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.
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.
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.
Carnivorousplants usually grow in places where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic bogs (moss in Scotland) and rock outcroppings.
This plant is usually encountered as a liana, however, in its juvenile phase, the plant is carnivorous: this may be related to a requirement for specific nutrients for flowering.
Carnivorousplants exist between these two extremes: the less limiting light and water are, and the more limiting soil nutrients are, the higher the optimum investment in carnivory, and hence the more obvious the adaptations will be to the casual observer.
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