It's estimated that there are over 670 species of carnivorous plants in the world.
Most people are familiar with the venus fly trap, which uses jaw-like leaves and a snapping
motion to capture it's prey, but carnivorous plants come in all kinds of forms and use
many different methods to capture their victims, such as trapping them in pitchers or ensnaring
them in slimy tentacles.
It's no surprise that these plants have captured the imagination of naturalists and amateur
collectors alike.
It's also no surprise that their bizarre nature has inspired all kinds of legends.
One of the most popular legends concerns carnivorous trees that are said to be able to devour a
human being.
They've been rumored to live in Madagascar, Central America and parts of Africa.
It sounds like something out of a 1950s science fiction story, but could they actually exist?
In 1874, a biologist named Dr. Omelius Fredlowski received a letter from a German explorer named
Karl Liche.
In the letter, Liche recalled how he had encountered a primitive tribe in Madagascar known as the
Mkodo.
They had taken him deep into the jungle and led him to a strange-looking tree.
He said it resembled an 8ft tall pineable with 6 almost transparent tentacles at the
top of it.
The tentacles were around 6ft tall and incredibly, they seemed to be moving as if they were the
tentacles of an animal.
Below the tentacles, there were 12ft long leaves that tapered to a sharp point and were
covered in strong thorny hooks.
Near the bottom of the plant, there were a series of long hairy tendrils that stretched
in every direction.
The plant emitted a sweet and seductive smell that made Liche feel drowzy.
As he watched in amazement, the Mkodo brought forth a young woman and forced her to climb
on to the tree.
Near the top of the plant there was a small pool of sweet fluid that she was compelled
into drinking.
After taking a sip, she immediately seemed to fall into a kind of seizure.
Liche writes:
It's a pretty amazing story but unfortunately it seems to have been a complete lie.
The Mkodo tribe and Carl Liche never actually existed, the whole story was fabricated by
Edmund Spencer for the New York World.
Of course, this wasn't the only time that tales of a man-eating tree made the rounds.
In 1887, author J.W.
Buel published a book called Sea and Land, which gave an illustrated history of the flora
and fauna of the Earth.
It included depictions of all kind of plants and animals, many of which were shown as being
vicious and dangerous.
There's depictions of shark attacks, of boats being attacked by swordfish, and humans being
killed by tigers and even elephants.
But one illustration stands out above the rest.
It seems to show a giant carnivorous plant much like the Madagascar tree, using its tentacles
to devour a human being.
The description indicates that the plant can be found in Central America and parts of Africa.
It's named the Ya-te-veo tree, which is Spanish for Now-I-see-you.
Could this tree have possibly existed?
To try and answer this question, we have to take a closer look at carnivorous plants.
The tree from Madagascar and the Ya-te-veo seem to be an amalgamation of different kinds
of carnivorous plants.
They have sticky tentacles like sundews, liquid deposits like pitcher plants and fast-moving
leaves that capture prey like venus flytraps.
Carnivorous plants grow in areas like bogs, where the soil is lacking in essential nutrients
such as nitrogen.
Since they're unable to extract the nutrients they need from the soil, they have adapted
ingenious ways to obtain those nutrients from the bodies of the victims they capture.
The largest carnivorous plant that we know of his Nepenthes raja, a type of pitcher plant
found in Borneo that can grow up to 16 inches tall.
They usually trap insects, but they have also been known to trap reptiles and small mammals.
However, these plants pose no threats to humans.
I think that the stories about carnivorous trees were inspired by knowledge of real carnivorous
plants, and also by tales of other strange plants like the titan arum, also known as
the corpse flower.
I mean imagine coming across one of these if you didn't know what it was.
They can grow over 9 ft. tall and they smell like rotting flesh.
They aren't carnivorous, but if you didn't know that, it wouldn't be hard to imagine
them being capable of devouring a person.
Another plant also known as a corpse flower, raflessia arnoldii, could have also inspired
tales of man-eating plants with it's sinister appearance and smell of decaying flesh.
So it's very likely that the descriptions of man-eating trees were just flights of fancy
based on rudimentary knowledge of real plants, but could a giant carnivorous plant have existed
at an earlier time in the Earth's history?
The oldest known fossil of a carnivorous plant was found sealed in amber in Russia in 2014.
The two small leaves are around 40 million years old and resemble the sticky Roridula
plants of today.
It's impossible to tell what the rest of the plant looked like but if it was anything like
its modern counterpart, it probably didn't grow very big.
Other carnivorous plant fossils have been found but nothing that would indicate any
sort of giant species so for now the man-eating tree will remain the stuff of legend.
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