Feed me Seymour…

Imagine walking thru a deep, dark jungle.  You hear a rustle, not a loud one, just a whisper.  Suddenly, a vine snakes out and wraps around your ankle.  You spy in the distance a gaping maw lined with razor teeth and realize the vine is pulling you towards it.  You grab your machete and lop off the vine and run.

There were many stories just like this one during the expedition explosion of the 1800’s.  The tales and legends that came back with explorers were often filled with danger and adventure., one of which originated as a story written by Edmund Spencer that appears in the New York World on April 26, 1874. The story follows Karl Leche (also spelled as Karl or Carl Liche in later versions of the story) a German Explorer. Karl Leche stumbles upon a sacrifice being performed by a tribe in Madagascar. This sacrifice is being fed to a plant during a ritual.

Now, while we haven’t as of yet discovered any flora friends from Little Shop of Horrors, there may be some kind of real world truth behind these fantastical rumors.

Some types of plants cannot gain enough nutrients from their environment, and so they turn to animals, gaining access to the carnivore classification. Pitcher plants, for exemple, look like a vase with a hood-like top. The edge of this hood is sweet smelling and attracts bugs and sometimes frogs. Once animals get too close, they fall in and get trapped. The pool of digestive chemicals at the bottom digest the prey.

The largest of these plants is called a Nepenthes. It’s native to Southeast Asia and has a vine that can grow up to 50 feet in length. The Nepenthes, although it usually consumes bugs, people have found animals as large as rats inside of the pitcher part of the plant. Some of these have been found to hold as much as four quarts of liquid.

In Japan the Rafflesia gets depicted as a man-eater, and even though it smells like rot and decay or the remains of a recently eaten animal, it is herbivorous.

The smell of this plant is similar to the corpse flower, which has been said to be the biggest and smellies flower on earth. When it blooms it can reach over nine feet in height, which certainly looks as if it could eat a human.  Just ask Kara, who dabbles a bit.

Our very own Panda says it best:

“Given how much is left to be explored here on Earth, who knows?  Maybe there’s something similar to the Pitcher Plant and the Venus Fly Trap that can eat people. Or something on another planet that we have yet to see”