Hungry Plants

Hungry Plants

1. Golcha! Everything is quiet in the bog. Or almost everything. A tiny black fly buzzes around, looking for food. All of a sudden, it smells nectar, a sugary juice that plants make. The sweet smell is coming from a strange plant growing flat against the ground.

The fly lands near the plant and crawls toward a leaf. Closer, closer, closer.

SNAP! The leaf slams shut, squishing the fly between two green walls. The fly tries to get out but can't. The fly will never escape. This plant will eat it alive! How can a plant eat a fly? It's easy for the Venus flytrap. The Venus flytrap is just one of more than six hundred kinds of plants that eat insects and other tiny animals. These plants are called carnivorous (kar-NIV-ur-us). This word means “ meat-eating. ” Carnivorous plants are the T. rexes of the plant world.

Eating bugs might seem like a strange thing for a plant to do. And it is. Most plants get everything they need to be healthy from sun, rain, and soil. But insect-eating plants grow in very poor soil. They make up for this by eating bugs. For these plants, eating bugs is like taking a vitamin pill. Scientists say that insect-eating plants are very old. The first one appeared about sixty-five million years ago, around the time of the dinosaurs and long before there were any people on Earth. We know about these old plants because just as there are dinosaur fossils, there are also plant fossils.