They seem very partial to plants with soft tissues - they completely
slaughtered some healthy Water Violets in a couple of days by getting into
the main stem and eating the plants from the inside out - I would keep them
away from Aldrovanda, but small Utrics seem to get the better of them.
There seems to have been some discussion about purity of species
recently. It seems to me that our classifications become less and less
certain the more general they become, and this is a reflection on the
fact that we started classifying things a long way from their
evolutionary beginnings. Hence we can give a pretty watertight working
definition of a variety, but as soon as we start to group varieties into
species and their hybrids we are in trouble because at this stage of
evolution virtually everything is a hybrid in some sense.
Regards, Nigel Hurneyman