Nathan Aaseng - Weird Meat-Eating Plants

Look Out for the Monster Plant!

A small fly buzzes around a plant with beautiful white flowers looking for a sweet snack of nectar. Slowly, the fly finds what it wants and lands on the plant's bright red leaves. Suddenly, as the fly enjoys its meal, the leaf snaps shut. The fly is trapped! The fly didn't realize it had landed on a meat-eating plant! Can you believe there are plants that eat insects? Some can even trap small rodents. Author Nathan Aaseng tells you all about these amazing meat-eating plants, from how they trap their prey what they like for dinner!

About the Author

Nathan Aaseng is the author of many books for young people, including The Marine Corps in Action and American Dinosaur Hunters for Enslow Publishers, Inc.

Beware the killer plants! In this close-up photo, an insect is drowned inside a meat-eating plant.

More than a hundred years ago, a doctor reported a hideous event that he had seen on the island of Madagascar. He described a tribe sacrificing a girl to a flesh-eating tree. The deadly plant was ten feet (three meters) high. Its 12-foot-long (3.7-meter) leaves bristled with sharp spikes. According to the doctor, the plant snared the girl in its long, snakelike tendrils. Then the murderous leaves closed in on her and finished her off.

Other reports of huge, deadly plants have surfaced over the years. A plant in Brazil was said to lure monkeys with bright flowers and sweet aromas. Then it crushed and consumed them. Sailors in the South Pacific were warned to avoid an island where the Death Flower grew. This plant was said to form a gorgeous cave so large that people could walk into it. If they did so, the overpowering aroma would put them to sleep. The plant would then devour its unconscious victims.

The idea of such deadly plants continues to fascinate us. Science-fiction writers often tell tales of killer tomatoes and other lethal plants that stalk humans. One of the most popular of these tales has been The Little Shop of Horrors, which has been made into both a Broadway musical and a movie. In this story, a rare and valuable plant requires human blood in order to survive. As it grows ever larger, these demands grow ever more gruesome.

Any educated person now recognizes such wild reports as complete fantasies produced by overactive imaginations. While our planet holds a wondrous variety of plants, it does not contain any that feast on humans or even on monkeys.

The very notion of plants eating animals is bizarre; it seems backward. Plants are at the bottom of the food chain. They provide meals for animals. We think of meat eaters as deadly creatures equipped with sharp teeth, claws, brute strength, and speed. Plants do not fit that description. Although plants have some defenses against predators, they are prey to even the gentlest creatures, such as baby rabbits, fat caterpillars, or tiny aphids. Plants do not have mouths or stomachs for digesting meals. How could they possibly eat animals?

Stories have been told about killer plants eating humans, but they are not true. However, they remain popular tales to tell. This image shows a scene from the movie The Little Shop of Horrors released in 1986.

The idea of plants eating animals seemed so absurd that, for hundreds of years and into the early eighteenth century, plant experts discounted such talk. True, plants had developed some weapons that could hurt animals, such as the sharp thorns of the rose and the blackberry bush. Plants had poisons in their leaves and stems that could kill animals. Certain plants with sticky leaves were so adept at trapping small insects that people hung them in their houses as pest control. These were all believed to be the ways plants protected themselves from animals. After all, how could plants eat animals?

In the eighteenth century, English settlers in America found a plant they called a Venuss-flytrap. They watched this plant snap shut and squeeze insects. Could this plant be trapping and eating these insects? It was a subject of great debate among scientists. Some believed the plant actually was carnivorous, or meat eating. But many said no, and thought the trap was just another ingenious way for the plant to protect itself against pests.

For many years, people had noticed pools of water inside the pitcher plants that grew in North America and the Pacific tropics. Some discovered dead insects floating in that liquid. Near the end of the eighteenth century, an American botanist (a person who studies plants), William Bartram, grew curious about some features of these plants. He observed that certain downward-pointing hairs in the plant seemed to invite insects to the water, where they died. Again, that could be yet another example of a plant defending itself by killing off possible enemies.

Charles Darwin provided the final evidence showing for certain that plants ate animals after he observed many meat-eating plants. This meat-eating plant called a sundew is trapping an insect.

In 1857, a researcher named Cohn examined one of the tiny sacs on an aquatic plant called a bladderwort. Most people who knew of these sacs thought that they served as buoys to keep the plant afloat. But when the researcher opened one up, he discovered a tiny dead fish. About twenty years later, researcher Mary Treat found that the sac was a trap that could engulf tiny water creatures in the blink of an eye.

Before these studies, many experts had thought that plants were doing the unexpecteddevouring small animals. And evidence from these discoveries further confirmed that belief. By the late nineteenth century, the famous biologist Charles Darwin proved once and for all that plants did eat animals. He found that these plants produced enzymes, much like the digestive enzymes found in animals. Furthermore, his careful measurements showed that the plants were absorbing nutrients from the dead creatures. Darwins experiments also showed that carnivorous plants that were fed an occasional meaty meal were a little healthier than those that were given no meat.

Since Darwins time, botanists have identified more than six hundred species of carnivorous plants. Insect-eating plants live in all parts of the world, in many types of climates from the arctic to the tropics. Most live in places with wet, spongy soil, called bogs. The wetlands and bogs along the Gulf Coast of the United States are teeming with carnivorous plants. As many as thirteen species have been found crowded together within a few acres. Carnivorous plants usually grow in soil that is thin or poor in nutrients. This is why they eat meatto get the nutrients they need to survive.

Most of these plants are fairly small. There are no killer trees or human-eating plants for us to worry about. However, there are plants capable of devouring animals as large as rats, mice, lemurs, frogs, snakes, and small birds. Others dine on scorpions, spiders, grasshoppers, wasps, flies, ants, slugs, snails, baby fish, and tadpoles.