Video: How flesh-eating pitcher plants trap insects
MONSTROUS man-eaters. Devourers of maidens. Flowers of evil. From the first hint that some plants had a taste for flesh, there have been horrible tales of what might be lurking unseen in far-off jungles.
Plenty of people were prepared to swallow reports of man-eating trees and bloodthirsty blooms, but naturalists had more trouble accepting the idea that plants could be carnivores. In the 1770s, the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dismissed the idea as “against the order of nature”. Even a century later, when Charles Darwin reported his meticulous observations of plants capturing and digesting insects, some still refused to believe it. One botanist found the notion so offensive he rejected Darwin’s studies as “scientific garbage”.
Since then biologists have got used to the idea that some plants eat animals, but now discoveries about one group, the Nepenthes pitcher plants, are upsetting some of their long-held beliefs. Careful experiments, high-speed video footage and some hard, sweaty work in the forests of Borneo are revealing that these plants are far more devious and more active in dispatching their prey than anyone suspected. There are even suggestions that some pitcher plants have “hunting strategies” akin to those of predatory animals.
“Pitcher plants have been studied for so long you would have thought everything would have been worked out by now,” says Walter Federle, who studies insect biomechanics at the University of Cambridge. “But botanists worked mainly with herbarium specimens or plants in greenhouses. Studies carried out under natural conditions are showing a whole new side to the way pitcher plants capture and