By: Alan Chen

There are many men eating plants in fictional stories and movies. In the movie Little Shop of Horrors, there is a plant that needs human blood to survive. In Nintendo’s Mario games, there are the piranha plants who want to eat Mario. And finally, in The Addams Family Mortician has an African Strangler plant.

Many of these weird plants are based on real plants, such as the Venus flytrap. They include small pits that attract bugs to leaves that snap down and trap animals when they step on their leaves. They catch mammals, small birds, arachnids, and animal poop. Yes, animal poop — It’s easier to digest something that’s already been digested.

Carnivorous plants come in many shapes. One type is the pitcher plant. Pitcher plants lure food into their tubes by luring them in with sweet, sweet nectar. The sides of the pitcher plant’s leaves inside are coated with a slippery coating, so that when animals go in they get stuck on the leaves, and if they try to escape from the bottom, they can’t climb up because of the sticky coating. The bottom also has a small pool of digestive enzymes that break the animal’s tissue into nutrients the plant can digest. Most pitcher plants can’t digest mammals and instead, only eat small insects and some other arachnids.

While in real life, a human-eating plant would want to save as much energy as it could, the human-eating plants in games and movies are not that realistic, as they display very quick movement and sometimes run after the player or the protagonist. But it takes lots of energy for fast movements.

The fictional plants almost always look like Venus flytraps, which have gaping leaf mouths, instead of the pitcher trap tubes. When an animal touches the leaves, small spiny tiny hairs on the inside of the leaves react and tell the flytrap to close the leaves which trap the animal and let the flytrap digest the creature.

Sarlaccs in Star Wars offers an idea of how man-eating plants in real life might work. These fictional monsters bury themselves in the sand on the planet Tatooine, which is also fictional, where they then sit there and wait for animals to fall into their gaping wide giant mouths. A careless human could easily fall in and be digested. Digesting a human could be dangerous though, as the extra nutrients could cause the corpse to rot and also cause the plant to rot.