Hungry Plants - Mary Batten [2]
Above the plant’s mouth is a hood that acts like a little umbrella. It keeps the pitcher from filling up with rainwater. Flying insects use the hood as a landing pad.
The pitcher doesn’t always get a chance to eat every bug it catches.
Sometimes it is robbed by a food thief. A diving spider can dive into the pitcher and steal a bug the plant has trapped. Diving spiders can get out of pitcher plants without being trapped.
They crawl up a silk thread that they spin from their bodies. The thread acts like a safety line.
In the southern United States, pitcher plants grow in wet swampy places called pitcher plant bogs. They look very different from tropical pitcher plants. These pitcher plants don’t hang from trees or cliffs. Instead, they look like trumpets growing out of the ground. In Alabama, where many pitcher plants grow, people call them “bug catchers.”
These pitcher plants come in all sorts of different sizes and colors. The purple pitcher plant is one of the most widespread insect-eating plants. It has some silly nicknames: huntsman’s cap, sidesaddle pitcher plant, and frog’s britches.
The parrot pitcher plant has been known to catch green tree toads and chameleon lizards.
This pitcher plant grows in Oregon and California. It is called the cobra lily. Can you guess how it got its name?
The plant looks like a snake’s head. It even has two flaps that look like fangs. The fangs make nectar.
Insects land on the fangs and then crawl inside the plant. But the cobra lily has a trick in store for its victims. It has fake light spots on the roof of its hood. Insects inside the plant see the spots and think there is a way out. But when the insect tries to escape by flying to the light, it crashes head-on into the plant’s wall. Down it falls into the water-filled trap.
With all these tricks—light spots, hoods, pointy hairs, slippery sides—you’d think every bug would want to stay away from pitcher plants. But some bugs actually live inside them!
In fact, the water in pitcher plants is a perfect place for a mosquito to lay her eggs. When the eggs hatch, the young wormlike animals called larvae (LAR-vee) live in the water. The larvae are so small, they could fit in this letter O. No one knows why, but the pitcher plant does not eat them. So even pitcher plants can be a home for somebody.
5. Sticky Fingers
Sundews are some of the prettiest bug-eating plants around. But don’t let that fool you. They are also pretty deadly.
Each sundew has tentacles that grow on its leaves. Sundews get their name from the little gluey balls that look like dewdrops on their tentacles.
When a beetle flies over the plant, it smells the plant’s nectar and lands to take a sip. Then it gets stuck to the gooey balls. The beetle tries to pull its legs free. But it’s no use. The harder the beetle tries to escape, the more glue the sundew makes.
Then this passive trap becomes very active. The sticky tentacles slowly wrap around the insect’s body, squeezing it so hard that it can’t breathe. The sundew’s tentacles make an acid that turns the beetle into beetle juice. The plant feeds on its “insect slurpy” for several days.
Sundews come in all sizes. The pygmy sundew is no bigger than a penny. The staghorn sundew may have as many as twelve branches and spread two feet across. It can catch larger bugs, like butterflies and moths.
Long ago, people believed that sundews could cure sickness. Many medicines were made from sundews. Mashed or chewed leaves were rubbed on warts, corns, and sunburns. Juices or teas made from the leaves were used to treat different diseases and problems such as asthma, whooping cough, and even toothaches. Some doctors today think that as a cough medicine, this old home remedy really works!
The great British scientist Charles Darwin was fascinated by sundews. He thought they had a stronger sense of taste and touch than any animal he had studied. Darwin spent twenty years studying insect-eating plants. In 1875, he wrote an entire book about