5 Carnivorous plants that hunt Animals

The Portuguese sundew, Drosophyllum lusitanicum, grows in nutrient-poor soil along the coasts of Spain, Portugal, and Morocco—so you can forgive it for supplementing its diet with the occasional insect. Like many other carnivorous plants on this list, the Portuguese sundew attracts bugs with its sweet aroma, traps them in a sticky substance called mucilage on its leaves, secretes digestive enzymes that slowly dissolve the unfortunate insects, and absorbs the nutrients so it can live to flower another day. (By the way, Drosophyllum has nothing to do with Drosophila, better known as the fruit fly.)

Native to South Africa, Roridula is a carnivorous plant with a twist: It doesn’t actually digest the insects it captures with its sticky hairs but leaves this task to a bug species called Pameridea roridulae, with which it has a symbiotic relationship. What does the Roridula get in return? Well, the excreted waste of P. roridulae is especially rich in nutrients that the plant absorbs. (By the way, 40-million-year-old fossils of Roridula have been discovered in the Baltic region of Europe, a sign that this plant was much more widespread during the Cenozoic Era than it is now.)

Named for its broad leaves that look like they’ve been coated with butter, the butterwort (genus Pinguicula) is native to Eurasia, North America, South America, and Central America. Rather than emitting a sweet smell, butterworts attract insects that mistake the pearly secretions on their leaves for water, at which point they get mired in the sticky goo and are slowly dissolved by digestive enzymes. You can often tell when a butterwort has had a good meal by the hollow insect exoskeletons, made out of chitin, left on its leaves after their insides have been sucked dry.

Unlike the other plants on this list, the corkscrew plant (genus Genlisea) doesn’t much care for insects; rather, its main diet consists of protozoans and other microscopic animals, which it attracts and eats using specialized leaves that grow under the soil. (These underground leaves are long, pale, and rootlike, but Genlisea also has more normal-looking green leaves that sprout above ground and are used to photosynthesize light). Technically classified as herbs, corkscrew plants inhabit the semiaquatic regions of Africa and both Central and South America.

The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is to other carnivorous plants what Tyrannosaurus rex is to dinosaurs: maybe not the biggest but certainly the most well-known member of its breed. Despite what you may have seen in the movies, the Venus flytrap is fairly small (this entire plant is no more than half a foot in length), and its sticky, eyelid-like “traps” are only about an inch long. And it’s native to the North Carolina and South Carolina subtropical wetlands. One interesting fact about the Venus flytrap: To cut down on false alarms from falling leaves and pieces of debris, this plant’s traps will snap shut only if an insect touches two different interior hairs in the course of 20 seconds.