Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Lilly Pad Sabateur

After my neighborhood retention pond failed due to the standpipe essentially collapsing, I rescued some Lilly Pad corms and have been keeping them in my garage in bins of water in the early spring.

When things warmed up more, I moved the bins outside into my driveway, and the all the corms sprouted pads. Truly, it was a beautiful thing, and I was just waiting for flowers to bloom.

Last Saturday night, my wife and I returned home around midnight after having been out on a tour of high school graduation parties. As we pulled up the driveway, we were quite surprised to see a doe making a hasty exit from our driveway/garage area, and we were impressed at the leap the deer made over a retention wall. We pulled the car in and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, I went out into my driveway and was shocked to see all the Lilly Pads gone and the stems chewed down to nubs!!!

I've never known deer to eat Lilly Pads, but now I'm starting to wonder if the damage to new Lilly Pads I've tried to plant in the past was not due to turtles, and maybe due to deer.

Deer eat lily pads, and sometimes submerged pond plants. Some deer may identify as moose:)

Our mule deer eat a lot of sagebrush, especially in winter. Some individual plants get heavily browsed; others very lightly munched. I believe I've read that the plants respond to browsing by upping the production of chemical deterrents, making themselves unpalatable to the deer.
We have a young, maybe 5 year old, Artemisia tridentata that survived very heavy deer browsing one winter and now is avoided by the yard deer.
I'm not so sure that sagebrush obligate species such as pronghorn antelope and greater sage grouse are put off by anything that sagebrush can produce. They love the stuff. Interestingly, sage grouse are known to actually gain weight during winter eating nothing but sagebrush while wading in deep snow.