Carnivorous Plants

A friend introduced me today to the National Geographic Magazine online (not for the sake of introducing it, but to use it to show me about El nino years). I should have guessed that it would be online, since everything else is online, but I never looked into it. One of the things they had in there (I think it was for this months magazine) was all about carnivorous plants. Now, I learned a little bit about them in my ecology class, but one detail that slipped by me without noticing it was that these plants eat insects (and sometimes small animals) so that they can not get the carbon to create more mass that way. No, they use the animals in a different way. They use the animals and insects so that they can get nitrogen and phosphorus to be able to photosynthisise. How interesting! A Carnivorous plant who eats to photosynthesise! Now, if only those plants could teach me how to photosynthesise...

for some really cool pictures of these plants, go here