Carnivorous Plants

Last updated Feb 17, 1998

I like to collect and grow Carnivorous Plants. (Or 'CP' which is much easier to type and to say.)

Believe it or not, I still have more photos to scan! Here is what is locally available:

• Photos from a brief trip through the Everglades of South Florida
• Photos from my trip to the UCF bog in Orlando, FL
• Photos from The Great California Darlingtonia Expedition
• Some (old) photos of my plants
• Do you own a Newton PDA? Here are some Newton Books on CP.
• Some Links
• Some info on my new photo scanner I've been using to scan photos on these pages

A very little info about CP:

What exactly is a carnivorous plant? Here's the answer according to the Official CP FAQ:

A plant is carnivorous if it attracts, captures, kills, and digests animal life forms. There are many plants that do some of these things but which are not carnivorous plants. For example, flowers attract pollinators (insects, birds, and other creatures, even humans!); some plants (orchids, jack-in-the-pulpits, and waterlilies) temporarily trap insect pollinators to ensure pollen transfer; plants such as members of the South African genus Roridula trap and kill insects by their sticky resins (but do not digest the prey); all plants absorb nutrients either through their roots or leaves. However, even though these plants do some of the things that carnivorous plants do, they do not fulfill all of the criteria necessary to qualify as a carnivorous plant. Only plants which attract, capture, kill and digest prey are truly carnivorous.

The archetypical CP is the Venus Flytrap. If you've seen a VFT, you've seen a carnivorous plant. No, they don't eat people, they don't even eat very large, reasonably large, or even small animals except in the very rare cases of a few species of the genus Nepenthes. No, a VFT won't catch your finger if you stick it in the trap, it's only a plant. (Although making the trap close on your finger will probably hurt the plant because you're making it expend energy and not giving it any food in return.)

CP are, for the most part, elegant little plants that have developed some of the most extraordinary methods of surviving in the poor environments in which they typically grow and surprisingly have some of the most intricate and beautiful flowers in the plant world.

Oh yeah, and they trap and eat lots of different types of insects. They lure them in with scents, colors and nectar, snap shut specially-designed leaves like jaws around them, smother them in mucous, get them stuck like flypaper, suck them in like a vacuum cleaner, or drop them into water- and enzyme-filled buckets where they will drown and slowly dissolve ... Heh heh heh heh ....