Elliott Swanson, age 11, of San Francisco, California for his question:
Is there a man‑eating plant?
Some of the best yarns are told about the facts of nature, But often these facts are somewhat stretched, This seems to make a more exciting story, However, it can lead to confusion in our nature study classes, Yarns about man‑eating plants come in this category, There are meat‑eating plants, but no such plant has tackled a live man for dinner,
As you know, plants tend to grow better in certain soils. The farxiort, has to enrich his land with fertilizers. These are chemicals which the crop plants use as food. Nitrates are among the important fertilizers. And certain soils are very short of nitrates.
Plants growing wild in these areas have a problem. They can give up and perish for lack of a balanced diet or they can find another way to get their nitrates, A very few plants have found a strange way to get a proper diet of nitrates. These are the ones that have become meat‑eaters. These plants grow special leaves to trap and digest live insects, These are the insectiverous plants that get their needed chemicals from raw insect meat,
Most of them feed on small flies, A bee is a banquet. A small mouse would astonish and probably ruin the whole plant. None of them could tackle a dinner as big as a house cat, let alone a human being, So, being eaten alive by a plant is one worry we can forget.
Each of these insectiverous plants has its own way of booby trapping its meat course, The sundew is a pretty little rosette of pink leaves. Each round leaf bristles with hairs tipped with dewy goo. Mr. Fly arrives to investigate. The dew turns out to be sticky enough to hold his feet fast, The round leaf turns out to be a folding spoon or dinner plate. For, once he is stuck fast, the little leaf folds up and digests him.
Another insectiverous plant grows only along the shoreline of our Carolinas. It is the Doaea or Venus's fly‑trap, he leaves of this meat‑eater are larger than those of the sundew. They are hinged down the centers which enables them to snap shut in a flash, If a small stone falls by accident on these leaves the plant soon knows about it, It opens suddenly' tossing out the indigestible stone. Mr. Fly gets ether sort of treatment, When he lands on the leaf he is looked in until digested,
The largest of the insectiverous plants grows in the Southland It is the tall pitcher plant, Its booby trap leaves grow in the shape of tall, slender pitchers, complete with open lid. Mr. Fly investigates the rim of the pitcher. He finds it slippery and down he plops into a pool of juices kept ready below, The juices are digestive juices.
Since time began, animals have been feeding on plants. But only a few plants have ever retaliated, And even they prefer to get their food from chemicals in the soil. For when planted in rich earths these insectiverous plants do very well without a meat course.