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Archive for the tag “carnivorous plants”

30 Dec 2020

Plants That Eat Animals

You’ve heard of Venus flytraps, the most famous of all carnivorous plants. We’ve seen them in cartoons and learned about them in school, but there are a variety of plants with similar appetites in the world and with different types of mechanisms for trapping their prey.

In the following episode, 4 Ever Green features 10 plants, including the Venus flytrap, that eat animals, usually insects because they’re easier to digest, and preferably dead ones so they can’t heal themselves.

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07 Nov 2020

How Plants Became Carnivorous

Carnivorous plants are rare and only develop in certain habitats, but they are perhaps the most intriguing example of flora on the planet. So fascinating that Charles Darwin published an entire book on them in 1875 after a decade or more of research. It  would take another 100-plus years before scientists could propose a definition of what counts as a carnivorous plant.

There are essentially two things that a plant has to do to be considered a carnivore: First, it has to have the ability to take in nutrients from dead prey and secondly, the plant has to have at least one adaptation that actively lures in, catches or digests its prey. But because this is nature, there are always exceptions to these rules.

So one of the nagging questions facing scientists is how and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected ways to make sure they thrive. Host Kallie Moore takes a deeper look into specifics and tells us how plants became carnivores in this episode of PBS Eons.

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06 Sep 2019

Plants That Communicate

Humans and animals are among Earth’s creatures blessed with brains. But can we say the same about plants? Taking sophisticated equipment used to study the brain, neuroscientist Greg Gage hooks up the Mimosa pudica and Venus flytrap to an EKG to demonstrate how plants use electrical signals to convey information, prompt movement, and can even count in this episode of TED.

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15 Mar 2013

The Day Of The Triffids

Today’s Trillion $ Movie is the 1962 sci-fi thriller The Day of the Triffids, based on John Wyndham’s novel of an eerie meteor shower that blinds most of the human race, leaving them helpless to fend for themselves against the triffids — a mutant strain of carnivorous Outer Space plants. The thing that’s creepy about these gigantic plants — they can move around and pounce on their hapless prey.

Fans of the novel complain that the movie’s a cheap imitation, and it does seem overly melodramatic, including the focus on an alcoholic scientist and his wife (played by Kieron Moore and Janette Scott) who are constantly bickering, as if they were auditioning for parts in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  The fate of the world rests in the hands of a diffident sailor (Howard Keel), who is spared the blindness because his eyes were bandaged the night of the meteor shower. In a prelude, he’s shown recuperating in his hospital room while a nurse lights a cigarette for him. Now, those were the days…

The Day of the Triffids has its flaws, but it remains quite chilling and horrifying, ushering in a new era of post-apocalyptic zombie movies. 28 Days Later owes a particular debt to this film. It was so influential that there’s a lyric in The Rocky Horror Picture Show that goes, “And I really got hot when I saw Janette Scott/Fight a triffid that spits poison and kills.”

Hope you enjoy it, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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