever else may be out there just waiting to be discovered.

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