Flesh Eating Plants
Most of us have read or heard about the Venus flytrap, but few of us refer to this little plant as carnivorous. Since carnivorous means flesh eating like lions, tigers or other mammals that love meat, we seldom connect this word to plants. There are 100’s of species of the carnivorous plants and many of them are native to our United States.
Many have blooms and beautiful flowers and the plant itself ranges in size from inches to large vines growing over 50 feet tall. The flower has a very important function and serves as a decoy by attracting all kinds of insects. The flower itself can’t trap or disengage its prey, but one must realize that without the flower’s interaction the plant at times wouldn’t be able to attract enough prey to sustain itself.
Botanists are still trying to follow and understand the evolution of these carnivorous plants over the past thousands of years. How could a plant evolve into the carnivore family with a digestive system that allows it to eat meat or tissue? How could a plant develop traps that drown, pierce, suffocate and or intoxicate its prey?
This is truly a mystery of mankind that holds so many secrets that one may never know the exact evolution process or the reason that a plant ended up in the family of carnivores. No, these aren’t man-eating plants, but they are carnivorous just like your family dog or cat and enjoy a meat dinner on a regular basis. |
Sounds like a scary movie, but it isn’t – carnivorous plants exist in our world. They didn’t just happen onto the scene! It’s taken them hundreds and hundreds of years to perfect the little steel-trap devices that would put most rocket scientists to shame. Traps that disable prey, digestive systems that break down flesh or tissue so the plant body can assimilate it.