A RARE and heartless killer, it dispatches and consumes its prey slowly, methodically, without forethought or remorse (and literally without a heart). Although it is famous the world around, few among us know intimately of its carnivory, and fewer still have seen it in action in its native habitat, where the killer warrants our sympathy and protection. So I myself journeyed to hallowed ground in the U.S. state of North Carolina to visit with one of the world’s most vulnerable and remarkable plants: Venus Flytrap.
It would be easy now to report for you on the antics of this plant, stuff you probably already know or can readily find online. Instead I bring you experience: what it means to encounter, in its finite and rightful place, what is mostly known as a novelty potted plant. But first a bit of evolution, a very short story of how a plant came to turn the tables on insect antagonists and evolve in an exclusive spot in the Carolinas— and nowhere else in the world.
Essential to any understanding of how Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) came to be is that plants, in their evolution, are often more parsimonious than inventive. Rather than evolving with some new appendage or other contrivance — a “jaw” to kill and digest insects, for example — plants tend to repurpose what they already have, especially leaves. The killing jaw of a Venus Flytrap is just that — a highly modified leaf. Lots of plants have changed their leaves over the course of evolution (cactus spines, for example), but Venus Flytrap and related carnivorous plants reconfigured themselves in at least two extraordinary ways:
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