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If you found your way here then you know that carnivorous plants are plants that digest living creatures. They live in soil that doesn't have all the nutrients they need, so they get them from insects. They got this way over a long period of time.
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Here are four kinds of carnivorous plants. They are Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, sundews, and cobra lilies. You can see a Venus flytrap top left, a fat pitcher plant below it, and a tiny sundew on the right. |
| The best known carnivorous plant is the Venus' Flytrap. (Dioneaea Musicupla). It grows on the southern coast of North Carolina, U.S.A. The Venus' flytrap looks and works like a trap. There are little "hairs" on the inside of its trap leaf, and when a bug touches it, the trap closes fast. When the leaf gets old, it doesn't close very fast. It digests the bug juice and usually opens up again in about a week. There's a dried-out bug left inside. |  |
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The pitcher plant ( Saracenia) kills its prey by drowning! It has a kind of water in it that the insect wants to drink, so it crawls down the throat of the pitcher. It can't come back out because there are hairs in the throat that point the wrong way and the bug can't get up. That is a sundew at the bottom right of the shorter purple pitcher. |
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The sundew (Drosera) works like those fly strips you can
buy at the hardware store! They have little hairs with shiny
sticky stuff on them and bugs really go for this! But then they
get stuck and the leaf closes over them like a fist. Sundews are smarter than Venus flytraps because they will not close over just anything. It has to be something they like to eat. A Venus flytrap will catch anything, including your finger! (Don't worry. It doesn't hurt you! But it feels weird!) |
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 | The cobra lily (Darlingtonia) is a kind of pitcher plant, too. It does look kind of like a cobra, doesn't it! |
If you live where these plants grow wild, you should never dig them up! You can buy these plants at a nursery or get your teacher to order them for you from a science supply company. I keep my own plants in a terrarium in a sunny window. They have to have alot of humidity. You can take the top off for a little while, but it should stay on most of the time. They grow best in peat moss and spagnum moss that you can buy at a garden store. Never feed them plant food because it makes the soil too rich and they will get yellow and die. Sometimes I catch bugs and put them in the terrarium, but you don't have to. I water my plants with rainwater. I never use cholorine water.
You will be tempted to poke at the flytraps but you really shouldn't because when they close they have to grow new cells and this wears them out and they die sooner.
Sometimes the plants go dormant for a while but they usually grow back up like bulb flowers. If you take care of them you can keep them for years.
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