Botany is certainly *science.

Some good info on carnivorous plants can be found here.
A very neat article on the biomechanics of the Venusfly trap's closing mechanism can be found here.

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At least no ants in this scene.

Yum, frog legs.

Now if only I can find a plant that'll eat the raccoons getting into my trash . . . .

You didn't watch 'til the end, ant. Those trumpet pitchers are practically an ant graveyard.

yep. those ants were falling in about as quickly as the french give up their firearms in a war.

I thought that the BBC didn't allow embedding.

*documentaries

Lovva the Attenborough

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To hell with bananas, trumpet pitchers are a real evolutionist's nightmare. Hell, I'm an evolutionist, and I have nightmares about them. Folded leaves? Check. Yellow tops to attract bugs? Check. Nectar on the UNDERSIDE the top leaf? Check. Downward facing spines? Check. Ability to digest meat? Are you kidding me? It's a plant! Well, check.

Couple of million years of mistakes = some pretty spectacular shit.

I don't think it's an evolutionists nightmare. The intermediate steps all make sense. A plant which was more likely to have insect corpses anywhere in the vicinity is more likely to get nutrients. It doesn't need to do anything special to digest them. Just the insects rotting and being attacked by bacteria nearby is a win.

Over time plants which had leaf structures which sometimes trapped the insects internally or plants which created enzymes which aided the digestion were selected for.

@rychan: second that, short and well explained!

There's actually a few small intermediary steps, to my understanding, in Rychan's otherwise neat explanation:
- Plants with more color and/or small pockets of mass that will catch rain water and accumulate sugary liquid from the plants glands or pollent are selected because they attract more insects for pollination. (Significant because it describes the creation of what will become a trapping ground later.
- Plants are selected for larger and larger liquid-holding pockets, which eventually evolve into phytotelmata.
- Insects fall into the phytotelmata, and local bacteria and parasites digest the insects, leaving basic nutrients that the plant can then absorb. (This bridges the evolutionary gap of the plant evolving the ability to trap insects at the same time as evolving the ability to digest the insect, a la blind watchmaker.)
- The plant develops small mutations (downwards-growing hairs, slippery sides) that lead to insects becoming trapped at a greater percentage. Some pitcher plants' evolutionary journeys end here.
- The intercellular methods of absorption of the digested insect nutrients are developed and eventually the plant evolves the ability to break the dead insect down into its basic amino acids through the production of proteases and phosphotases. (I haven't come across one definite mechanism for the evolution of the ability to create these enzymes, although viral transduction/transmission seems to me to be a pretty good possibility.)
- The modern day pitcher plant is born.

Carnivorous plants are a fascinating topic of biomechanics and evolutionary mechanisms. Some neat papers and links to check out:
http://www.botany.org/Carnivorous_Plants/
http://www.skepticfiles.org/evolut/meatplnt.htm
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/p/pitche42.html

Cameron, K.M., Wurdack, K.J., and Jobson, R.W. 2002. Molecular evidence for the common origin of snap-traps among carnivorous plants. American Journal of Botany 89:1503--1509.
Evolution of the Genetic Architecture Underlying Fitness in the Pitcher- Plant Mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii
Peter Armbruster, William E. Bradshaw, Christina M. Holzapfel
Evolution, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 451-458
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-3820(197506)29%3A2%3C296%3AEAEOTP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

I love carnivorous plants. There was a long period of time where I wanted to be a plant geneticist largely because of them. Outstanding organisms.

A short read:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050127233724.htm

I looked for the sited original article, but couldn't find it. Dah!

Woah. Those carnivorous plants are pretty hardcore.

Especially the one that ate the frog. Damn!

thats nothing, on the movie Dark Crystal I saw a plant eat a large mammal

What I'd like to know is why the plant was named after the goddess of love. Is it because the plant resembles the female labia, with its bright pink flaps that open and close? Does this reveal the secret fear of female genitalia, for its ability to trap and destroy the penetrator?

Seph, it isn't quite so Freudian as all that, but still a rather interesting story. From Sarracenia.com:
"The true reason that Venus is part of this plant's name due to the dirty minds of the kooky naturalists and nuserymen (such as John & William Bartram, Peter Collinson, William Darlington, Arthur Dobbs, John Ellis, and Daniel Solander). When they looked at the plant, they saw in its amazing behavior and attractive form (two red, glistening lobes, surrounded by hairs, sensitive to the touch), something that reminded them of female genitalia of their own species. Indeed!

Amongst themselves, this cabal of learned perverts referred to the plant as a "tipitiwitchet" (or "Tippity Twitchet"). It was subsequently assumed by historians that this was a Native American term, but linguistic experts have eliminated that as a possibility.

Tipitiwitchet, it appears, was a naughty euphemism of their own devising. I like to imagine a few of them coining the term one night as they were slamming down beers in a pub or in a sumptuous study. I'm guessing that the originator of the term was probably John Bartram. For while you might expect a scientist to express wonder or astonishment upon seeing the plant, Bartram wrote to Collinson on 29 August 1762 that "my little tipitiwitchet sensitive stimulates laughter in all ye beholders"."

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Damn son.

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