4 Heartless Predators!

The Venus flytrap might be the most famous carnivorous plant, but it’s hardly the craftiest.

Check out these other insect enemies:

Sundews

Like their flytrap cousins, sundews grow in damp, mineral-poor soils, trapping and digesting insects to supplement their intake of nitrogen and potassium. Bugs are attracted to the sundews’ colorful tentacles, as well as to the sparkly globs of mucus along their leaves.

When an insect lands on these adhesive “dewdrops” the tentacles curl up around the bug and begin to secrete digestive enzymes.The prey’s nutritious innards are dissolved within a couple of days, leaving behind only a dried husk.

Cobra Lilies

The cobra lily isn’t really a lily, but it’s definitely a snake in the grass.The cobra is a type of pitcher plant-a carnivorous flower with a lip, a neck,and a bulbous body. Like all pitcher plants,the cobra lily comes equipped with a cavity full of bacteria and digestive enzymes, much like a human stomach.

insects crawl inside the slippery neck of the plant (which really does look like a cobra, right down to its leafy, red fangs). The bugs then slide down easily, but the cobra’s downward-pointing hairs block them from coming back up.
Eventually, they grow tired and fall to their demise inside the lily’s stomach.

The Waterwheel

The waterwheel is a rootless plant that floats around ponds in Europe and Asia.

Although it looks harmless, it can move as fast as any animal.The waterwheel contains dozens of finger-like stems that can clamp shut around an insect in about 1o milliseconds—that’s 1o times faster than the blink of an eye!

Bladderworts

These plants live underwater, catching plankton with a unique negative-pressure system.

The bladderwort has chambers at the tips of its shoots that maintain a lower interior pressure than the surrounding water.When plankton brush against the bladderwort,the chamber opens for a split second, sucking in both water and prey.