PLANTS THAT EAT MEAT

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 140, 14 June 1924, Page 16

PLANTS THAT EAT MEAT

ENDOWED WITH A SENSE OF TASTE.

All carnivorous plants are endowed with a sense of taste, and they are most particular in their choice of food, for it would be useless to give a flesheating plant a lump of sugar, but, on the other hand, a tasty morsel.of meat would be speedily devoured! The best known of our English epicureans is the common sundew, which can always be f°™d in boggy.places, says Ivy Rodgers, F.R.H.S., in the "Daily Mail." This voracious plant often captures dragonflies and ants, for, attracted, by the' gummy appearance of tho rosy leaves, the feet of the luckless victims become secureiy fixed to the gum and tho red glandular tentacles close in on the unwary insects, which are "swiftly devoured. The butterwort, which grows side by side with the sundew, also ensnares and eats insects, for the sticky leaves of this plant also exudo a resinous substance, which curls over the prey and holds it captive. The Venus fly-trap grops its tasty diot by means of fringing hairs that interlock. Ihe curious leaves stand almost erect and their lobes like .a halfopened book, and you can see an unwary beetle stumbling over them until all at once, he is lost to view, for the lobes close up, dropping the unfortunate beetle into the cleverly constructed trap Insectivorous plants, such as the American side-saddle plant, set water traps for their victims. The side-saddle fraternity hold up their coloured vaselike leaves to tho sunlight, around the mouths of which are glands that secret* honey. Lured, by tho scent of their nectar, the. insects make their way across the leaves, which are beautifully streak-' with purple, green, and red, to the mouth of the plant; farther and farther down tho tube they stray, seeking for the hpney.for which they crave. Detennve hairs prevent them from ever returning to the air and sunlight and weary and exhausted they eventually fall into the pool secreted at the base of the leaf. N *Tr. e i-Dnrlingtoma > which is a nativo or California, is similarly constructed ' and the acid stored in its internal glands .drowns and decomposes both birds and insects. ■ The bladderwort ttiat abounds on our weed-strewn ponds frL heads hanging from its branching, thread-like roots" ?. 1> Mfc OV"' mmute crealures to Pass hi but they have no exits, emergency or otherwise., and the dead «irca«es heln to sustain tho plant in good lieafil, Ml oat small flying and Creeping animals in Older that the. necessary substance- may be added to their tissues which the suil