Hungry Plants - Mary Batten [1]
The leaves of this meat-eating plant are really small traps with spines along the edges. Many traps are no larger than a dime. The biggest are about the size of a half-dollar. A Venus flytrap has about seven leaf traps.
On each leaf is a red spot. Insects like red, and they head toward it. The spot is covered with sweet nectar that lures the insect like fish to bait. But it’s a trick. Instead of finding food, the insect becomes food for a hungry plant.
When a fly, or any other small insect, crawls onto a Venus flytrap leaf, it touches a tiny hair. Then the fly touches another tiny hair. These little hairs are triggers.
When two trigger hairs are touched or when one trigger hair is touched twice, the leaf trap suddenly snaps shut. The two sides of the leaf close around the insect. Like the bars of a cage, the spines keep the bug from escaping.
The Venus flytrap takes several days—sometimes as long as a week—to eat its food. The plant makes special juices that break down flies, spiders, ants, beetles, and any other bugs unlucky enough to get caught. The leaf will not open again until it is done with its meal.
Each Venus flytrap leaf can open and close about seven times. This means it can eat about seven insect meals. Then the leaf opens as wide as it can and just acts like a regular leaf. But the plant still has other leaf traps ready to catch its next victim.
3. Slurp!
Another type of insect-eating plant is the bladderwort. It is also an active trap. There are more than two hundred kinds of bladderworts. Some have beautiful flowers that look like orchids. But quicker than you can blink your eye, bladderworts suck up their prey.
The bladderwort’s traps are tiny pouches shaped like little eggs. Most bladderworts grow in ponds or lakes. The plant’s stem and flower grow above the water, but the traps are underwater. When tiny water animals swim by, they touch a trigger hair on the plant’s trapdoor. In less than half a second, the pouch opens, sucking the water and the animal inside—just as you’d suck juice through a straw. It takes about one hour for the plant to reset the trap. Then it’s ready to catch another passing bug.
4. Slip and Slide
Like a small helicopter, a bee whizzes in for a landing on the edge of a plant. The bee smells nectar and wants a sip. It crawls inside the plant and quickly loses its footing. The plant walls are slippery.
The bee begins to slide. It tries as hard as it can to climb out, but tiny downward-pointing hairs keep it from crawling back up. Down, down, down the bee slides. It can’t stop. At the bottom of the plant is a pool of water.
SPLASH! The bee falls in. It can’t get out. Soon the bee drowns. Then chemicals in the water help the plant digest the bee just as chemicals inside your stomach help you digest your food.
The unlucky bee fell into a pitcher plant, another kind of carnivorous plant. Unlike Venus flytraps and bladderworts, pitcher plants don’t move. So they are called passive traps.
They, too, use nectar to bait insects. But they just sit still and wait for their victims to fall inside.
There are many different kinds of pitcher plants. Some grow on long vines in tropical countries where it is hot all year round. Many tropical pitcher plants grow in rainforests on mountains thousands of feet high.
Borneo is home to the biggest, most spectacular pitcher plants in the world. Some have stems more than sixty feet long that snake along the ground or hang from trees. Some are big enough to trap a tree frog or a small bird. Others are so tiny they can’t catch anything larger than an ant.
Tropical pitcher plants look like hanging pouches. The plant’s “pitcher” is really a leaf that grows in an unusual shape. The opening is the pitcher’s mouth. The pouch is its stomach.
Most tropical pitcher plants are climbing vines that usually have two types of pitchers. Lower pitchers are shaped sort of like cans. Because they are closer to the ground, lower pitchers catch crawling insects. Upper pitchers are shaped like funnels. Upper pitchers