GOTCHA! Hungry Plants! by Mary Barton

 

EVERYTING IS QUIET IN THE BOG. OR ALMOST EVERYTHING.

A TINY BLACK FLY BUZZES AROUND, LOOKING FOR FOOD.

And nothing is so appealing to a fly as the sweet scent of sugary nectar. And that smell is coming from a small, odd plant growing low to the moist ground. The fly circles round, coming lower and lower, until it's tempted to land and investigate. But it's the last landing he'll ever make!

SNAP!

That fly has just encountered one of the strangest plants known--a flesh-eating plant. It sounds like something from a horror movie, but it's a carnivorous (meat-eating) plant, the Venus flytrap. And plants that trap animals to eat have been around at least as far back as the days of the dinosaurs. Not so dependent on good soil and available moisture, they have thrived during the many climatic periods Earth has known. Unfortunately, the Venus flytrap takes several days to digest one fly, so they have never become hugely successful as pest-eliminating houseplants.

Among the types of carnivorous plants included in this non-fiction book is the bladderwort which grows in shallow water, blooming prettily above the water level, but with special hair-trigger pouches below the waterline which suck in tiny water creatures that are unfortunate enough to touch it. The lovely green spiraled pitcher plant has nectar at its base and works like the twisty slide at the park to whiz unfortunate insects around and around and down, where they become "plant food." Some giant ones in Borneo are large enough to swallow up a greedy frog or bird. The sundew, a favorite discovery of Charles Darwin, attracts insects with sticky bubbles on its long leaves, which can roll up to pull the insect down to its "stomach" for digestion. Luckily, there are no carnivorous plants big enough to consume humans, except perhaps in horror comic books; even the giant pitcher plant draws the line at smallish rats. But these endangered survivors of eons of earth time are usually seen today only in botanical gardens, where if young readers are there at the right moment, they may get to see feeding time in the carnivorous plant zoo.

There are more fascinating facts about animal-eating plants to read about in Mary Batten's beginning chapter non-fiction book, Hungry Plants (Step-into-Reading, Step 4) (Random House), with plenty of elegant nature illustrations by artist Paul Miracha, for those young readers who like to read about "real stuff."