RAVENNA, Ohio — The slow decline of bogs is resulting in the disappearance of plants such as the carnivorous purple pitcher plant.

What You Need To Know

  • Triangle Lake Bog State Nature Preserve is a wetland created during the last ice age

  • The bog is composed of sphagnum moss which can hold up to 20 times its weight in water

  • The bog is home to the carnivorous purple pitcher plant

The purple pitcher plant has tiny little hairs on its pitcher-shaped leaf. If an ant or small fly gets on it, they’re forced down into the liquid below. It’s just one of the unique plants that makes this bog significant to northeast Ohio.

“We’ve lost over 90% of our wetlands. Bogs are even more unique and we call them peatlands,” said Adam Wohlever, regional preserve manager of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.  

Triangle Lake Bog State Nature Preserve is a wetland created during the last ice age.

“Peat is a type of soil. Peatlands are even more in peril. There’s less than two percent of the original peatlands that once occupied Ohio,” Wohlever said.

Peat is essentially decomposed plant material. Most of the peat in a bog is composed of sphagnum moss, the building block of the bog.

Sphagnum moss can hold over 20 times its volume in water.

“The other unique thing about it is it also changes water from a neutral to acidic state. Without the moss, there is no acid bog,” Wohlever said.

Bogs like these won’t last forever.

“We call it natural succession. It’s a natural process of ecosystems and habitats changing over time,” Wohlever said.

But it’s not just Mother Nature that the bog is battling.

“A lot of these invasive species are the result of ornamental-type plants that people grow in landscaping. We really encourage people to look for native alternatives,” Wohlever said.

It’s not just little plants that grow in this acidic landscape. Tamarack trees grow best in bogs.

“Tamarack is unique that it is deciduous. At the end of the growing season, rather than hold on to needles and grow new ones so it looks like it’s always evergreen, it turns a vibrant, gold yellow. Then, it’ll shed all its needles and put on new green needles in the springtime. It’s our only deciduous conifer that we’ll find here,” Wohlever said.

Triangle Lake Bog will not be around forever.

“Now, if get another ice age, who knows? Maybe we’ll get another bog, but I don’t see that happening yet,” Wohlever said with a laugh.