Carnivorous plant - Definition and Overview

A pitcher plant in flower, growing on a road cut in Palau

A carnivorous plant is a plant that derives some or most of its nutrients (but not energy) by trapping and consuming animals, especially insects. Carnivorous plants usually grow in places where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic bogs and rock outcroppings.

Types of carnivorous plants:

• Snap-traps
  • Dionaea, (Venus flytrap)
  • Aldrovanda, (waterwheel plant)

• Pitcher plants
  • Sarracenia, (North American trumpet pitchers)
  • Nepenthes, (tropical pitchers or monkey-cups)
  • Darlingtonia, (cobra plant)
  • Heliamphora, (sun or marsh pitchers)
  • Cephalotus, (Albany pitcher plant)
  • Brocchinia reducta, (a terrestrial bromeliad)

• Flypapers
  • Drosera, (sundews)
  • Drosophyllum, (Portuguese dewy pine)
  • Pinguicula, (butterworts)
  • Triphyophyllum, (a tropical liana)
  • Roridula, (a non-carnivorous plant that looks carnivorous)
  • Byblis

• Bladder and corkscrew traps
  • Utricularia, (bladderworts)
  • Polypompholyx, (fairy aprons or pink petticoats)
  • Genlisea, (corkscrew plant)

Charles Darwin wrote the first well-known treatise on carnivorous plants in 1875.

Carnivorous plants in fiction

• A fanciful carnivorous plant with an insatiable appetite was the central theme of the comedic play, Little Shop of Horrors, made from a more serious 1960s movie of the same name.
• The triffids presented in John Wyndham's book The Day of the Triffids are plants which can uproot themselves, move, and can kill with a poisonous, whip-like tail. The book leaves open the question of whether the triffids are intelligent.
• The film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a campy movie about tomatoes that for some reason eat people. It is an intentional spoof on 50s monster movies.
• A large floral plant consumed a young woman in Madagascar in 1878, as witnessed by Dr Carl Liche, or so he reported in the September 26 1920 issue of The American Weekly. The woman was supposed to have been a member of the Mkodos, a little known but cruel tribe. The woman was pictured in an accompanying artwork. In 1925 the same paper offered another carnivorous plant story, of a tree species on Mindanao, in the Philippines.

External links

• The Carnivorous Plant FAQ (http://www.sarracenia.com/faq.html)
• Carnivorous plant discussion forum (http://terraforums.com/)
• Carnivorous Plant Database (http://www.omnisterra.com/bot/cp_home.cgi)
• Carnivorous Plant Nurseries (http://www.paonline.com/mrmiller/Nurseries.htm)
• International Carnivorous Plant Society (http://www.carnivorousplants.org/), provides an extensive FAQ and links to the Carnivorous Plant Web Ring.
• Insectivorous Plants (http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/insectivorous/insect01.htm), by Charles Darwin