In 1875, Charles Darwin proposed in Insectivorous Plants that certain Saxifraga species — small alpine flowers covered in sticky glandular hairs — might be carnivorous, the same way sundews and Venus flytraps are. He tempted specimens with insects but could not get conclusive proof of digestion, and the question sat unresolved for a century and a half. A study published in Nature Communications on 4 August 2026 says Darwin was right.
What the study found
Researchers led by Xin-Jian Zhang, working with field sites across the alpine Qinghai-Tibet Plateau-Hengduan Mountains region of China, tested Saxifraga candelabrum against all four criteria formally required to classify a plant as carnivorous: attraction, capture, digestion, and nutrient uptake. Field surveys of 45 specimens found trapped insects on 43 of them, with mature plants carrying an average of roughly 70 trapped insects each, mostly small flies and mosquitoes caught on the plant’s sticky glandular hairs. Fluorescence tagging showed phosphatase enzyme activity consistent with active digestion at the trap sites, and when researchers fed the plants nitrogen-15-labeled fruit flies, the isotopic label showed up in plant tissue — direct evidence the plant was absorbing nutrients from its prey, not merely trapping insects incidentally. Genomic comparison also found convergent evolution with genes already linked to prey attraction and nutrient processing in other, unrelated carnivorous plant lineages.
The paper’s author list includes Douglas E. Soltis, a botanist affiliated with the University of Florida and its Florida Museum of Natural History, alongside researchers primarily based at Chinese institutions — an international pairing consistent with news coverage describing the work as a joint study, though the full institutional breakdown is best confirmed directly from the paper (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75288-y), which is published open access under a Creative Commons license.
A 150-year hypothesis, formally closed
What makes this result notable beyond the plant itself is the shape of the science: a specific, testable hypothesis Darwin published in 1875, using the observational tools available to him at the time, sat as an open question for 151 years until modern methods — isotopic labeling, enzyme fluorescence assays, comparative genomics — could actually close it. That is a clean illustration of how reproducibility and hypothesis-testing are meant to work over long timescales: an old, specific, falsifiable claim, revisited with better instruments, either confirmed or overturned rather than left as folklore. In this case it held up. Saxifraga candelabrum becomes one of a small number of confirmed carnivorous plant lineages to have evolved the trait independently, adding a sixth or so documented independent origin of carnivory across the plant kingdom.
Readers wanting the full author list, funding sources, and methodology detail should consult the paper directly at the DOI above — those specifics come from the paper itself rather than secondary coverage.
