Carnivorous Plants

Yesterday in science class the Artist was reading about carnivorous plants. Curious girl that she is, she asked me if we could get a video that would show such plants taking a meal.

photo of cobra lily patch from http://www.botany.org/Carnivorous_Plants/

Thinking this a perfectly reasonable request, I roused the sleeping computer and started looking around at the local library system. My first query did not give me a result. Undaunted, I tried again. I seemed to remember seeing something like this when I was in a junior high or high school science class oh so many years ago. Do you recall any such thing from your school career?

Repeated queries still gave me no results. Now it was time to call in the professionals for help. The librarian I spoke with was also certain the item I was looking for must be available somewhere. After diligent searching through the local system, through the state of Ohio and then in an expanded search she found it. One video from 1978. Located in Arkansas.

Ms. Librarian requested the video for me, but also told me that I may get a call from a real person (her words). If that happens that means the library was not going to be able to fulfill my request. She also admitted that it was likely this would be the case.

As it turns out, there are at least a couple dozen films of carnivorous plants in action. It is just that no one (well, apparently only one person) has made VHS or CD recordings of the action.

The librarian was very helpful though, and she suggested I look at the National Geographic website. She was right, that site does have a short video of a Venus flytrap, and a bug, and you can imagine the rest.

When Rick got home from work he immediately suggested You Tube. Why didn't I think of that? They have scores of videos about carnivorous plants. From my brief overview it looks like most of them deal with raising, transplanting, making cuttings, and other horticultural things. But some do deal with feeding. Being what the medium is, though, I'll need to invest some time previewing the videos to be sure they are acceptable for my little viewers.