Anna: They snap, they trap, they stick, and they suck. This is the bizarre world of carnivorous plants—leafy creatures that eat everything from insects, to crustaceans, to mammals. I’m Anna, and this ...

Carnivorous plants comprise a fascinating group that has evolved elaborate mechanisms to secure nutrients in environments where soils are often deficient. Their diverse trapping structures—from ...

Carnivorous plants haven’t have the best media representation. The 1986 cult classic Little Shop of Horrors depicted these hungry little darlings as bloodthirsty beasts, which isn’t entirely ...

Splash! Ooch! Yum! And so another unsuspecting insect victim of Nepenthes alata (N. alata), commonly known as the carnivorous pitcher plant, falls victim to the digestive fluids at the bottom of the ...

The Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula is the most sophisticated of the carnivorous plants. Its traps snap shut in a fraction of a second, imprisoning prey in a cage of teeth that line the edges of the ...

A new study sheds a bit more light on the unusual, and a bit bizarre, species of carnivorous plants that trap and kill food, instead of drawing their nutrition from sunlight and soil. A large team of ...

To the average plant-eating human, the thought of a plant turning the tables to feast on an animal might seem like a lurid novelty. Now, science is showing just how remarkable these macabre traits ...

Carnivorous plants have fed our imaginations since the dawn of our time. Charles Darwin called the most popular variety, the Venus flytrap, the “most wonderful plant on earth.” Even the film The ...

It’s a plant-eat-insect world for pitcher plants. These carnivorous plants have bucket-shaped leaves that hold a pool of fluid to drown and digest unwitting insects that fall in. Now genetic ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Toward the end of the 19th century, lurid tales of killer plants began popping up everywhere. Terrible, tentacle-waving trees snatched and swallowed unwary travelers in far-off lands. Mad professors ...

Yet while that bolsters the idea that carnivorous plants acquired their new digestive skills in much the same way, there’s growing suspicion that the same might not be true for the all-important ...