A new species of butterwort – carniverous plants first described in the 15th century – is one of only three to be found in Turkey

Butterworts first show up in a herbal in the 15th century. The genus name Pinguicula is derived from the Latin word pinguis, meaning fat or oily, an adjective first applied to butterworts by Gesner in 1561. The glistening "fatty" droplets on the leaves are a sticky substance secreted by short-stalked glands used to attract, ensnare and digest small arthropods. With about 100 species, the genus is second only to Utricularia in numbers in the carnivorous plant family Lentibulariaceae. The genus differs from others in the family by several primitive or plesiomorphic features including true roots, leaves and sticky adhesive traps. As with many carnivorous plants, the genus is restricted to nutrient-poor habitats.

Species are widespread from the subarctic to the tropics, occurring in Eurasia, northern Africa and the Americas. Although 20 species are recorded from the Mediterranean basin, until the discovery of P habilii only two were known from Turkey. Although some Pinguicula have the two cotyledons in the embryo expected of typical dicots, most species have only one.

The new species P habilii is named after a retired teacher and enthusiastic amateur botanist, Habil Issi, who was the first to discover and photograph the plant in the field. When he posted images of what he called his "secret garden" on Facebook, the unusually long-leaved Pinguicula was spotted by professional botanists. It is known from an area estimated at 0.14 square kilometres where it grows in dense clumps on vertical serpentine rock cliffs along a small stream near Marmaris in south-western Anatolia, Turkey. Given its limited range and narrow habitat it is considered to be critically endangered.

P habilii is among the heterophyllous species of the genus showing two distinctly different leaf forms at different times of the year. From spring until the end of summer it has longer and smaller leaves, and from autumn until the end of winter it has shorter and larger leaves.

Hasan Yıldırım, Serdar Gökhan Şenol, and Ademi Fahri Pirhan of Ege University, Bornova-Izmir, Turkey, made several trips to collect and observe the new species over a period of two years. They noted that it, like other Pinguicula species in Mediterranean ecosystems, is both rare and restricted to small "islands" of sufficiently wet habitat surrounded by much larger expanses of inhospitably dry land.

From an insect's point of view, these beautiful flowers are femmes fatales. Their leaves have two types of glands. We have mentioned the stalked or peduncular glands that exude glistening droplets attractive to bugs searching for water. While these have some digestive enzymes, their primary function is to attract and trap insects. The more an insect struggles, the more reserves of the mucilage are released, making it a losing battle. Sessile glands that lie flat against the leaf surface are activated by detection of nitrogen from the insect. These glands release a potent cocktail of enzymes that leaves little more behind than the chitinous exoskeleton. The same pores in the leaf's cuticle that absorb the liquefied prey make the butterwort susceptible to increased water loss, hence tying them to wet habitats.

Quentin Wheeler is director of the International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University