Many Players With But One Tune: The Death March

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These don’t look scary to you? Imagine being a bug with the capacity to understand the danger and you were flying low over a field of open, hungry screeching baby robin beaks. -Or the open maws of carnivorous plants. Its the same thing.  Yeah, -scared now? If you were a bug, these plants could eat you.

Pitcher Plants are my favorite of the carnivorous plant varieties. Their colors and variety are astounding. Most pitcher plants employ a ‘pitfall trap’ method whereby insects or even possibly a small amphibian either by lure or by accident, slip and fall into the vessel. There, they are unable to climb out due to either the vertical walls being too slippery, or grooved in such a way to make climbing out difficult or more commonly, the inside of the vessel has downward pointing hair.

The most accepted belief is that Pitcher Plants evolved from various sorts of pitfall trap plants that employ rolled or tubular leaves, with evolution favoring the ones with the deepest cupped leaves. I believe that bromeliads employ a simple ‘pitfall trap’ in that they retain a pool of standing water and anything that falls in and decays, provides some nutrients to the plant. It is possible that pitcher plants evolved from this manner, getting better and improving upon the design until it reached perfection.

Attractive and Alluring

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Insects that fall prey to this passive system of predation eventually drown in the digestive juices and will be dissolved and absorbed by the plant. Enzymes from the plant itself and bacterial action may also assist several varieties of Pitcher plants in this feat. Some varieties of these plants have a mutualistic relationship with the larvae of certain insects which aid to break-down the insects, and the pitcher benefits from that as well as the excreta from the insect.

The insects that are trapped are reduced to amino acids, phosphates, ammonium, peptides and urea, which is lacking in the poor soils the in which the pitcher plants grow. Pitcher plants tend to grow in soils that are too mineral deprived or acidic for most other plants to grow, so often they are the predominate plants in that area. You tend to find them in vast numbers, packed closely and devoid of most any other kinds of plants.

Horticultural Variety Pitcher Plants

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There are places right here in Ontario, CANADA that have wild pitcher plants growing lushly in swampy areas. I have not seen them myself, but have been reading that there is a large grove of pitchers between Toronto and Hamilton ‘just off the highway’ and easily missed unless one actually stopped the car, got out and explored. The writer wrote that he foolishly walked out into them, exploring, and promptly went waist deep in muddy swamp! He could have been in serious trouble at this point but was able to climb back out. He refuses to disclose the actual location of this pitcher plant grove, lest it attract collectors and curiosity seekers which could do serious damage. While disappointed with this decision, I have to admit that I understand and respect it.

Many Types of Pitcher Plants for the Home

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I have seen these variety of pitcher plants in local fruit markets in summertime here in Toronto, Canada. They are magnificent. I’d love to have a large basket of these hanging on my balcony.

Large Porch Pitcher Plants

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These pitcher plants are huge! The are probably close to the size of your fist. I had heard that some pitcher vessels are large enough to contain a small dove, -I might think that these are that big!

Close Up of These Large Outdoor Pitchers

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Such beauty and graceful lines, -these really do look like brass wind musical instruments. Horticultural saxophones.

Grow Your Own Meat-Eating Plants

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You can even buy packets of seeds to grow your own garden of insect-eating plants. This could be a lot of fun for the amateur hobbyist. Some species of carnivorous plants are protected so the wild harvesting of them is prohibited in many states. One should not forage for wild specimens anyway; the stress of being extracted and relocated will usually be detrimental to the plant and possibly even to the colony where it was harvested.

Venus Fly Traps

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Although these as well as all carnivorous plants eat insects, they do not “eat meat” in the normal sense. Force-feeding a Venus Fly Trap a piece of hamburger will kill it as the beef is too high in fat and the protein is too difficult to break down. The beef will rot long before it is digested. Many a young boy’s pet flytrap has perished because of this. It doesn’t help that many of the advertisements for these plants in the 60s and 70s more or less touted that you could feed them a small piece of beef. Generally, you would not even want to ever force-feed it even the correct insect for that would over satiate the plant as a whole anyway. They grow in poor soil and adapted to eating insects to maintain this balance. Force-feeding in abundance amounts to planting in richer, loamier soil and that will kill the plant anyway, even if no insects are ever caught and eaten. They need to grow in poor and/or high-acid soils.

More Fly Traps

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Venus Fly Traps were my favorite ‘meat eating’ plants when I was a child. Scary, these look like the snapping, nipping maws of something from a science fiction movie!

The Fly Traps I had as a youth never lived very long and I more or less decided that I was not a good caretaker for them. I have had slightly better luck with commercially grown pitcher plants though.

Sundew

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These Sundew plants hold sticky fingers to the sun, attracting flying insects to their nectar. An insect that happens to land upon them will be instantly glued, and the sticky filaments will curl in to complete the trap. Digestion will take place and when the insect is absorbed, the sticky fingers will once again hold its hand open to greet another intrepid insect.

Evil Muppets?

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These cephalotus follicularis pitcher plants look like hand puppets from The Muppet Show or maybe Dark Crystal. They look more ‘animal’ than plant. They almost mock you with a stare of defiance, beckoning you to enter their parlor of doom. You can almost hear their bass voices signing like a choir….

There Should be a LOL Carnivorous Plants Section

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This is rather cute. I wonder how many other funny ‘LOL’ images can be created featuring these unusual meat-eating plants.

(All Images Creative Commons Sourced)