Pitcher plants and sundews prey on insects, but there are other plants in the bog that are hazardous to larger animals, especially humans. Occasionally, a bog explorer plunges through a thin spot in the sphagnum mat and emerges the color of peat. The greatest danger, apart from catching cold, lies in grabbing for the wrong tree to break the fall. Larches, swamp maple and black spruce are all accept able, but beware a tall, tree-like shrub with compound leaves and white berries. It is poison sumac, which leaves a rash far more durable and annoying than poison ivy or poison oak.
Few animals live in the bog, although many pass through it in search of food or shelter.
Permanent residents include insect-eating birds, bog lemmings, garter snakes, frogs and turtles who feed on large insects. Almost no fish thrive in the acidic water of the bog. Although the surface of the bog offers little variety of animal or plant life, its layers of peat represent an uninterrupted record of the myriad species of plants that have grown there since the Ice Age. Plant pollen, the fine yellowish spores that fertilize flowers, are very resistant to decay, especially within the airless bog. For thousands of years, pollen grains have blown into the bog and been buried there, creating a vertical history of the kinds of plants that once existed in the surrounding forest.