Snack Dragons : Cal State Fullerton Greenhouse Is the Carnivorous-Plant Fanciers’ Dream

It says something about the workings of a boy’s mind to admit that it was a crushing disappointment when, at age 10 or so, I learned there really were no plants that could eat kittens, let alone an occasional African explorer.

Such floral predators had been a delightful horror to think about at that age. I used to muse that if a plant could be trained to eat a man or maybe a horse, then perhaps through applied science it could someday manage an elephant--or an entire baseball team.

But the sure knowledge that carnivorous plants could not devour a pachyderm or the New York Yankees--in fact, could not even nibble a turkey leg--distressed my young imagination.

What they could eat were bugs. It seemed somehow ignoble. I stayed disappointed for about a year.

My spirits were lifted when I ordered my very own Dionaea muscipula from an advertisement in the back of a comic book. At the time, I was thin on my Latin and so only knew it as a Venus flytrap.

It was a wonderfully weird plant to have around the house. Unfortunately, I eventually killed it, as I did a couple cacti. I was sorry to see it go. It was the first pet I ever owned that ate flies instead of Alpo.

I never tried to raise another flytrap. But the fascination I felt for these strange plants stayed with me.

I am not alone, said Leo Song, who runs the greenhouse complex at Cal State Fullerton.

This hive of glass and latticework buildings houses one of the largest carnivorous plant collections in the United States. Nearly 100 of the world’s 500 natural species can be found.

Some of those species look as if they dropped from a visiting spaceship.

Aquatic bladderworts drift in shallow ponds ready to vacuum any passing meal. Pitcher plants tower over their trays, bunched together like choruses of cobras frozen in mid-sway.

There are tropical carnivores with bulbous, dangling pitchers big enough to catch a rodent or small bird. And tiny sundews whose tentacles glisten with droplets of sticky insect glue.

All in all, a stroll among the elevated planters at Cal State Fullerton is like stumbling upon the real-life counterparts of a primeval hallucination. The bizarre plants on display are hardly typical of what you would expect to find among the suburban flora of Orange County.

Yet Orange County is at the very center of the carnivorous plant universe, and has been since 1982 when the International Carnivorous Plant Society was founded at Cal State Fullerton with the help of Song. Today, the society boasts more than 900 members scattered from Brunei to Belgium and 20 countries in between.

Society membership is open to anyone with an interest in the plants who is willing to invest $10 annual dues ($15 foreign). The Orange County roster includes back-yard gardeners, biologists and even a Westminster fireman. Actually, there are more society members here (13) than in all of France (9).

Also published from Cal State Fullerton is the society’s quarterly journal, “Carnivorous Plant Newsletter,” edited by Song. Awash in Latin genus names, accompanied by enough italics to blind a hawk, the newsletter serves as an informational fountainhead for all things carnivorous and leafy.

While dissertations titled “Evolutionary Patterns in Drosera “ and “Propagation of Utricularia by Leaf Cuttings” are admittedly not for everyone, Song believes there is a mystique about carnivorous plants that appeals to most people, even those non-flora types who wouldn’t set foot in a garden.

“Everybody seems to be interested in plants that can catch their own meals,” he explained.

Especially plants like the Venus flytrap--the superstar of carnivorous vegetation.

The Venus flytrap has been the public’s darling ever since Charles Darwin described it more than a century ago as “the most wonderful plant in the world.” The famous scientist was impressed not only by the plant’s alien aesthetics, but by the speed (about half a second) with which its reddish-green pods can trap unsuspecting prey.

Potential meals spring their own doom by brushing against tiny trigger hairs inside the trap. But don’t trust what your eyes tell you. The sudden snap of the pod halves is actually accomplished without any hinge action.

“For a trap to close, the cells on the outside expand longitudinally,” Song explained. In a sense, the trap curls itself shut. “To open, the opposite happens. The cells on the inside grow. By the time a trap opens and closes, it has actually grown a little bit larger” due to this cell expansion.

Which doesn’t mean you can expand a flytrap into the size of a waffle iron by continually tickling its trigger hairs. After several false alarms, the trap will cease working.

It takes about a week for a trap to digest an average-size insect, according to Song. Although a single plant can have dozens of traps, the traps themselves are fairly light eaters, downing at most a couple meals before permanently losing their appetite. Old traps soon turn black and die--to be replaced by new traps ready to repeat the cycle.

While carnivorous plants exist throughout the world, the Venus flytrap is found naturally only in certain parts of North and South Carolina.

Some scientists theorize that the plants were once far more widespread, but that an Ice Age nearly wiped them out. A few hardy plants managed to survive in the relative warmth of the Cape Fear Peninsula near Wilmington, N.C. Since then, the species has migrated only about a hundred miles from its prehistoric refuge.

Another theory links the plant to a long-ago meteor shower that bombarded the Cape Fear area. The celestial debris left behind acted as a sort of alien fertilizer. Mutations occurred when local plants sank their roots into this loam from outer space.

Although meteorite fragments have been found in the area, many botanists believe it more likely that the flytrap developed in pretty much the same way other plant species have--through the influences of habitat, time and a roll of the evolutionary dice.

Song said that the Venus flytrap--like its fellow carnivores--probably evolved an appetite for bugs as a way to acquire minerals lacking in the acid, swampy soil of its native habitat.

“Essentially, insects represent little walking and flying packages of fertilizer coming directly to the plant,” he said.

Compared to most other carnivorous plants, the Venus flytrap is hyperactive.

Insect eaters like the pitcher plant don’t raise so much as a leaf to catch their meals. Bugs just wander in through openings at the top of the plants, lured by aroma into a waiting digestive pool. One-way spines lining the mouth prevent the insects from wandering back out.

Some pitcher plants have waxy inner surfaces that act like deadly slip-and-slides, while others paralyze their insect guests with a volatile alkaloid common to the hemlock plant.

At least one plant, the parrot pitcher, gives flying insects caught in its flared hood a sporting chance of escape--providing the panicked bugs can find the real way out among a background of translucent spots. Most simply bang about until they beat what little brains they possess into pulp, then finally fall, exhausted, into the hellish broth below.

Pitcher plants--both hooded and open-mouthed--often go by metaphoric designations such as huntsman’s horn and sweet trumpet. Among the more visually arresting of the species is the foot-tall cobra lily, so named for the reddish forked tongue it sticks out at the world from beneath its hooded mouth.

Carnivorous plants are often ingenious in how they trap their victims. Among the most prolific bug catchers are the sundews, whose sticky tentacles snare passing insects and then slowly close around them, pulling the struggling meal close to the plant so it can be eaten by surface digestive fluids.

The star-shaped butterwort also employs the Crazy Glue approach in its quest for food. Adhesive leaves slowly furl about mired victims, forming a cradle in which digestion will take place.

Aquatic bladderworts, on the other hand, act like floating vacuum cleaners to suck prey to their doom. The plants will feast on whatever small creature swims by, be it insect, small worms, crustaceans or microscopic protozoans. A hungry bladderwort will even gobble a tiny fish dinner from time to time.

In the humid warmth of Cal State Fullerton’s tropical greenhouse grow the big game hunters of carnivorous plants, the nepenthes. Although these exotic pitcher plants thrive on an insect diet, they have been known to catch and digest frogs, lizards, rodents, birds--and even small monkeys.

About a third of the 70 known species of nepenthes have been collected at Cal State Fullerton, along with a number of hybrids, according to Song. They are bizarrely diverse plants with hanging pitchers that look very much like what they are--stomachs on a stem. The pitchers on some species grow to the size of a salami, measuring up to 4 inches in diameter and a foot and a half long.

“This one really looks carnivorous when you see these two fangs,” said Song, gently touching a piece of vegetation that looked like it should be in a cage chewing on a goat. “The fangs are not for chomping. Bugs just fall in, like any pitcher plant. It’s from Borneo. It has a common name . . . but not in this language.”

Song explained that in the wild, the nepenthes’ gourd-like pitchers can fill with rainwater, sometimes attracting thirsty animals and birds that fall in and drown.

“But we’ve never had this particular greenhouse open so stuff like that can get in,” he said. Ants that flow like rivers into the growing areas usually take care of the plants’ nutritional needs, although sometimes the botanist squirts a weak fertilizer solution into the pitchers as a supplement.

After a look at this far-out flora, it is easy to understand how early explorers coming across a bloated Borneo bug-eater with fangs might be inclined to theorize that even more horrific plants could be lurking about--huge, hungry hombres hoping for an unsuspecting human to stroll along about dinner time.

Song has heard it all before.

“There are no people-eating plants,” he said, sounding resigned in the face of persistent myth. “Nor do they eat little kittens as was pictured recently in the tabloid press.”

Nevertheless, there have been attempts to bombard carnivorous plants--particularly Venus flytraps--with hormones, special lights, even radiation to stimulate growth. Fortunately for humankind, the plants have shown little or no size gains, and are therefore content to graze on passing insects and not your next-door neighbor.

As hardy as the various species would seem, the botanist said all is not well in the carnivorous plant world.

“Many of the plants are being endangered because the habitats in which they grow are being altered,” Song said. “Ranges for many species are fairly limited. A lot of these plants grow in coastal areas which are more prone to development. Plus many are specific to wetlands, which for some reason everyone wants to drain.”

Song said two species of pitcher plants kept at Cal State Fullerton have been placed on the endangered list due to encroaching urbanization in their native ranges.

Even the popular Venus flytrap is under siege, he added. Urban development and the draining of bogs for commercial pine-tree production are gradually squeezing out the plants from their historic habitat in the coastal Carolinas.

Ironically, the public’s fascination with carnivorous plants has raised another threat to their survival: commercial exploitation.

“Although it’s fairly easy to grow a lot of these plants in cultivation, distributors who do cannot compete with (the low-cost) of field-collected material,” Song said. Although properly managed field collection can result in sustained, year-to-year yields important to mail-order operations, the botanist angrily denounces “those people who just go out and rape the wilderness and pull everything up.”

Song said the North American pitcher plant, one of the variety of carnivore on display at Cal State Fullerton, is now being used by the cut-flower industry in certain parts of the country to add an exotic touch to flower arrangements. Many botanists fear that such practices, if not carefully regulated, could lead to further uprooting of wild pitcher populations.

While all this would be enough to give a bladderwort heartburn, there is some hope that the public will begin to realize that it may be loving these odd plants to the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, love isn’t the only problem.

“It’s got to the point now that if there’s an endangered species growing on somebody’s private property, and they find out about it, they will actually go out and destroy it,” Song said. Why? “So they can develop the land without worrying about complying with the endangered-species laws.”

Song believes that the public’s strong interest in carnivorous plants could benefit all flora by stressing the vital link between habitat preservation and species survival.

He just hopes that plants like the Venus flytrap do not have to become martyrs to do it.