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Topics: News, Science, Weird, Food and Drink
Bec Oakes
Topics: News, Science, Weird, Food and Drink
There's no shortage of man-eating plants in pop culture; from the gigantic plant that needs human blood to grow in Little Shop of Horrors to Morticia Addams' 'African Strangler' plant that has a pesky habit of biting people.
It leaves you wondering, could a carnivorous plant actually eat a human?
One expert set out to answer that very question and found that the Venus flytrap actually can eat human flesh.
New fear unlocked.
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Barry Rice, an astrobiologist at Sierra College in Rocklin, California, has researched carnivorous plants in great detail. He grows his own carnivorous plants and runs The Carnivorous Plant FAQ blog.
To find out whether we could ever be devoured at our local garden center, Barry fed his Venus flytraps some chunks of skin that had peeled off his toes due to an athlete's foot infection.
Gross.
He cut the skin into four equally sized pieces and placed them in the jaws of four Venus flytrap plants.
A week later, he pried open the plants' mouths to see whether the skin had been digested.
Rice said he was pleasantly surprised to find that the chunks of skin were almost completely digested, explaining that he'd expected them to have remained relatively intact.
He wrote on his blog: “What was left no longer had much cohesion, but was gooey and slimy, like little boogers. Uck! Uck! Uck! And what is with the weird hue shift to bacon color?? Uck! Uck! Uck!"
It's been confirmed — Venus flytraps have the ability to consume human flesh. But, could they actually eat us whole?
Absolutely not.
To start, Rice only tested one type of tissue in his DIY experiment. There's no evidence to suggest the plant could break down something tougher like bone or cartilage.
On top of this, there is the issue of size and scale. Digesting a small chunk of skin is one thing, but guzzling down an entire human being, well that's another thing entirely.
The largest Venus fly trap in the world is just 2.4 inches long, according to the World Record Academy. This is too small to capture a mouse, never mind a person.
There are, however, much larger species of carnivorous plants out there — the giant montane pitcher plant can measure up to 16 inches tall and has been known to consume frogs, geckos and rats.
This suggests that it's possible to break down most of the tissues of a vertebrate mammal, bones and all.
As it stands through, no species of carnivorous plant is big enough to actually contain a whole human corpse, so you don’t need to worry about becoming one's breakfast any time soon.