Plants eating vertebrates?

This week we recognize (National Geographic, Newsweek, Fox News,  New Scientist, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Smithsonian magazine, CTV News, Global News did it before us) the work done by Dr. Tim Bartley (Post Doc) from Bailey McMeans Lab (UTM) and Kevin McCann Lab (UGuelph)

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.2770

"I have no doubt that during your most recent trip to Algonquin Park, you witnessed some truly wonderous natural sights. But did you see plants eating vertebrates?

In 2017, I instructed a field course at the Wildlife Research Station in Algonquin Park. One adventurous student, Teskey Baldwin, opted to explore what organisms were in pitcher plants in a nearby bog. Pitcher plants are carnivorous and have specially shaped leaves that act as pitfall traps that commonly catch a variety of insects and other invertebrates. Remarkably, Teskey found 8 spotted salamanders trapped in the pitcher plants. When instructing the same field course the following summer, University of Guelph professor Alex Smith and his students similarly stumbled across salamanders in pitcher plants. Alex recounted his experience to Patrick Moldowan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at U of T, who returned the bog later in summer 2018 to survey both the salamanders and the pitcher plants. Patrick found salamanders in a whopping 20% of the plants, corresponding to something like 2.5% to 5% of that year’s juvenile spotted salamanders. These numbers are remarkable because prior to our publication, no one had documented the consumption of vertebrates by plants in North America. Our work raises many unanswered questions, such as why salamanders end up in the pitcher plants, and how important salamanders are as a seasonal pulse of nutrients for the pitcher plants.