Nature: Carnivorous Plants

Galleria Carnivora displays a terrific collection of carnivorous plant photographs, curated by Barry Rice, whose tongue-in-cheek commentary makes for an entertaining introduction to this garden of fantastic fauna-devouring flora. Carnivorous Plants in Their Natural Habitats, by Matthias and Oliver Schmidt, also contains many beautiful pictures of meat-eating veggies. At Venus Flytrap on HowStuff Works, you can find out how the man-eater from Little Shop of Horrors attracts, traps, and digests insects. Indiana University biologist Roger P. Hangarter's Venus Flytrap is a QuickTime movie of the plant in action -- part of a Plants-In-Motion video collection). Another site honors the Nepenthes, a genus of tropical pitcher plants native to Borneo. Nikon's Small World Gallery has, among many other wonders, a beautiful photomicrograph of a sundew plant by Earl Nishiguchi, submitted to Nikon's Small World Gallery photo contest. Boston's Museum of Science displays a magnified image of a bladderwort, a tiny carnivorous plant found in freshwater. Another site from Barry Rice is The Carnivorous Plant FAQ, an entertaining look at the vegetation in the movies and on television, in such productions as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Minority Report, and the like.