Venus's Flytrap

Abstract

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• Venus's Flytrap
• John Jeremiah Sullivan (bio)

"This plant," wrote Darwin, "is one of the most wonderful in the world." He was talking about the Venus flytrap, Latin name Dionaea muscipula. That's its Linnaean binomial, anyway—an irony, seeing as how Linnaeus Doubted its existence, as "against the order of nature as willed by God." Dionaea in Greek is Dione's daughter, Aphrodite—or, in Latin, Venus, A somewhat roundabout and epithetical way of indicating the goddess. That second word, muscipula, is odd. It can mean flytrap or mousetrap. The former would descend from the Latin musca; the latter, from mus. There are no reported cases of a Venus flytrap's having eaten a mouse. In the jungles of Borneo grows a carnivorous plant that can eat rodents, The giant montane pitcher plant. It has deep traps, in the shape of urns. Mainly it eats the rodents' feces, but every so often one does tumble in. A flytrap might occasionally catch a tadpole, under freak circumstances. Mostly they eat spiders, beetles, ants, grasshoppers, and flies, of course. Flytraps secrete a juice that calls like Turkish Delight to the hapless prey. The plant is named for Venus because its trap, the lobes, resemble labia, Or at least they can be plausibly imagined to resemble a woman's labia, Perhaps in the tumescent state that with certain women attends desire. Its first name, in the 18th-century botanical world, was tippitytwitchet, Which also contains, supposedly, an obscure vagina joke of some kind. That was a randy circle of obsessives, the early colonial plant-collectors. They had another, less erotically charged name too: Catch Fly sensitive. Sensitives are plants that react to touch—the Venus flytrap is only one. The trait has evolved in many parts of the plant kingdom and the world. I will try to describe for you, as we go, a few of the more novel species. For instance, there's a plant known as the shame plant, Mimosa pudica, Also called sensitive plant. It has startling leaves that shrink from touch. [End Page 367] They make themselves look like unsavory twigs, a mode of camouflage. All Venus flytraps are native to the area where I live. They seriously are. They evolved here, in southeastern North Carolina, around Wilmington, And this is the only place on earth where those plants occur in the wild. Very old people say you used to be able to find them all over the place, But today their range is mainly limited to a handful of nature preserves. I know of a secret spot, at the edge of a marsh, behind an old cemetery. I say, "secret," but probably the local university botanists know about it. I have never seen anyone there, though, or any signs of site-monitoring. The city officials may deem it best just to act like the place doesn't exist, So as not to draw the attention of "flytrap-nappers," our local poachers, Who come in the dead of night, in camo fatigues, and dig up the plants. They uproot hundreds at a time to sell them on the exotic-plant market. Families do it—they hand it down in a tradition, like arrowhead hunters. It is a real problem for a plant already contending with shrinking habitat. Venus flytraps live in pocosins, something between marsh and meadow. I have never poached a flytrap. I do still tickle them to make them close, Especially if I have brought somebody with me who has never seen one. You're not really supposed to do that, trick the heads into snapping shut. It risks harming the plants, because a head might not reopen for a week, And, obviously, during those days, it cannot eat bugs to obtain nutrients. On top of that, a single head can close only so many times before it dies. But one flytrap will have several heads—you're not likely to hurt it much. Whenever I take someone who's unfamiliar with the town to a preserve (Which I pretty much always do when somebody visits for the first time), I carry a pencil, which I hand to the person, showing how to trip the trap...