Venus Flytraps may not be Local, but They’re Cool

I feel like a high school kid that got taken to task by her teacher for failing to complete an English essay on Wuthering Heights (yes, the memory does still sting a little), but nonetheless, I need to make a confession here: I didn’t manage to come up with a local plant, animal or insect to feature in this week’s Nature Nook.

However, as I started to stress about this apparent planning snafu, my eyes wandered to my kitchen windowsill where I spotted one of the newest additions to our family’s fauna, our sons’ Venus Flytrap.

We purchased the Venus Flytrap on a recent trip to a local greenhouse amid a “he said, she said” banter between my husband and me about our respective college dormitory Venus Flytraps and the things we supposedly successfully or not-so-successfully had fed to said plants.

Time for another confession: my husband said that he tried to feed the strange carnivorous plant ground meat and had killed it. I, on the other hand, was quite emphatic about the fact that my freshman roommate and I had given ground meat from the school cafeteria to ours and that our little bug-eater had loved it, bellowing for Seymour to bring him more.

Well, based on the research I did to try to verify which of our college stories is true, it seems that my husband MAY be right. (Yes dear, I said it…You might be right.)

While Venus Flytraps eat a variety of insects including ants, spiders, beetles, and grasshoppers, according to the International Carnivorous Plant Society (yes, there really is such a thing), ground beef doesn’t seem to be on the menu of choice for this North Carolina native

So, it seems that my memory of how much our Venus Flytrap loved burgers might be a little bit skewed.

Unless, of course, the cafeteria ground beef wasn’t actually made of beef…