What? This 'Sheep-Eating Plant' Isn't Even All That Sinister

You’re a sheep, just a normal ol’ sheep doing sheep things. One of those things is munching on the various green plants that come across your path. That’s your diet mostly: casual chewing on plants. Your main concern in life is munching enough plants to survive while avoiding large carnivorous predators. Easy enough, until one day, as you prepare to munch on a particular cactus-looking thing, it stabs you (passively) with a sharp, barbed green arm. You move to get away, but the arm is made up of a surface needlepoints, each one stabbing in the opposite direction as the spike, resisting your escape in the most painful way imaginable. Eventually, you starve to death there next to the plant and decompose, your remains fertilizing the plant roots.

This is thought to be the actual way of life of the puya chilensis, a carnivorous plant in the same family as the pineapple that’s native to the arid hillsides of Chile. Going after not just sheep, the plant might grab up pretty much any meat product that might be caught sniffing within its spines. The internet is very, very excited about this right now because one just bloomed at the National Botanic Garden of Wales—no matter that they’re blooming all the damn time in Chile—so this might not even be news. It was brought to my attention yesterday by a very excited friend who pointed me to this BBC post.

If there is “news” beyond some very breathless posts on the internet about a plant that stabs its victims it’s that the puya chilensis is not all that extreme or uncommon: there’s about a thousand carnivorous plants identified in the world and most of them are a lot cooler—for example, those falling under the genus Utriculari sporting “bladder traps,” e.g. one-way sacs containing negative pressure. So, the prey is literally sucked to their doom of being slowly digested. And, of course, there’s the Venus flytrap and its kin, which also actively trap their prey a la a bear trap. (There also seems to be some common confusion about what plant “eating” actually is; these plants get nutrients carnivorously but energy from the sun, like most of the rest of plants on Earth.)

Somehow everyday bindweed seems more sinister than even the sheep-stabber. It’s a plant specialized for wrapping around other plants like a boa constrictor, setting up root systems 20 or 30 feet down and basically stealing every nutrient that the original plant was getting, killing it eventually. At the least the sheep has to die to be of any use to our sheep-stabbing friend. Same with the Venus flytrap. Bindweed, however, needs its prey to be alive.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.