Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it
Speaker 1: is Saturday. The vault hangs open, and it is a
Speaker 1: October vault. Isn't that right, Robert? That's right. That is
Speaker 1: why the vault is full of monstrous, curling, twisting vines.
Speaker 1: This week. Vines. They just want to grab hold of
Speaker 1: you and just drag you down into the carnivorous undergrowth.
Speaker 1: This was an episode published originally on October eighteen about
Speaker 1: carnivorous plants and uh, and so we hope you will
Speaker 1: stay around for the Tree of Terror. Yeah, imagine there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a little bit of a little shop of
Speaker 1: horrors in this one. Maybe I think we remember everything
Speaker 1: we referenced. We talked about that what's that um William
Speaker 1: Friedkin movie with like the killer Enchanted Tree, Killer Enchanted Tree.
Speaker 1: Oh well, we talked about in the spoil it for you.
Speaker 1: I've already forgotten what it is and now I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to look it back up because that's sounds amazing. Okay,
Speaker 1: without any further ado, let's just jump right into it,
Speaker 1: back into the vault, back into the embrace of the Vines.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: I want to put you in a scenario a bit seasonal.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's a seasonal Halloween scenario. Do you do
Speaker 1: you want to go with me on a hike high? Alright,
Speaker 1: it's late October and you are on a solitary fall
Speaker 1: hike through the woods, and the leaves are starting to
Speaker 1: turn orange and red. The air is dry, and you
Speaker 1: feel like an adventure, so you head off trail. Not
Speaker 1: always a good idea, but let's just say you're brave.
Speaker 1: If this is how all terrible stories start, how all
Speaker 1: tragedies begin, you leave the trail, Well, it starts very nice.
Speaker 1: So you're off trail and you find a little mountain
Speaker 1: brook and it's twisting among the rocks, and you decide, oh,
Speaker 1: how sweet, I'm gonna follow this upstream, maybe I'll find
Speaker 1: its source. And on the way you come across a
Speaker 1: cluster of what looked like oak trees, thick trunks with
Speaker 1: roots spread out exposed over the bank of the brook,
Speaker 1: and there's an odd smell. It's a little bit sweet
Speaker 1: with just a hint of deep earthiness, kind of like
Speaker 1: overripe fruit. So you approach the stand of trees and
Speaker 1: the ground is covered with a mat of these beautifully
Speaker 1: colored fallen leaves. And as you come near the trunk
Speaker 1: of the nearest tree, your foot knocks against a smooth
Speaker 1: stone tangled in the outer roots. But wait a second,
Speaker 1: that's no stone. It's smooth and white, partially buried with
Speaker 1: two eye shaped hollows. And then suddenly, with a rushing
Speaker 1: sound and a scattering of leaves up into the air,
Speaker 1: something envelopes you. The light gets blotted out. You feel
Speaker 1: these wooden fibers pressing into your skin from all sides.
Speaker 1: What's going on? You struggle to free yourself, but you
Speaker 1: find that you're becoming sluggish, disoriented. There's a powerful smell,
Speaker 1: your throat burns, and then the digestive enzymes come. Another
Speaker 1: visitor disappears into the grove of the killer tree. Ah.
Speaker 1: I knew it was a killer tree once the digestive
Speaker 1: enzymes in the woods started happening, because my first instinct
Speaker 1: would be, oh, something was in the tree. I got
Speaker 1: myself tangled and then something was in the tree and
Speaker 1: it jumped down upon me, some sort of predator of
Speaker 1: some sort. I guess that's the more logical thing to think, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: at list until the wood comes, or that somebody has
Speaker 1: set some kind of trap for you. This is a
Speaker 1: human design, That's probably what I would guess. But Robert,
Speaker 1: what first comes to your mind when I say killer tree?
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've got like a fictional anchor point that
Speaker 1: you go to. Oh, I mean there's so many, uh,
Speaker 1: there's so many examples of killer trees, and especially in fantasy, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes you think of the ants or
Speaker 1: especially like the dark sort of tree people from Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons. I'm not really familiar with those. Well, what
Speaker 1: happens when you fight a tree person? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: they're big, they're wooden, they're they're lumbering. I think there
Speaker 1: are a few a few different varieties. There's they're basically,
Speaker 1: you know, they're animate trees, and then they're sort of
Speaker 1: wooden people, and they're good and good ones and they're
Speaker 1: bad ones. Of course, the ants that we encounter and
Speaker 1: the Lord of the Rings are are are good. So
Speaker 1: when you're battling a tree person do you like, do
Speaker 1: you have to have a paladin with a blessed wood
Speaker 1: chipper or something. I don't recall there being a requirement
Speaker 1: for magical weapons. Of course, you know, some creatures can
Speaker 1: only be fought with natural weapons, but with the with
Speaker 1: magical weapons. But I believe that the tree creatures in
Speaker 1: this case are just big, tough trees, because that's the
Speaker 1: thing they're they're they're they're large, They're flesh is different
Speaker 1: than us. So the idea of them becoming animate, the
Speaker 1: idea of them turning against us is terrifying. Uh, and
Speaker 1: they do turn against us. I mean, we live in
Speaker 1: a very um uh tree friendly city. So anytime the
Speaker 1: wind blows, anytime the anytime the rain freezes, the trees
Speaker 1: rattle and threaten us. When they fall, they can cause
Speaker 1: significant damage and even loss of life. There is a
Speaker 1: killer tree hanging over our house right now. Rachel and
Speaker 1: I are working on getting something done about that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this old dead pecan tree. It just looks like
Speaker 1: it is aching to plunge its killer branches through somebody's roof.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, there, of course killer trees in reality,
Speaker 1: but the kind we're thinking of are the ones that
Speaker 1: are a little more conscious with some directed actions the agency,
Speaker 1: maybe some arms, some tentacles, some some gaping maws with
Speaker 1: thorn teeth. Of course one of the big ones, and
Speaker 1: this one entered my mind when you were taking me
Speaker 1: through descriptions. Of course, in poulter Geist, there's that just
Speaker 1: horrifying scene that scarred me from an early age, where
Speaker 1: you have you have multiple things going on it once,
Speaker 1: like there's the creepy clown um doll on the bed,
Speaker 1: but then there's the tree outside the window. It's like
Speaker 1: trying to eat the child man. So I haven't seen
Speaker 1: Poulder guys in years. I honestly don't remember this scene.
Speaker 1: I guess I gotta go back to one of many.
Speaker 1: They throw a lot of nightmare imagree up against the
Speaker 1: wall and up up their amount of it sticks. So
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you that this episode. I wanted to
Speaker 1: do this topic because I was inspired by having recently
Speaker 1: watched the William Friedkin horror movie The Guardian from nineteen
Speaker 1: for the first time. I remember the trailer for this
Speaker 1: is like a creepy babysitter, creepy nanny, but I never
Speaker 1: saw it, so I don't know what the what the
Speaker 1: gimmick is. Well, I'll give you the premise. It's about
Speaker 1: a couple who has a baby and they're looking for
Speaker 1: a nanny because they both want to go right back
Speaker 1: to work immediately, so they're looking for a nanny to
Speaker 1: take care of their child, and they end up going
Speaker 1: with Camilla, the British nanny, who unfortunately is a druid
Speaker 1: who has got a tree friend, and her tree friend
Speaker 1: is a killer tree friend, and she likes to take
Speaker 1: babies to the tree sacrifice them to the tree. Except
Speaker 1: it's this weird thing where the tree sort of observe
Speaker 1: orbs the baby, and then you can see the baby's
Speaker 1: face embedded in the surface of the tree. So I
Speaker 1: guess that the baby kind of melts into the tree
Speaker 1: and becomes petrified. Anyway, she she's an evil druid, kidnaps babies,
Speaker 1: sacrifices them to a killer tree. There are scenes where
Speaker 1: the tree kills people. There's like Camilla gets attacked in
Speaker 1: the woods by some by some creeps who just happened
Speaker 1: to be hanging out in the woods, and the tree
Speaker 1: defends her by essentially smashing them and tearing them up.
Speaker 1: So would you say this is part of the Druids ploitation,
Speaker 1: uh movement of the nineties. Man, if only there were
Speaker 1: such a genre, I would be all over that. I
Speaker 1: would be like a film scholar of the genre. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so do I recommend this movie. It's not a good movie,
Speaker 1: but it's William Friedkin, so it's like a well made
Speaker 1: bad movie, if that makes any sense. He there's a
Speaker 1: there's a certain segment of his filmography that that definitely fits.
Speaker 1: That always worth checking out if you're a fan of his.
Speaker 1: But you know, maybe not Tough Shell. I guess I'd
Speaker 1: say it's not good, but it's worth seeing, especially since
Speaker 1: the spoiler alert the client max of the film involves
Speaker 1: a chainsaw. Oh well, of course it would. Um, of course,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of other cinematic examples of animate trees,
Speaker 1: murdering trees, and just murderous plants. Um. Aside from ants,
Speaker 1: there's the I don't know if anyone remembers the sexy
Speaker 1: Matron tree from the Last Unicorn. The tree becomes animate
Speaker 1: and attempts to love our hero to death, or one
Speaker 1: of our two heroes, the male hero s Medric I believe,
Speaker 1: and uh this sounds troubling. Yeah, she has like huge
Speaker 1: bosoms and all um weird, it's a it's a weird
Speaker 1: It's a weird film when you look back on it.
Speaker 1: Lots of strange elements. Uh. Scott Smith's novel The Ruins
Speaker 1: and the two movie adaptation of it, the concerns man
Speaker 1: eating vines. Yeah, and they're sort of infectious, right, So
Speaker 1: it's not just that the vines reach out and grab you,
Speaker 1: but that there's a spore element where they contaminate you
Speaker 1: with some kind of plant germ cell. I think so, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is interesting when you start getting into some of
Speaker 1: the the technical possibilities of man eating plants. Um, let's
Speaker 1: say already mentioned Poulter guys. There, of course the vines
Speaker 1: and evil dead that are rather notorious. There are some
Speaker 1: man eating plant action in Chinese Ghost Story, which I
Speaker 1: have not seen yet. After reading a synopsis of part
Speaker 1: of it yesterday, it's moved back up to the top
Speaker 1: of mine must watch list. You got the whamping Willow
Speaker 1: and Harry Potter, you have you have a version of
Speaker 1: the the evil dead vines that are mentioned in A
Speaker 1: Cabin in the Woods. They quote angry molesting tree, which
Speaker 1: I think you only see like a a just a
Speaker 1: fragment of it as it like snatches a guard in
Speaker 1: one scene. Man Cabin in the Woods is full of
Speaker 1: just great little freeze frame moments. Oh yeah, tremendous. Uh.
Speaker 1: They're various kaiju that, you know, giant monsters that have
Speaker 1: had plant elements to them and certainly planning with fun
Speaker 1: guy elements to them. And I believe one of Michael
Speaker 1: Shay's Niffed stories features a carnivorous plant kind of like
Speaker 1: a venus fly traffic suchet has a like a humanoid
Speaker 1: female part in the middle to lure males inside it. Weird,
Speaker 1: but I don't have a clear memory of that, so
Speaker 1: maybe I'm imagining it, but it seems like the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that would be in one of his stories. Now,
Speaker 1: almost all of these seem like modern fictional inventions. Do
Speaker 1: are there? Are there animated trees, animated predatory trees or plants?
Speaker 1: Going back in mythology, I would expect to find such
Speaker 1: a thing. I expected to find some better examples, and
Speaker 1: I was not able to find any. Um, not to
Speaker 1: say that I didn't miss something, But the closest, the
Speaker 1: closest example that I came across, and I got excited
Speaker 1: about this was is that is this example of something
Speaker 1: called a jidra uh and this is from the traditions
Speaker 1: and folk beliefs of the Middle East. But here's the
Speaker 1: caveat as related by medieval European travelers. And this is
Speaker 1: a theme we're going to see time and time again.
Speaker 1: The plants become animate and man killing only in foreign
Speaker 1: environments entered by westerners, right, European and American travel writers
Speaker 1: and cataloguers of things going on in places other than Europe,
Speaker 1: in America and the America's talk about man eating plants,
Speaker 1: right and in this case as again as related by
Speaker 1: medieval European travelers, and this was explained by Carol Rose
Speaker 1: and are always excellent giants, monsters and dragons Encyclopedia. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea is this thing emerges from the ground like
Speaker 1: a plant, and and it's rooted in place, and it
Speaker 1: just consumes anything in its vicinity, you know, cattle, small animals,
Speaker 1: and of course humans. The only way to kill it
Speaker 1: is to detach it from its root, essentially chop it down.
Speaker 1: And if you do, then you get to harvest its bones,
Speaker 1: because I guess it has bones which would be valuable. Um.
Speaker 1: It has bones. Apparently that's according to the myth. So
Speaker 1: I don't know if this means that it literally has
Speaker 1: bones and it's a like a rooted mammal creature vertebrate
Speaker 1: creature of some sort, or if bones and by bones
Speaker 1: we mean it's like it's it's would you know, you
Speaker 1: know that does sound valuable because you could probably use
Speaker 1: the bones of the Jidra to make a totally vegan stock, right,
Speaker 1: so you roast the bones and then make it make
Speaker 1: like you'd make a chicken stock or something, but this
Speaker 1: would be vegan, I said, depending, well, depending on exactly
Speaker 1: how you classify a monster like this. Now, I should
Speaker 1: also add that it's thought that this myth probably also
Speaker 1: derived from the man Drake, So you know, European influence
Speaker 1: the idea of the man Drake, which is this kind
Speaker 1: of like animal um vegetable hybrid creature, and then this
Speaker 1: kind of evolves into this tail of the j dra okay,
Speaker 1: And I find it curious, though, you know, I looked
Speaker 1: around for more examples, couldn't find it. I would have
Speaker 1: expected plenty of the Elder, the noted first century Roman
Speaker 1: historian who often spoke of foreign monstrosities, to have like
Speaker 1: a clear cut example of a man eating plant in
Speaker 1: foreign land. Oh yeah, plenty of the elders like the internet, right,
Speaker 1: like if you can think it up, it's on there,
Speaker 1: and if you can imagine it, plenty road about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like people like beast people in other lands, the people
Speaker 1: with the bellies, the with head it had nowls in them.
Speaker 1: I mean all sorts of strange humanoid monstrosities, beastly monstrosities, dragons, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So why no man eating plants? I don't know. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: did you ever see him? Night shamelans the happening. I
Speaker 1: did not. I saw the trader. It happened. There was
Speaker 1: some happening, and it happened, and it was about trees
Speaker 1: that were trying to kill Mark Wahlberg. I have no
Speaker 1: idea why they want to do that. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: really predatory behavior. It was more like vindictive jerk behavior.
Speaker 1: So the trees didn't want to eat us. They were
Speaker 1: like tired of us being abusive to them. So it's
Speaker 1: even less uh in less biologically sound, yes, than than
Speaker 1: any of the examples we've looked at this far. So yeah,
Speaker 1: obviously this idea of the killer tree, the man eating
Speaker 1: plant is one that captures our imagination very easily. And
Speaker 1: I think I've got a theory as to while, and
Speaker 1: let me know what you think of this. I think
Speaker 1: the reason we like the image of the killer tree
Speaker 1: and it shows up in all these stories reas, is
Speaker 1: because the idea of a man eating plant has a
Speaker 1: certain level of why not to it? Right? So, there
Speaker 1: are creatures in nature that kill large animals with claws
Speaker 1: and teeth and tentacles and venom and such, and plants
Speaker 1: have things that are equivalent to this. They've got thorns, vine, tendrils, poisons.
Speaker 1: Trees are much larger than us, and in one sense
Speaker 1: they are apt to be much quote stronger than any
Speaker 1: animal prey that would try to resist them. So why not,
Speaker 1: you know, if the continent of Australia can produce an
Speaker 1: animal that has the fur of a mammal in the
Speaker 1: bill of a duck, why couldn't some deep, unexplored forest
Speaker 1: harbor a tree that can reach out with a vine
Speaker 1: covered in venomous thorns and snatch a hiker, wrap him up,
Speaker 1: roll tight until he turns blue, and then pull him
Speaker 1: down into a crevice in the root structure and treat
Speaker 1: him like a soft salty meal. Yeah, I agree, I
Speaker 1: think on on on one hand, certainly, we look at
Speaker 1: all the variety of nature, we see what's possible within nature,
Speaker 1: and you ask yourself, we'll wind a in this exists.
Speaker 1: Maybe it does exist. Maybe some you know, a third
Speaker 1: or fourth hand tail that I've heard about a man
Speaker 1: eating plant is from a traveler is actually true. And
Speaker 1: on the other hand, I think the reason it's so
Speaker 1: appealing is because it's abhorrent, the idea it's crossing category
Speaker 1: exactly inherent taboo. Yeah, because I find myself kind of
Speaker 1: like if I see an example of an insect preying
Speaker 1: on a on a vertebrate, like invertebrates eating vertebrates, something
Speaker 1: that kind of like it's wrong, has got a frog
Speaker 1: in its web. Yeah, it's like that. You're not supposed
Speaker 1: to move in that direction because stick to your your
Speaker 1: own invertebrate kind. But of course it happens. Now, of
Speaker 1: course I wouldn't actually blame the spider for that. I
Speaker 1: think that's perfectly fine. But no, no, no, no, no
Speaker 1: judgments spiders. But but from our human standpoints, even more important,
Speaker 1: because we've largely removed ourselves from the risk of fredation
Speaker 1: like which is a pretty remarkable thing in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of things, right, and so we don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about other animals eating us. And the idea of
Speaker 1: another animal eating us is strange and awful and terrifying.
Speaker 1: Even more so the idea that a tree could do it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I totally see. It goes backwards on the chain, the
Speaker 1: food chain, right, it's reversing the food chain. That's it's
Speaker 1: not supposed to be this way. So, except for the
Speaker 1: fact that we've never seen things like this happened, at
Speaker 1: an intuitive level, it's like, what's so implausible about it? Uh?
Speaker 1: Then at the same time, I think we may be
Speaker 1: able to come up with some good biological reasons we
Speaker 1: don't actually see organisms like this. But according to some
Speaker 1: we must say, not very credible accounts, there is nothing
Speaker 1: all that implausible about the man eating tree, the killer tree,
Speaker 1: because people have written about these things as if they
Speaker 1: actually exist within the past few hundred years, and that
Speaker 1: hearsay was more more powerful previous times exactly. So I
Speaker 1: want to talk about one source, a very weird biology
Speaker 1: book from the eighteen eighties called Sea and Land, written
Speaker 1: by a guy named James William Buell. Now, just glancing
Speaker 1: through this thing and looking at the author's introduction, it
Speaker 1: is obvious that this is not a source of credible
Speaker 1: scientific information. It's more one of those nineteenth century natural
Speaker 1: Wonders books. You've ever seen these kind of things, where
Speaker 1: there you know, like, wow, look at all these illustrations
Speaker 1: of animals in their natural habitats. But they're all grossly inaccurate,
Speaker 1: and it's really not all that different from various versions
Speaker 1: of Plenty's work from previous times, exactly, except it's you know,
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred years later, however, whenever Plenty was living, Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly so, but it's got all these allegations of weird
Speaker 1: sensational creatures mingled in with reports about real animals, and
Speaker 1: I have to also say, like a very Eurocentric sense
Speaker 1: of exoticism about the planet. So there's that kind of
Speaker 1: unsavory element to it. But it's also full of gruesome
Speaker 1: and probably highly inaccurate illustrations about various animals and attack modes.
Speaker 1: Some of these illustrations are great. There's a good one
Speaker 1: of an orangutang apparently kicking a man to death, one
Speaker 1: of a swordfish stabbing at a sailor through the hull
Speaker 1: of a boat. Not impossible, extremely rare. But as we've
Speaker 1: discussed in our Jumping Fish episode, it it has happened, okay,
Speaker 1: or well, individuals have been stabbed, boats have been stabbed.
Speaker 1: I don't know if anyone, I don't I don't remember,
Speaker 1: of both happen, it would be really bad luck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, in this case, it looks like the swordfish
Speaker 1: is trying to kill the guy. Okay, but in any case,
Speaker 1: there's another one that's awesome. It's a giant crab hanging
Speaker 1: from a tree, lifting a goat up into the tree
Speaker 1: with its claw as if to devour it. But then
Speaker 1: finally a tree with tentacles pulling a human victim into
Speaker 1: the crown of its trunk. I have to say these
Speaker 1: different accounts here. I couldn't help but think of a
Speaker 1: Simpson episode, and I don't even remember the context, but
Speaker 1: there being a scene where like a gorilla is in
Speaker 1: a tree and a shark comes out of the river
Speaker 1: underneath it and eats the gorilla as an example of
Speaker 1: like natural predation or something. Oh wow, But yeah, So anyway,
Speaker 1: so you Will says that travelers have told him stories
Speaker 1: of a carnivorous plant that grows in Central Africa and
Speaker 1: South America. And he says it's so voracious it even
Speaker 1: resorts to eating humans. And I want to read a
Speaker 1: quote from the book. He says, quote. This marvelous vegetable
Speaker 1: minotaur is represented as having a short, thick trunk, from
Speaker 1: the top of which radiate giant spines, narrow and flexible,
Speaker 1: but of extraordinary tenaciousness, the edges of which are armed
Speaker 1: with barbs or dagger like teeth. Instead of growing upright
Speaker 1: or at an inclined angle from the trunk, these spines
Speaker 1: lay their outer ends upon the ground, and so gracefully
Speaker 1: are they distributed that the trunk resembles an easy couch
Speaker 1: with green drapery around it. Uh. Then he goes on
Speaker 1: to say that the unfortunate traveler will come along and
Speaker 1: quote the moment his feet are set within the circle
Speaker 1: of horrid spines, they rise up like gigantic serpents and
Speaker 1: entwine themselves about him until he is drawn upon the stump,
Speaker 1: when they speedily dry of their daggers into his body
Speaker 1: and thus complete the massacre. The body is crushed until
Speaker 1: every drop of blood is squeezed out of it, and
Speaker 1: becomes absorbed again by the gore loving plant when the
Speaker 1: dry carcass is thrown out and the horrid trap is
Speaker 1: set again. I'm some elements of that sound reasonable, especially
Speaker 1: later when we get into real world carnivorous plants and
Speaker 1: the idea that plants are living things that that live
Speaker 1: and move at an entirely different speed. And therefore when
Speaker 1: you see like fast moving actions such as from a
Speaker 1: venus fly trap, it is very much like a like
Speaker 1: a crossbow, a heavy crossbow that has been painstakingly loaded
Speaker 1: over time and then sprung. So I could I could
Speaker 1: see this idea of like a sprung trap working within
Speaker 1: the conceivably working within the confines of of of actual botany. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with a certain type of movement, you can imagine it.
Speaker 1: Less so when especially with something we're going to hear
Speaker 1: about in the second though. I also want to add
Speaker 1: a funny note that, in contrast to the passage I
Speaker 1: just read that in the introduction, Bull says his purpose
Speaker 1: in writing the book is to quote bring us into
Speaker 1: a closer relation with and a better understanding and appreciation
Speaker 1: of the mysterious and infinite wisdom of Nature's God. I
Speaker 1: mean that certainly sounds like a devil created tree. There
Speaker 1: ever is such a thing. But anyway, um so Bull
Speaker 1: says that a gentleman of his acquaintance who lived sometime
Speaker 1: in Central America affirms the existence of a plant like
Speaker 1: this there, except was with a few variations. So he
Speaker 1: says that instead of lying on the ground, the filaments
Speaker 1: of the plant quote moved themselves constantly in the air,
Speaker 1: like so many huge serpents in an angry discussion, occasionally
Speaker 1: darting from side to side as if striking at an
Speaker 1: imaginary foe. Now that sounds completely That sounds like not
Speaker 1: a plant. Yeah, I mean the closest thing I can
Speaker 1: think of that is, say, like a pussy willow with
Speaker 1: with the wind blowing through it, you know, right. But anyway,
Speaker 1: He goes on to describe how this tree would crush
Speaker 1: its prey and an embrace of spines, and he compares
Speaker 1: it to the method of execution from alleged medieval torture
Speaker 1: dungeons known as the iron Maiden. He also claims that
Speaker 1: in some regions, the locals are said to punish criminals
Speaker 1: by casting them into the tree, which is, to anybody
Speaker 1: practicing witchcraft, you go straight into the tree, and that
Speaker 1: the plant is known as yatte vo Spanish for I
Speaker 1: see you. Though I double checked the translation, Apparently it
Speaker 1: has a tensed inflection really meaning I already see you,
Speaker 1: which is even a little creepier. I do like that
Speaker 1: a and almost certainly non existent man eating plant. The
Speaker 1: comparison is made to the almost certainly non existent, at
Speaker 1: least functional and functional terms iron maiden. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that is the case, right. Like I've heard, there's no
Speaker 1: good evidence that iron maidens were actually used. That is
Speaker 1: my understanding. That they became kind of you know, they
Speaker 1: became it. They were an invention and then took on
Speaker 1: a new life. Is kind of a fetish, I him
Speaker 1: for those that wish to possess tortuous objects. Weird anyway.
Speaker 1: I hate to be a downer, but I think we
Speaker 1: can be pretty certain that this is all a bunch
Speaker 1: of nonsense. Like this, this just sounds like complete fabrication.
Speaker 1: There may be maybe or maybe massive, massive exaggerations of
Speaker 1: something people actually saw that was in reality nothing like
Speaker 1: what's being described. There are no trees with killer squid
Speaker 1: tentacles that we know of, and I don't even I
Speaker 1: think we can just say there are no such trees,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't make any biological sense to have trees
Speaker 1: with writhing tentacles that move around constantly. Yeah. The closest
Speaker 1: thing I can think after this would it would be
Speaker 1: the fact that, yes, vines grow on the ground, and
Speaker 1: you could trip over a vine, you're like becoming tangled,
Speaker 1: and you could hit your head on a rock or yeah,
Speaker 1: sort of passive entrapment. That makes more sense, but hardly
Speaker 1: a scenario that that I could see plants evolving to
Speaker 1: utilize as part of their you know, their primary survival
Speaker 1: um tactic. Right. But we will talk about the biological
Speaker 1: possibilities of such a you know, mega fauna eating plant
Speaker 1: later on in this episode. But we should say that
Speaker 1: the yata Vo and and Bules accounts here are not
Speaker 1: the only supposedly true accounts, or at least presented as
Speaker 1: true by the by the recounters of of these man
Speaker 1: eating plants or these giant killer trees. Yeah, and these
Speaker 1: next two examples, like our previous two examples, are exotic
Speaker 1: trees and a foreign land as experienced or at least
Speaker 1: related by Westerners. So there's the Madagascar tree. And this
Speaker 1: was something of a sensation at the time appearing in
Speaker 1: publications of the seventies. The idea here was that you
Speaker 1: had Western missionaries led by a German explorer called Carl Leachy,
Speaker 1: and they accounted a tribe of cave dwelling tribespeople in
Speaker 1: Madagascar who made sacrifices to a man eating plant um.
Speaker 1: There's a fun quote from this so where they talk
Speaker 1: about the atrocious cannibal that had been so inert and
Speaker 1: dead came to sudden savage life. The slender, delicate palpy
Speaker 1: with the fury of starved serpents, quivered at the moment
Speaker 1: over her head. Then, as if instinct with demonic intelligence,
Speaker 1: fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her
Speaker 1: neck and arms. Then, while her awful screams and yet
Speaker 1: more awful laughter, rose wildly to be instantly strangled down
Speaker 1: again into a gurgling moon, the tendrils, one after another,
Speaker 1: like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity,
Speaker 1: rose retracted themselves and wrapped her about in fold after fold,
Speaker 1: ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anaconda's
Speaker 1: fastening upon their prey were well and whoever wrote it,
Speaker 1: because that's one tremendous run on sentence. I love it.
Speaker 1: It's true you can't stop for a breath. That that
Speaker 1: is obviously some sensational detail. That does not sound like
Speaker 1: like an account intending on clinical accuracy. Yeah, I I
Speaker 1: do not buy it for second. So though some people
Speaker 1: have the plant has achieved something of cryptid status. Even
Speaker 1: the governor of Michigan, Chase Osborne, claimed that it was legit,
Speaker 1: but no evidence has ever been presented, and it seems
Speaker 1: to have been a little more than a literary fabrication. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That just seems like another one of those kind of
Speaker 1: like Eurocentric stories of the exotic weirdness of other lands. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean another example, and I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: into the jail on this one. But Phil Robinson, in
Speaker 1: one writing in Under the Punka described tales of man
Speaker 1: eating trees in southern Egypt, and this one is called
Speaker 1: the Nubian tree. Um. Yeah, I all these accounts, they
Speaker 1: really they have this sort of ickiness to it of, oh, well,
Speaker 1: a Westerner being. Westerners live in a special land where
Speaker 1: trees know their place, and we're we're above even predation
Speaker 1: by by other vertebrates. But but it's like everybody wants
Speaker 1: these things to exist, Like you can't stand the idea
Speaker 1: that they're not real. You just don't want them to
Speaker 1: be near you. They're they're hidden in some other place
Speaker 1: where you don't live, a savage land full of savage people,
Speaker 1: according to these recounters. Yeah, yeah, And I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to say that that's like the the only element at
Speaker 1: play here. I mean also, just like the idea of
Speaker 1: man eating plants is really cool. I don't want to
Speaker 1: suggest that the desire to encounter a man eating tree
Speaker 1: is necessarily linked to some kind of colonial xenophobia, right,
Speaker 1: but but I feel like there are some elements there
Speaker 1: that are that are little key to to modern readers.
Speaker 1: All Right, well, you know, on that note, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break, and when we come back, we will
Speaker 1: we will ask the question, indeed, a question that the
Speaker 1: Glenn Danzig may have asked, Uh, why do plants kill?
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. Tell me, Joe, why do why
Speaker 1: do the plants kill? Well, that is a good question
Speaker 1: because in the realm of the well known, of course,
Speaker 1: there are plants that kill. Right, So we've been talking
Speaker 1: about trees that prey on humans in in these legendary accounts,
Speaker 1: that are pretty obviously false. But there are plants that
Speaker 1: kill not just with defensive toxins and thorns, but with
Speaker 1: predatory tactics. They've got specially designed morphological features to trap, poison, paralyzed, dissolve,
Speaker 1: and digest prey animals, generally insects. These are the predatory flora,
Speaker 1: if you will, the eaters. So let's discuss a few
Speaker 1: scientific facts about the eaters. First, I think we should
Speaker 1: ask the question why would a plant kill to eat?
Speaker 1: I mean, think about it for a second. A defining
Speaker 1: feature of what makes a plant the plant kingdom is
Speaker 1: the fact that plants, unlike us, are autotrophs. They make
Speaker 1: their own food, so the energy that they need to
Speaker 1: survive they get from photosynthesis. There's energy and the sunlight
Speaker 1: coming down from the sky, and they use that energy
Speaker 1: from pure sunlight to create a chemical reaction where they
Speaker 1: react carbon dioxide from the air and water in the
Speaker 1: end producing chemical energy in the form of glucose sugars.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you look at the the energy economy
Speaker 1: of life on Earth, generally speaking, plants are the only
Speaker 1: ones with a with an ethical get out of jail
Speaker 1: free card, right like well, I mean, I guess you
Speaker 1: also microorganisms that ar tropes. But yeah, but but everything
Speaker 1: else is having to consume something else for its energy,
Speaker 1: has to steal its energy. But here we have all
Speaker 1: these plants getting the energy from the sun. Well, it
Speaker 1: seems cut and dry. I wouldn't let him off the
Speaker 1: hook too much for the for the ethical quandaries, because
Speaker 1: plants and will not necessarily plants, but auto trophes did
Speaker 1: some atmospheric engineering that led to great extinction events and
Speaker 1: killed probably more organisms than any mediator ever has. Yes,
Speaker 1: but anyway, so plants get most of their energy from
Speaker 1: this harmless process, why would they ever need to trap
Speaker 1: and insect and digest it. That just seems like it's
Speaker 1: it's redundant. It doesn't make any sense. And to find
Speaker 1: the answer, we can look at where these carnivorous plants
Speaker 1: usually live. So most often you're going to find them
Speaker 1: in inhospitable growing conditions, the nutrient poor soil of bogs,
Speaker 1: fins and swamps, places where there might be plenty of
Speaker 1: access to sunlight, hopefully water too. But in the words
Speaker 1: of the old man from pet cemetery, the ground is sour.
Speaker 1: There is not enough nutrition in the ground, And so
Speaker 1: what does nutrition mean for a plant? This is the
Speaker 1: first fact. By the way, carnivorous plants eat for nutrients,
Speaker 1: not for energy. They don't need the chemical energy within you.
Speaker 1: They need your compounds or your molecules. So, just like
Speaker 1: human beings, plants rely on the environment for essential nutrients. Right. So,
Speaker 1: if if you're stuck in an environment where you get
Speaker 1: plenty of food energy through sugar, but you have no
Speaker 1: dietary access to some essential nutrient like vitamin C, your
Speaker 1: health will deteriorate. You've probably read about this on on
Speaker 1: old like ships, you know, the sailors out on the
Speaker 1: war or whatever. Exactly. So, without vitamin C, you're gonna
Speaker 1: start to experience some not so great symptoms. You're gonna
Speaker 1: have dry splitting hair, rough scaly skin, inflamed gums and
Speaker 1: gum bleeding, nose bleeds, wounds, and bruises that won't heal.
Speaker 1: This is all because your body can't synthesize vitamin C
Speaker 1: on its own. You have to get it from your diet,
Speaker 1: and eventually, if your diet is really deficient in vitamin C,
Speaker 1: you're gonna develop scurvy, in which you experience extreme fatigue,
Speaker 1: loss of strength in the connective tissues all over your body,
Speaker 1: Like your body needs vitamin C in order to make
Speaker 1: collagen these for these connecting tissues and uh, and you're
Speaker 1: also gonna have fragility in the walls of your blood vessels,
Speaker 1: which is as not good as it sounds. Likewise, plants
Speaker 1: need essential nutrients to write that. They can't make everything
Speaker 1: they need to survive within their bodies. They have to
Speaker 1: get it from their environment. And one example of this
Speaker 1: is nitrogen. So most plants get nitrogen through their roots
Speaker 1: from the soil around them. They reach out into the
Speaker 1: ground with all of their root and they pull up
Speaker 1: these molecules. They pull up these nitrogen atoms from the ground.
Speaker 1: And if the soil is nitrogen poor or gets robbed
Speaker 1: of nitrogen somehow, like apparently this can happen if there's
Speaker 1: over introduction of carbon into the soil, plants in the
Speaker 1: area can suffer nitrogen deficiency, which is kind of a
Speaker 1: scurvy for plants. You see with the stunted growth, leaves
Speaker 1: turning yellow and pale, and body structures that look kind
Speaker 1: of wilted or sick. So, if you are the plant
Speaker 1: equivalent of a vitamin C starved sailor with bleeding gums
Speaker 1: and fragile joints living in this nutrient poor soil. Where
Speaker 1: do you get your essential nutrients? Well, you could snatch
Speaker 1: up and digest something that has plenty of nutritious molecules
Speaker 1: in it, like an insect, you know. And and we
Speaker 1: discussed in a previous episode, the Weird Mushroom episode that
Speaker 1: you see this exact scenario play out with with oyster
Speaker 1: mushrooms in which there's a nitrogen deficiency and therefore they
Speaker 1: have adapted to prey on nematodes and in some cases spiders. Wow,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. And then
Speaker 1: of course we turn around and eat the oyster mushrimps. Well,
Speaker 1: they are delicious tasting. You never eat a spider on purpose,
Speaker 1: but who knows how many times you you get one
Speaker 1: down the chain. That's the old myth, right, the average
Speaker 1: person eats sixty spiders a night. I think it's crawled
Speaker 1: right in there. That's a myth, right, that's not true,
Speaker 1: that's an Yeah, that's an exaggeration of the myth on
Speaker 1: my part. Alright, so we have okay, so here's another
Speaker 1: fact about carnivorous plants. Uh So the this trick, this
Speaker 1: insect eating trick in order to get nitrogen and other
Speaker 1: nutrients that the plant needs. It's a good trick. And
Speaker 1: for that reason, the carnivorous phenotype evolved multiple times independently,
Speaker 1: So there was no one carnivorous ancestor plant that all
Speaker 1: carnivorous plants today can be traced back to. This is
Speaker 1: an example, or scientists think this is an example of
Speaker 1: what's known as convergent evolution. So it would be kind
Speaker 1: of like flight. There's no one flying animal that all
Speaker 1: flying animals today evolved from. Flight is a solution that
Speaker 1: was reached by evolution in different branches of the tree
Speaker 1: of life, independently and at different times. Uh coast three
Speaker 1: different times. Yeah, Carnivory in in plants is the same way.
Speaker 1: It's a survival strategy that's so good. Different branches on
Speaker 1: the tree of life adopted separately in separate evolutionary contexts. Uh.
Speaker 1: Let's let's go to a third fact related to the
Speaker 1: previous one. Carnivorous plants come in a lot of different varieties.
Speaker 1: You're probably familiar with venus fly traps, but the superstars, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they're not the only ones. There are multiple different
Speaker 1: types of carnivorous plants. It actually occurs in According to
Speaker 1: one source, I found at least nine families, nineteen genera,
Speaker 1: and six hundred species of plant, and so it could
Speaker 1: be more by now. Yeah, I think just a few
Speaker 1: years ago it was that I saw a source saying
Speaker 1: five hundreds. So apparently just continually or discovering new examples. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what are the different types of carnivorous plants. Well,
Speaker 1: you have a few different models, a few different methods
Speaker 1: out there. First of all, snap trap plants, venus fly traps,
Speaker 1: water wheel plants. This is the the iconic example of
Speaker 1: the little trap that slowly opens and then a fly
Speaker 1: lights in the middle and the gates close over it.
Speaker 1: So it's it's kind of a trigger plate kind of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's exactly has a trigger plate. It works very much
Speaker 1: like a like like I said, like a like a
Speaker 1: wolf trap or a fox trap or a bear trap. Right,
Speaker 1: and uh, and these are you know, these are famous
Speaker 1: because they're beautiful, they're they're relatively easy to cultivate or
Speaker 1: at least by the store and keep alive for a
Speaker 1: certain period of time in your home. I had one
Speaker 1: when I was a kid one time and I think
Speaker 1: consolation for the fact that my mom took me to
Speaker 1: a very long, boring time at a plant nursery where
Speaker 1: she was buying some flowers or something. I asked and
Speaker 1: returned to get this venus fly trap, and I got
Speaker 1: it and it was very cool. But I recall I
Speaker 1: got at home and I couldn't get it to close
Speaker 1: on any thing. Oh yeah, I remember being I never
Speaker 1: had one as a kid, though certainly it would be
Speaker 1: the only plant I would have been interested in as
Speaker 1: a child. I had. I had one for a while,
Speaker 1: maybe ten years ago. My wife and I had one
Speaker 1: called Monster Tom, and we kept hoping it would catch flies.
Speaker 1: I would be one of those things where you would
Speaker 1: let a fly live in the house because you're like,
Speaker 1: all right, let Monster Time take care of it. I
Speaker 1: don't think the Monster Time ever ate a single fly,
Speaker 1: but it was still a beautiful little plant app around.
Speaker 1: I wonder if the domesticated venus fly traps have gotten soft,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they just don't pray on flies, like
Speaker 1: they just know they've got to have like big beautiful eyelashes, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, because but of course, these these are known
Speaker 1: as the snap trap plants, and they're not the only
Speaker 1: kind of This also includes water wheel plants, right do
Speaker 1: we say that? Yes, Okay, I'm sorry, but there are
Speaker 1: plenty of other kinds too well, like how about pitfall traps. Oh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the main example of this being picture plants. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is which is one? I believe they have them in Newfoundland, Canada,
Speaker 1: and that's where I kind of encountered them early on
Speaker 1: one really good yeah, or at least some variety of them,
Speaker 1: because they're pretty widespread and these are lovely specimens. The
Speaker 1: leaves fold into deep, slippery pools field with digestive ensigns,
Speaker 1: So it's essentially a champagne flute that's filled with insect death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but with it's got the slippery slide going down into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the the insect light slides down scot and the
Speaker 1: goo and dissolves. So it's it's it's kind of monstrous,
Speaker 1: but also be their beautiful plants. So you seem a
Speaker 1: lot of botanical gardens. I'm always seeing them, often with
Speaker 1: some kind of chemical attractant to to bring the insects in,
Speaker 1: to lure them down. Uh. And then there there's something
Speaker 1: I've read about the special surfaces, right, like the surfaces
Speaker 1: on the lip of the picture plant becomes slippery when wet,
Speaker 1: so it's hard to scramble back up them and just
Speaker 1: kind of slide, uh intellectably down into the pit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course it's worth worth reminding everyone. Like one
Speaker 1: of the key things here is that is that plants
Speaker 1: and insects and have a hat if a long history
Speaker 1: with insects serving as pollinators for for so for so
Speaker 1: many different plant varieties. Oh yeah, there's actually a study
Speaker 1: about that I want to mention in a few minutes here.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the picture plants, Yeah, that's so they're they're
Speaker 1: they're numerous varieties of this. And the earliest fossil evidence
Speaker 1: of a carnivorous plant might be a picture plant, uh,
Speaker 1: the mid early Cretaceous uh Archaeomorpha long as servia, was
Speaker 1: discovered in what's now northeastern China, and researchers are now
Speaker 1: split on the matter, with newer research arguing than it
Speaker 1: might not be a picture plan at all, some of
Speaker 1: the others, especially the earlier papers, saying that, oh this,
Speaker 1: this definitely is a picture plan or at least sort
Speaker 1: of a proto picture plant, and so it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of a problematic fossil right now. But there's a possibility
Speaker 1: other than that that there's not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: fossil evidence of carnivorous plants. So any dreams you might
Speaker 1: have out there listeners for a for like a prehistoric
Speaker 1: giantly like a giant one that's eating dinosaurs or prehistarring mammals, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: it's not in the fossil record at any rate. Man,
Speaker 1: that's a bummer. Three. History gives us giant toads, giant scorpions,
Speaker 1: but no giant carniverous plants. Of course, there are other
Speaker 1: varieties of carnivorous plants as well. There are lobster trap plants. Oh,
Speaker 1: these are great. There They go by the pickle jar principle, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you reach in, you grab the pickles, and you can't
Speaker 1: get your hand back out right or indeed, as the
Speaker 1: name applies, lobster traps various crab traps. Does anyone has
Speaker 1: ever used these? Know that the creature crawls in, but
Speaker 1: then it can't quit get out again. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: how these plants that do that with through special structures
Speaker 1: that end up trapping the creature. Yeah, I think there's
Speaker 1: a certain element of this and I think it's actually
Speaker 1: a type of picture plant, but it had there's an
Speaker 1: element of easier to get in and apparently easy to
Speaker 1: get out until you're inside. In uh In the cobra lily,
Speaker 1: this cool example of an American carnivorous plant that I found.
Speaker 1: It grows in I think northern California and southern Oregon.
Speaker 1: Uh And it's this beautiful looking plant that has a
Speaker 1: has a picture and is in some way carnivorous. But
Speaker 1: it's got an opening on the bottom and then the top.
Speaker 1: It's kind of translucent so the light can come through,
Speaker 1: so I assume to an insect, it looks kind of
Speaker 1: like you can exit through the top until you get inside,
Speaker 1: all right. Up next, we have sticky traps a k a.
Speaker 1: Flied paper traps, and examples here include sun dues and butterwartz.
Speaker 1: So the leaves exude a sticky substance that catches lighting insects.
Speaker 1: Pretty pretty basic, but hey, it's a winning design. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've I've got the willies from glue traps because I
Speaker 1: know the stories of people who have tried to use
Speaker 1: glue traps to catch rodents in their house. And that's
Speaker 1: just a sad scene. Yeah. The tragedy of glue traps
Speaker 1: is that they sound humane on the surface of things
Speaker 1: not but they're they're not at all, especially when you
Speaker 1: when you realize that reptiles that gets caught in them,
Speaker 1: they're going to suffer a long time because they've evolved
Speaker 1: to to to go a long time between meals. Uh so, hey,
Speaker 1: if you do. I have had to remove a snake
Speaker 1: from a glue trap before, and if you use oil,
Speaker 1: that will really help. I think I think we used
Speaker 1: olive oil and we're able to free a specimen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. Well, well, I don't know, it's amazing. I
Speaker 1: didn't know you were such a hero, Robert. Well, it was.
Speaker 1: I feel like, can you come get my cat out
Speaker 1: of the tree? Can you come get my snake out
Speaker 1: of a glue trap? Well? I have you. I have
Speaker 1: found that if I am if I encounter an animal
Speaker 1: with my son, I'm often even more humane, Like not
Speaker 1: not so much snakes, because I generally am going to
Speaker 1: be cool with snakes. But this most recent trip, we
Speaker 1: came across some blackwood of spiders and like, actually three,
Speaker 1: you're like really close to um to a house, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, normally once the instinct that I grew up
Speaker 1: with is if you find a blackwoodo of spider, you
Speaker 1: go ahead and kill it because it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a highly it's it's not a good animal have around.
Speaker 1: You don't want that thing by me, right, I feel
Speaker 1: like we should learn to resist that impulse. I think
Speaker 1: so too. I like, you know, if it's not hurting us,
Speaker 1: then we shouldn't crush it. So we just checked it out.
Speaker 1: We actually caught one and put it in a little
Speaker 1: glass and looked at it for a little bit and
Speaker 1: then released it further away from the house. But then,
Speaker 1: of course there is one other major type of of
Speaker 1: of carniversus plant, right, these suction traps. Yes, these involve
Speaker 1: highly modified leaves in the shape of a bladder with
Speaker 1: a hinge door lined with trigger hairs. H So these
Speaker 1: are the ones, if I'm picturing them correctly. Um, these
Speaker 1: are the ones that kind of remind one of of
Speaker 1: pipe organs with a little bit on the top, like
Speaker 1: a little lid on the top of the organ pipe. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever seen that, or maybe it's
Speaker 1: more like no, no, it's more like the I'm I'm
Speaker 1: comparing it to cartoons. I think in my mind we
Speaker 1: have like a steam engine or something, and they have
Speaker 1: the little top that flips up on the top of
Speaker 1: the the sauce pipe. Yeah, kind of similar to that. Okay,
Speaker 1: uh so, hey, let's hit the next fact about carnivorous plants.
Speaker 1: Among the killer plants, you've got a couple of different
Speaker 1: major varieties, right, So you've got carnivores and then you've
Speaker 1: got the proto carnivores proto carnivorous plants. So what what
Speaker 1: would we mean by that? A proto carnivorous plant is
Speaker 1: a plant that has the tendency to catch and kill prey,
Speaker 1: but doesn't yet have the capacity to directly digest the meal. So,
Speaker 1: for example, there are some picture plants that do not
Speaker 1: produce their own digestive enzymes, but rely on bacteria to
Speaker 1: dissolve organic matter in the traps. And some botanists would
Speaker 1: class proto carnivorous plants as taxons that are part of
Speaker 1: the way. They're right there on the evolutionary path to
Speaker 1: becoming carnivores. Yeah, it's interesting when we consider that that
Speaker 1: many carnivore lineages, you know, they enter into the carnivore
Speaker 1: game via proto carnivore lifestyle. Yeah, so yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of like seeing evolution in action, and
Speaker 1: I can't help it. To consider the relationship between figs
Speaker 1: and fig wasps, that's interesting, which I think is a
Speaker 1: great example of, you know, a complex relationship, really a
Speaker 1: mutualistic relationship between a plant and a particular insects species.
Speaker 1: I've never heard this mentioned as an example of of
Speaker 1: a carnivorous plant, but Robert tell us how it goes down.
Speaker 1: What's the relationship? All right? Well, uh, again, it's a
Speaker 1: mutualistic relationship. But there there's some there's some nutrients absorbed
Speaker 1: to at the end of the story. So the basic
Speaker 1: scenario here is that fig trees need wasps to transport
Speaker 1: pollen from one plant to the other. The plant provides
Speaker 1: a fig wasp with their only source of food and
Speaker 1: shelter um. What we call a fig is actually a
Speaker 1: structure called a seconium, and it's really more of an
Speaker 1: inverted flower than a fruit, with all its reproductive parts
Speaker 1: located inside. And after a female fig wasp flies over
Speaker 1: from her home fig plant, she has to travel to
Speaker 1: the center of seconium to lay her eggs, and to
Speaker 1: get there, she climbs down a narrow passage called the
Speaker 1: osteo passage is so cramped that she scrapes off her
Speaker 1: wings and her antenna during the descent. It's just a real,
Speaker 1: real nightmare scenario. And then once inside, there's no getting
Speaker 1: back out and flying to another plant. Uh, it's like
Speaker 1: like finding a narrow hole in a cemetery and climbing
Speaker 1: down into a grave, just ripping a bunch of skin
Speaker 1: off in the process. And then when she's down there, well,
Speaker 1: she better hope she's in the right place because fig
Speaker 1: plants boast two kinds of figs, male caprifigs and then
Speaker 1: female edible figs. If she if she winds up an
Speaker 1: inedible with fig she eventually dies from exhaustion or starvation.
Speaker 1: She can't lay her eggs there, the stylus is in
Speaker 1: the way, but she at least delivers the pollens, which
Speaker 1: is kind of a cool, a cruel trick, right. Um,
Speaker 1: we see the mutualistic aspect here, but it also kind
Speaker 1: of breaking down right Like the right plant, the plant
Speaker 1: gets what it wants, but the wasp doesn't get what
Speaker 1: it wants. Now she enters the male caprifig, she'll find
Speaker 1: male flower parts perfectly shaped to hold the eggs. She'll
Speaker 1: eventually lay. The eggs grow into larva, which then developed
Speaker 1: into male and female wasps, which emerge after hatching. The blind, wingless,
Speaker 1: wingless male wasp will spend the remainder of their lives
Speaker 1: digging tunnels through the fig. The female wasps then emerge
Speaker 1: through these tunnels and fly off to find a new fig,
Speaker 1: carrying pollen with them. Now, and that is a crazy process, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It's it's it's wondrous, wondrous. I had figs
Speaker 1: in my backyard this this year, and uh I thought
Speaker 1: about it every time I went out there to check
Speaker 1: on them. Well, wait, then, is it accurate to say that,
Speaker 1: in some sense the fig tree is consuming the wasp
Speaker 1: that is stuck inside it. Yes, because this is what
Speaker 1: happens in the death fig um. When a female wasp
Speaker 1: dies inside an edible fig, and enzyme in the fig
Speaker 1: called icing breaks down her carcass into protein. So the
Speaker 1: fig basically digests the dead insect, making it a part
Speaker 1: of the resulting ripened fruit. The crunchy the crunchy bits,
Speaker 1: and the figs, though or seeds, not anatomical parts of
Speaker 1: the wasp in case, and he was wondering. Now, One
Speaker 1: thing I do think about here is that a fig
Speaker 1: tree doesn't seem to me to be something that is
Speaker 1: suffering from a lack of nitrogen or some other nutrient
Speaker 1: or or is it. I mean that that's not my
Speaker 1: understanding that it's necessarily suffering, but it just gets some
Speaker 1: kind of maybe even if it could survive without these wasps,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I know that it could, but even
Speaker 1: if it could, it just gets a little extra boost.
Speaker 1: I guess it's like using every part of the buffalo, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, the wasp is in there, it's it's not
Speaker 1: going anywhere. Why not digested? Why not digested? I mean
Speaker 1: to sort of anthromorp anthropomorphize the evolutionary process here of bit.
Speaker 1: But it's it's an interesting example. I think of certainly
Speaker 1: a complex relationship, a mutualistic relationship where it's kind of
Speaker 1: like thinking of it as a corporation. Right, So you
Speaker 1: have you have Big Treek Corp. You know, and they
Speaker 1: have all these different departments, and most of the departments
Speaker 1: are related to fruit production and UH and and wasp
Speaker 1: relations but there is definitely a wasp dissolving and digesting department.
Speaker 1: It's not the primary department. It's on the basement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's in the basement, but it's still plays a role
Speaker 1: in the overall company structure. Okay, okay uh. And it's
Speaker 1: you always got to put the payroll in. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I wanted to see if there was any interesting new
Speaker 1: research from this year on on carnivorous plants, and I
Speaker 1: can't across one paper I thought was kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: It's called Pollinator prey conflicts and carnivorous Plants when flower
Speaker 1: and trap properties mean life or death from scientific reports
Speaker 1: published this year in and it was studying plants of
Speaker 1: the genus Drosera, which are the sun dues. Right, we
Speaker 1: talked about those the sticky trap plants, and its studied
Speaker 1: how the play an't solve a particular problem if you've
Speaker 1: thought about this. If you're a carnivorous plant that wants
Speaker 1: to draw insects into a death trap, but you're also
Speaker 1: a flowering plant that wants insects to spread your pollen
Speaker 1: for reproduction, how do you make sure that you don't
Speaker 1: trap and kill the insects that you need to pollinate
Speaker 1: your flowers. Um, I'm about to say a metaphor for
Speaker 1: this that might be the worst metaphor I've ever tried
Speaker 1: on this show, So so stop me if I'm going
Speaker 1: off the rails. It's kind of like if if you
Speaker 1: couldn't have sex without the help of a certain species
Speaker 1: of live wild rat, but you also have rat traps
Speaker 1: all over your house, like kill traps. This would seem
Speaker 1: to lower your reproductive fitness. So instead, what the drosera
Speaker 1: plants do and study is they offer different visual, spatial,
Speaker 1: and chemical signals that selectively attract nonpollinators to the traps,
Speaker 1: so that they've adapted to have selective appeals in the
Speaker 1: traps versus in the pollinating structures. What's kind of like
Speaker 1: imagining these, um, these hotels and horror movies where they
Speaker 1: cannibalize the guests, like you gotta keep your YELP rating
Speaker 1: up enough you get more guests, Exactly, You've got to
Speaker 1: have enough real guests. But then at the same time,
Speaker 1: you need guests to eat, so you've got to find
Speaker 1: that balance. Yeah, So in in my horrible analogy, it
Speaker 1: would be sort of like having traps that are designed
Speaker 1: to to kill all the rats, except your sex rat
Speaker 1: that you need for reproduction. So yeah, let's let's discuss
Speaker 1: the real carnivorous plants, the plants that really do prey
Speaker 1: on vertebrates. Okay, well, we've got to start by discussing
Speaker 1: the alleged ones that prey on vertebrates. So the one
Speaker 1: I want to start with is the Pulla chill Insis. So,
Speaker 1: this is a bromiliad plant that grows in the arid
Speaker 1: parts of the Andes in South America. It's known as
Speaker 1: Pulla chill insists. And it's sort of because it's a bromiliad,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a cousin of like the pineapple,
Speaker 1: and it kind of looks like a pineapple. It looks
Speaker 1: like a giant, woody pineapple with yellow green spikes extending
Speaker 1: out at an inclined angle from the trunk. And it
Speaker 1: has been widely reported on popular websites and a few
Speaker 1: news sources that this plant is known as the quote
Speaker 1: sheep eating plant because it sometimes feeds on the carcasses
Speaker 1: of livestock caught in its spines. For example, there's ABC
Speaker 1: news piece about how the Royal Horticultural Society and Great
Speaker 1: Britain managed to grow one of these plants in a
Speaker 1: greenhouse in Surrey, and the story was about how the
Speaker 1: plant was about to flower. I think it takes a
Speaker 1: long time to do that, But the article claims quote
Speaker 1: in the andies it uses its sharp spines to snare
Speaker 1: and trap sheep and other animals, which slowly starved to death.
Speaker 1: The animals then decay at the base of the plant,
Speaker 1: acting as a fertilizer. The RHS feeds its specimen on
Speaker 1: liquid fertilizer, and then the quote a horticulture is saying
Speaker 1: that obviously would be problematic who feed this plant quote
Speaker 1: its natural diet um. So, despite these reports, most of
Speaker 1: which sort of repeat the same thin summary claims over another,
Speaker 1: over and over, I have been unable to find any
Speaker 1: evidence in the scientific literature that these plants are really
Speaker 1: known to do this to trap and kill large animals
Speaker 1: like sheep, And honestly, looking at a bunch of pictures
Speaker 1: of them, I'm also having a hard time seeing how
Speaker 1: this would happen, like they look like they would be
Speaker 1: painful to fall into, but not deadly traps. Also, I've
Speaker 1: read a few accounts of people who claim to work
Speaker 1: around the puya and don't report anything about this. So
Speaker 1: this makes it seem to me like this phenomenon of
Speaker 1: sheep becoming trapped in puya growth, dying, and then fertilizing
Speaker 1: the base of the plant is something that maybe conceivably
Speaker 1: could happen by coincidence. Like I guess you could accept
Speaker 1: that rotting animal flesh is generally a decent fertilizer, but
Speaker 1: it probably doesn't happen off and enough to qualify as
Speaker 1: a real evolutionary adaptation by the plant. Yeah. And plus,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are plenty of animals that are already
Speaker 1: going to play prey on a sheep, And then if
Speaker 1: you're having sheep that are raised and based on an
Speaker 1: artificial population of sheep, they're gonna be there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a higher susceptibility to strange it unnatural deaths. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I'm skeptical of this one. I think unless somebody
Speaker 1: can send us some really good evidence that this actually
Speaker 1: takes place, I'm going to say this one actually looks
Speaker 1: like a myth to me that has somehow made it
Speaker 1: into news reports. I think that is a safe bet.
Speaker 1: But then there's another one that is definitely not a myth.
Speaker 1: Though we have to be a little careful and how
Speaker 1: we characterize it. So I want to talk about nepenthees,
Speaker 1: the tropical picture plants. So these are pitfall traps, right,
Speaker 1: Like we've talked about picture plants where they've got a uh,
Speaker 1: they've got a deep well that has some killer fluids
Speaker 1: in it, and they want you to fall in and
Speaker 1: get stuck and die and dissolve. Now it's it's definitely
Speaker 1: worth saying that the natural prey of these plants are invertebrates.
Speaker 1: They're going to be insects. But some of these traps
Speaker 1: can grow like more than forty centimeters deep or hold
Speaker 1: up to two liters of digestive fluid. That's huge. That's
Speaker 1: like a you know, that's like a big soda bottle.
Speaker 1: Like with some of its various species having traps this big,
Speaker 1: it's sort of natural to wonder if anything bigger than
Speaker 1: an insect ever gets digested, And I'd say the answer
Speaker 1: appears to be both no and yes. So, like I said,
Speaker 1: first of all, invertebrates are clearly the main prey of
Speaker 1: these plants. Um they they appear insectivorous by evolutionary design,
Speaker 1: But animals come into the picture as well. One one
Speaker 1: sense is more mutualistic. Like, there are several picture plants
Speaker 1: that seem to have this non predatory symbiotic relationship with
Speaker 1: vertebrates like birds, bats, and shrews. And it works like this.
Speaker 1: You've got a picture and it's got sweet eat nectar
Speaker 1: all along the outer surface, and a bird or a
Speaker 1: forest rodent comes along besides, I want some of that nectar,
Speaker 1: And while it's hanging out of the opening of the
Speaker 1: picture plant, it just happens to deposit some feces inside. Now,
Speaker 1: normally you would not expect an organism to have an
Speaker 1: adaptation that incentivizes animals to poop inside it. But guess
Speaker 1: what those feces are rich in nitrogen? Yeah, exactly the
Speaker 1: nutrients that the plant would normally need to get by
Speaker 1: killing insects. So there are types of picture plants that
Speaker 1: also seem to provide like a roosting shelter for bats
Speaker 1: as well, and the bats to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: They poop into the plant and the plant gets some
Speaker 1: sweet nitrogen out of it. But with some of the
Speaker 1: larger tropical pictures, what if a small mammal or two
Speaker 1: fall all the way in, would it be able to
Speaker 1: get out? And if not, would the plant eat it?
Speaker 1: I think the answer is dinging ding. You bet. This
Speaker 1: is this nightmare scenario I encounter anytime I use a
Speaker 1: composting toilet. Oh. No, those things smell bad enough anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even when they do. I was in a really good
Speaker 1: one last week. Oh I shouldn't bad mouth, and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: I've been near one that smelled really bad. But it's
Speaker 1: still horrifying because especially like in my case, I'm putting
Speaker 1: my son on it, and I was like, oh, he
Speaker 1: could just fall right down there, and then I guess
Speaker 1: I'd have to go down there too, like the fluke man. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh man, this is a horrifying scenario falling into a
Speaker 1: picture trap. God. So here's the evidence. There is a
Speaker 1: photo and video documentation online of a nepenthes research expedition
Speaker 1: that took place first in October, and they were going
Speaker 1: to Mount Victoria in the Philippines and they were studying
Speaker 1: specimens of nepenthees at in Burrow I wouldn't named after
Speaker 1: our our favorite at in Burgos endemic to the region
Speaker 1: and with the species not and not Attenburgh. But they
Speaker 1: found one picture of this plant that contained a wild
Speaker 1: caught dead tree shrew, and they showed it in photos
Speaker 1: and on video, and a return expedition two months later
Speaker 1: showed the skeletal remains of the shrew covered in a
Speaker 1: sort of layer of first So essentially all the soft
Speaker 1: tissues of the tree shrew appeared to have been digested
Speaker 1: by the plant. So does the picture plant naturally target
Speaker 1: vertebrate mammals as prey. Probably not, but if there's one
Speaker 1: on offer, yeah, I don't mind if I do. That
Speaker 1: seems to be the approach. But now the real question
Speaker 1: is could it be possible for a real world plant
Speaker 1: to be the man eating tree, that the killer tree
Speaker 1: that would trap and kill large megafauna like a deer
Speaker 1: or a bear or a human being mm or even
Speaker 1: something like a raccoon? Right? I mean, oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: settling for a raccoon medium size because because the even
Speaker 1: the the bat possibility and the shrew possibility is kind
Speaker 1: of iffy, right, So anything larger than it becomes increasingly fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I will say, first of all, I found no
Speaker 1: evidence that a plant like this already exists. We'll start
Speaker 1: with the bad news, but the good news or maybe
Speaker 1: the bad news, who knows what's good and bad. It
Speaker 1: depends where you stand on plants killing and eating humans.
Speaker 1: Is that there's some interesting leads. So first of all,
Speaker 1: I want to consider the possibility of a proto carnivorous
Speaker 1: bramble trap. So I watched a video blog and this
Speaker 1: is not scientific information. This was a video blog by
Speaker 1: an Irish sheep farmer, and this guy was personally insisting
Speaker 1: that the BlackBerry brambles on his land are carnivorous, or
Speaker 1: he called them carnivorous. I think more accurately you would
Speaker 1: call them proto carnivorous. But if he's correct, But here's
Speaker 1: his argument. He says by demonstrating how his sheep become
Speaker 1: trapped in these brambles all the time, they get like
Speaker 1: they get their wooly coats caught in the hook like thorns,
Speaker 1: and then they struggle and they get more and more
Speaker 1: tangled in the branches as they struggle to a escape.
Speaker 1: That's kind of interesting. I guess the idea is that
Speaker 1: they get caught, they can't escape, they die. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like what was being alleged with the Puya chilensis,
Speaker 1: that they would fall down near the base of the plant,
Speaker 1: rot and fertilize the soil. Well, even if they in
Speaker 1: doing this, if they didn't kill the animal outright, if
Speaker 1: they even if they didn't allow starvation to occur, they
Speaker 1: could conceivably you could conceivably have the plant just holding
Speaker 1: it long enough for a predator to come take advantage
Speaker 1: of it, eat part of it, and then but still
Speaker 1: leave portions of the creature to rot. Oh, that's interesting too,
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that now. I do want to
Speaker 1: say I'm not going to endorse the hypothesis of carnivorous
Speaker 1: brambles here because I think we don't have evidence that
Speaker 1: that's necessarily what's going on. I think you'd have to
Speaker 1: demonstrate that this is actually an adaptation towards which bramble
Speaker 1: evolution was shaped like where they're similar wooly animals native
Speaker 1: to the regions wherever these plants evolved. Would one of
Speaker 1: these animals rotting at the base of the bramble plant
Speaker 1: really provide enough nutrition incentive to make a major difference
Speaker 1: in survival and reproduction like a would the would the
Speaker 1: nutrients it provides matter enough for this to be an
Speaker 1: evolved trade that is targeted by selection. Yeah, Because to
Speaker 1: come back to the fig tree, scenario. Think of it
Speaker 1: as a well run corporation. At what point does do
Speaker 1: the do the masters that do the do the CEOs
Speaker 1: of the border directors or whatever we're going to invest
Speaker 1: in the processing division. Yeah, it's like, tell me more
Speaker 1: about this, uh, this, this, this sheep eating division that
Speaker 1: you're working on this project. All right, let's hire some
Speaker 1: more people, let's let's invest more in that, and let's
Speaker 1: bump it up in the overall hierarchy exactly. So. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen evidence that that's what's going on with the brambles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but given all these questions, I do want to say
Speaker 1: I could believe it's possible that some bramble type plant
Speaker 1: could establish an evolutionary pathway toward proto carnivary and eventually
Speaker 1: full carnivalary, starting with accidental snagging. This accidental snagging of
Speaker 1: sheep and other unfortunate creatures that are covered in suicide
Speaker 1: vel crow. You know, this reminds me of a specimen
Speaker 1: that I encountered in Arizona last week, and that's the
Speaker 1: death's claw or heartbrogaph item, also known as a grapple
Speaker 1: plant or a wood spider wood spider that is gold.
Speaker 1: They're pretty gnarly looking. Um. They they're from the sesame family.
Speaker 1: But they're a hooked fruit. So it starts when it's growing.
Speaker 1: Initially it kind of looks like a weird green banana.
Speaker 1: And apparently it can be consumed. Uh we did. I
Speaker 1: did not eat one, but I was told that, yes,
Speaker 1: some people have things they can do with these. Um.
Speaker 1: But it starts off like a banana and then it
Speaker 1: kind of splits in the middle, and so it ends
Speaker 1: up like you imagine you're like your hand making the
Speaker 1: devil horns and then imagine if you had super long,
Speaker 1: curvy fingernails on both of the protruding fingers. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so what it does is when a a mule deer
Speaker 1: or a prong horn a horse or even a human
Speaker 1: comes along, Uh, it latches onto the ankle. These these
Speaker 1: these the devil horns here latch around and it becomes
Speaker 1: and it carries the the fruit across you know, long distances. Um,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't does not hurt the animal in question.
Speaker 1: And actually they seem to have anti inflammatory properties that
Speaker 1: are utilized in some folk medicines. But if this is possible, yeah,
Speaker 1: why not a grappling mammal killing root as well, yeah, again,
Speaker 1: I guess we'd have to come back to the question
Speaker 1: of is the incentive there is the evolutionary incentive big
Speaker 1: enough to work on these powerful structures. Yes, another way
Speaker 1: to ask this question. Another scenario for this. How about
Speaker 1: a human sized snap trap, sort of like what I
Speaker 1: pictured in the grove of the killer tree at the beginning.
Speaker 1: So imagine this. It's a venus fly trap, large enough
Speaker 1: to capture and digest a deer or a bear or
Speaker 1: a human like, not not so much necessarily like a
Speaker 1: little shop Ahara's audrey too, but just a giant venus
Speaker 1: fly trap. Just a trap doesn't mean a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't sing or leap out, but just large enough
Speaker 1: to lay a trap that could snag a larger creature. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So uh. There are obviously plants that move quickly. The
Speaker 1: venus fly trap is one example of them. There's you know,
Speaker 1: plants usually exhibit very slow motion motion that's expressed through
Speaker 1: growth patterns rather than through fast moving of plant tissues.
Speaker 1: But there are plants that fast moving tissues. You touch
Speaker 1: a fern and sometimes the leaves can close. The venus
Speaker 1: fly trap can snap closed. I'm not sure how big
Speaker 1: and how sturdy, you can scale up those fast movements
Speaker 1: and plants like I've never seen a plant with huge,
Speaker 1: strong structures that exhibit fast movement. All the all the
Speaker 1: ones I know of with fast moving body parts tend
Speaker 1: to be pretty small. Yeah. Yeah, anytime you you see
Speaker 1: the same thing when you're talking about giant gorillas. Right,
Speaker 1: anytime you scale up morphology, you're gonna run into various
Speaker 1: engineering limits and you end up having to change the
Speaker 1: design in order to make it conceivably work. And then
Speaker 1: in some cases, is it even possible to upscale that design? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but let's just imagine. Let's say, okay, imagine you can
Speaker 1: scale up fast moving plant body parts. Uh. Still a
Speaker 1: couple of problems here. It doesn't take a lot of
Speaker 1: compression strength to hold in a fly or a spider,
Speaker 1: but imagine how many pounds of compression force it would
Speaker 1: take to hold in a human or a bear that's
Speaker 1: fighting to get out of a trap. This would have
Speaker 1: to be a really strong, big, powerful plant. And I
Speaker 1: guess my question is why would a plant evolves such
Speaker 1: an extravagant morphological contrivance And does it even make sense
Speaker 1: to imagine how it gets to there? Because remember carnivorous
Speaker 1: plants tend to practice animal predation in order to offset
Speaker 1: nutrient deficiencies in the soil. Right, that's the whole reason.
Speaker 1: We go back to their growing in inhospitable conditions. They
Speaker 1: can't get the nitrogen or some of their nutrients they need,
Speaker 1: so they need to pray on animals to get those little,
Speaker 1: those little molecules. But what would an organism grown in
Speaker 1: such poor soil be able to attain human trapping size?
Speaker 1: To begin with? Like, how does it get that big
Speaker 1: and that powerful if it hasn't been trapping humans? The
Speaker 1: whole way would have to It would have to sort
Speaker 1: of like be scaling up as it goes, catching bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger animals as it gets bigger. Ye, And why
Speaker 1: would you why would it? Why would it evolve to
Speaker 1: depend on increasingly larger and increasingly um, you know, more
Speaker 1: rare uh specimens? Why why would it would be making
Speaker 1: it's it's there would be there would be a tipping
Speaker 1: point where it would just be making its work harder
Speaker 1: for itself, and and therefore there would be less uh less,
Speaker 1: it would be less advantageous to its evolutionary set. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And another thing to remember as we've said on the
Speaker 1: show before. In evolution, we've always got to keep in
Speaker 1: mind bigger is not necessarily better. It seems better to
Speaker 1: us because we like bigger trucks, but bigger bodies are
Speaker 1: not necessarily better. Or as ms will not tend to
Speaker 1: grow larger unless there's a clear survival advantage or reproduction advantage. Right,
Speaker 1: it comes down to what the environment will bear, what's competitive.
Speaker 1: I just just a few seconds ago, I I said
Speaker 1: evolutionary ascent, which we often use in talking about humans.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of a misnomer because evolution, in the
Speaker 1: same way that there's no evolution, is not an upward
Speaker 1: or downward movement. It is just a movement um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: if you start thinking about it in terms of there
Speaker 1: being a goal other than survival, other than propagation, than
Speaker 1: you muddy the waters. So yeah, the the human size
Speaker 1: snap trap, I'm going to say that that's something that
Speaker 1: maybe could be engineered. You know, I could imagine in
Speaker 1: the future, if you're you're tinkering with plant genomes trying
Speaker 1: to create something weird, it's possible that that that's sort
Speaker 1: of a a physical uh, something that's physically attainable and
Speaker 1: plant morphology. I don't know, it might not even be that.
Speaker 1: But even assuming it is that, it doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: something that would arise in nature, right. It would need
Speaker 1: to be a mad science who decided, you know, he
Speaker 1: or she wanted a large man eating plant. Maybe you know,
Speaker 1: an evil dictator who wanted it to live it at
Speaker 1: the bottom of a trap door or continue feeding witches too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or how about this, how about a bio toilet for
Speaker 1: for spaceship gardens. So going back to the picture plant idea,
Speaker 1: encouraging animals to poop in it, like a compos bio
Speaker 1: biological compost, biologically engineered compost toilet. Or maybe it's engineered
Speaker 1: by a British nanny who is a druid who has
Speaker 1: had her tree killed with a chainsaw that she used
Speaker 1: to worship for years. She needs a new god and
Speaker 1: so she genetically she studies genetics, she you know, masters
Speaker 1: the art of crisper gene editing, and then she makes
Speaker 1: this thing or has she just merely entered into contract
Speaker 1: with the space toilets who overthrew another alien species because
Speaker 1: they were tired of just being pooped into. Okay, Robert,
Speaker 1: I think we're done. Yeah, we've got off the deep
Speaker 1: end here, but I think we've covered some We've covered
Speaker 1: some fictional ground here, We've covered covered some mythological, some
Speaker 1: cryptid ground, as well as the the the the more
Speaker 1: solid soil of of actual scientific inquiry, and nothing aid
Speaker 1: us in the process. So I guess we're doing okay.
Speaker 1: It would be a good way to go, though. It
Speaker 1: would be a noteworthy way to go, not a pleasant
Speaker 1: way to go. But yeah, it'd be good to be remembered. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because none of these scenarios, I think we can agree,
Speaker 1: none of the scenarios of carnivorous plants actually sounds pleasant.
Speaker 1: All of it takes place, that death ends up occurring
Speaker 1: at the slow rate that is, uh, that is typical
Speaker 1: of of the plant's slower approach to life. You'd really
Speaker 1: be hoping a bear would come along and get into you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, So there you have it, carnivorous plants. Um. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about this topic, if
Speaker 1: you want to discover other topics than we've done, heading
Speaker 1: over to Stuff to bul your Mind dot com. That's
Speaker 1: the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes,
Speaker 1: video goes, blog posts links out to our various social
Speaker 1: media accounts. Those include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, tumbler, uh and
Speaker 1: who knows what will evolve in the future, will probably
Speaker 1: sign up for those as well and give you another
Speaker 1: way to interact with us and indeed tell us about
Speaker 1: any fictional carnivorous plants that we may have missed or
Speaker 1: we should explore, as well as your thoughts on the
Speaker 1: possibility of a man eating plant. And of course, if
Speaker 1: you would like to continue to get tangled in the
Speaker 1: killer vines of the subject, you can email us with
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