Lissa Wallace, age 10, of Charlotte, No. Carolina, for her question:
Is it true that some plants eat insects?
Yes, this is true. But chances are it does not happen the way you picture it. For one thing, none of these plants can devour anything much bigger than a bee. No plant is big enough to trap and squeeze the goodness out of a human being. What's more, the land dwelling plants are rooted to the spot. They cannot prowl around, as the meat¬eating animals chase after their food.
Most plants use sunlight to make their basic foods from air, water and chemicals in the soil. But some soils cannot provide all the food chemicals they need. For ex¬ample, plants need to take certain nitrogen chemicals from the soil. And as a rule, there is a shortage of these chemicals in soggy boggy soils.
Plants that grow in these soils must have ways to get their needed nitrogen from somewhere else. There is plenty of this stuff in the bodies of insects, and a few plants have clever ways to get it. Actually they don't grab a bite of insect meat, chew it up and digest it as we cope with our meaty food. They trap an insect, then soak him in juices that draw out his nitrogen chemicals.
There are not many of these odd plants in the world. Some people call them insectivorous plants because, until lately, we only knew about those that consume in¬sects. Now we know about a strange fungus plant that consumes real meat. It lives in the steamy jungles of Borneo and its meat course is a mini wormlet called a nematode. So nowadays we call all these oddities carnivorous plants which means meat eating plants.
One of them is the pretty little sundew. It is a flat rosette of pinkish, spoon¬ shaped leaves, about the right size to fit in the palm of your hand. The tiny spoons have hairy whiskers, with here and there a glistening drop of dewy moisture. When a fly is tempted to land on a leaf, the little spoon closes like a fist.
The Venus flytrap has leaves with spikey edges and the middle vein of each leaf works like a hinge. When a fly lands, the hinge snaps shut and the spikey edges trap him in a cage. The leaves of the pitcher plant are folded around to form a slender pitcher. When a fly lands on the lip, he slides down, down a slippery surface. At the bottom of the pitcher there is some gooey liquid which drowns the fly and digests his juices.
Not all the carnivorous plants live on land. The bladderworts live in fresh waters and salt sea waters. These stringy little water weeds have dozens of tiny, bladder shaped balloons with hairy trapdoors. All sorts of worthy midgets swim in the water. When one of them happens to touch the whiskers, the little bag puffs up and sucks him down to be digested.