Remember those TV ads for venus fly traps? A fly buzzes innocently near those weird leaves that look like almonds with eyelashes and . . . snap! The leaves close on the fly and that’s that. Awesome!
Well, the venus fly trap is just one of dozens of flesh-eating plants. There’s Nepethes rafflesiana, for example, otherwise known as “pitcher” plants. Scientists report in the journal PLoS One that the plant, which is native to Borneo and member of a species found throughout the Asian tropics, traps bugs in a sticky, gooey liquid inside it’s pitcher-shaped leaves (see the pic above).
Here’s how it works. Say you’re an insect, buzzing quietly along on a sunny, tropical day. You notice an inviting, pitcher-shaped plant and fly in for a closer look. Wanting to investigate more, you land on the pitcher’s rim and peer inside. Suddenly, you’re slipping on the rim’s moist, slippery surface down toward the bottom where you find yourself stuck in a thick ooze. You struggle, but find that the move you move, the more you get stuck. The only way to escape, it seems, is to release your stuck limbs slowly and carefully. But there’s a catch . . . the sticky stuff is dissolving your body so the plant can digest your nutrients. So . . . good luck.
Besides being cool, what’s interesting about this is that pitcher plants have been commonly seen as passive traps. But they’re actually pretty aggresive once a bug gets caught. The pool of goo strategy for catching prey is unique in the plant kingdom and, the researchers say, could be put to use as pest control technology.
Source: PLoS one
Piture plants are cool. I will look for more plants like these. I wonder how big the plants can get.. Be cool if they could trap mice and such.
Yes, that would be cool. From what I’ve found on various websites, pitcher plants don’t get big enough to trap anything much bigger than garden variety insects. Maybe a dragonfly? Anyhow, any plant that can trap and eat a living thing is worth learning more about.
I liked the way you wrote part of that using the fly’s point of view
I thought that what attracted the flies to plant was a scent from the sticky goo? Am I wrong about that?
I guess I should go read more about them now… heh ^_^;;