Mick E. Dagas, age 13, of Huntsville, Ala., for his question:
Where do we find carnivorous plants?
No doubt you have heard fantastic tales about meat eating plants lurking in steamy jungles to grab a passing traveler. Well, fantastic is just about the right word for such yarns. All of the earth's carnivorous plants are quite smallish. They are called insectivorous plants because none of them can consume anything much bigger than a bug.
The plant world provides the breatheable oxygen for all living things on the earth. Directly or indirectly, it also provides the foods of the animal kingdom. The notion that certain carnivorous plants eat meat seems rather odd because, as we know, most plants can use sunlight to manufacture their basic food from air and water.
Sometimes we tend to forget that plants also need a balanced diet of dissolved chemicals, which they normally absorb from the soil. Nowadays, our hungry world must face the fact that the stretches of fertile soil are limited. Vast areas are unable to grow crops because they are deficient in certain essential plant foods.
Ages ago, the ancestors of the carnivorous plants found themselves in soggy regions, where the soil was either too short of nitrogen or too acid for normal plant survival. But these impoverished plants did not give up. Gradually they adapted themselves to trap and digest their needed chemicals from the bodies of passing insects. This is why we find most of the carnivorous or insectivorous plants growing in soggy, acid type soils that are deficient in nitrogen chemicals.
The pretty sundew thrives in moist, acid soils around the globe. Its flat rosette of pinkish leaves are hungry little spoons, baited with drops of dewy moisture. Apart from the arid Southwest, they are found in most moist nitrogen poor soils of North America. In certain shady, muddy regions of Australia, the largest sundews are three feet wide.
The Venus' flytrap belongs in the sundew family. It manages to survive in the soggy nitrogen poor regions of the Carolinas. Its leaves are little traps with spiked edges that snap shut with the featherweight touch of a fly. The tall pitcher plant thrives in soggy nitrogen poor bogs and marshes throughout the eastern parts of North America. A somewhat shorter pitcher plant is found in the mountain swamps of California and southern Oregon. Its graceful leaves, baited with fragrance to trap passing insects, may be one, two or three feet tall. Its taller stems droop over with lovely pale yellow or purple blossoms. Perhaps the pitcher plant is the prettiest of all the carnivorous plants. In any case, it was selected to be the official plant of Canada's Newfoundland.