A Plant is a Plant is a Plant

What about the 500 or 600 species of carnivorous plants that in many respects don’t appear to fit in the plant family. They’re unique and unlike any of their “kissin cousins” that we refer to as plants. They eat raw meat or tissue, have amazing digestive systems and during their evolution, these ingenious little plants designed steel traps for catching their prey.

Most of us think of plants as flowers, vegetables or food for animals and that would be a correct assumption. In fact, at last count there are thousands of plants - scientists are working diligently attempting to give us an accurate count, but this will take years and who knows we may never know the true answer.

In the meantime, our little carnivorous friends have been assigned to the family of plants, regardless of their peculiarities. Actually they’re more like your family dog or cat, because on a daily basis they enjoy a good meat dinner.

They live throughout the world and prefer dark mucky waters called swamps or bogs. These little plants discovered years ago that in order to survive in the habitat of their choosing, they must learn how to add meat to their diet. It might be referred to as survival of the fittest, because over thousands of years they made some changes that have botanists shaking their heads to this day.

These plants range in size from a few inches to vines that grow 50 or 60 feet high. Many of them have beautiful flowers who invite little insects to come pollinate them. Although the flower isn’t capable of devouring the insect, it serves as an important decoy. While the insect is busy doing it’s pollination thing, our little plant pulls out all the stops and entraps its prey via poison, narcotic or using a sticky substance that renders their prey helpless.

There are many unanswered questions about these little carnivorous plants and their evolution over thousands of years. Like many of our big mammals and animal friends some of their species are hitting the endangered list. Could it be that as a world, we need to protect them, because most of our medicines originate from plants.