Venus Flytraps Ate My Skin, Says Scientist. Could They Eat Whole Humans?

Giant, flesh-eating plants have long fascinated the public imagination, from the bloodthirsty bud in Little Shop of Horrors to the piranha plants in Super Mario Bros.

In the natural world, carnivorous plants have been known to chow down on mammals as large as rats and other medium-sized rodents. But could they ever eat a human?

"Carnivorous plants are fabulous, wonderful things that demonstrate the beautiful innovations resulting from evolution," Barry Rice, an astrobiologist at Sierra College in Rocklin, California, who has extensively studied carnivorous plants, told Newsweek. "We have carnivorous plants on every populated continent...they are in every state of the USA!"

Carnivorous plants are those that have evolved to trap and digest animals as an extra source of nutrients. Roughly 630 species are already known to science, according to the Natural History Museum in London, and there may be many more.

Without teeth or a stomach, the plants have had to evolve their own strategies for absorbing their food.

"Carnivorous plants produce digestive enzymes [that] are easily capable of rendering animal tissue into liquid goo that the plants absorb," Rice said. "It's all about chemistry!"

A few carnivorous plants do not produce these enzymes and instead rely on their resident bacteria to do the digesting for them.

The plants also use a variety of strategies to lure in and trap their prey. The spring-loaded jaws of the Venus flytrap are perhaps the most famous, but other examples include the slippery-lidded trumpets of the pitcher plants and the sticky tentacle-like tendrils of the round-leaved sundew.

These plants also vary in size, with the largest—a pitcher plant called Nepenthes rajah—reaching volumes of over 118 fluid ounces. "The largest prey that has been recorded for carnivorous plants, in the wild, are medium-sized rodents like rats," Rice said. "More commonly, they can catch smaller prey like frogs. But mostly, they consume invertebrates like insects, spiders, etc."

But could they ever eat humans?

Well, we already know that they can eat mammals, and, as Rice discovered, they are capable of digesting human flesh.

"I once did a disgusting experiment where I took chunks of my own thick foot callus and fed them to Venus flytraps," he said. "Much to my simultaneous pleasure and horror, I found that the plants consumed the nasty, thick, dried callus tissue with gusto."

In a post on his own website, sarracenia.com, Rice said: "If you were to get caught by a sufficiently large Venus flytrap, your skin would easily be digested, and the plant would be able to proceed to your other internal tissues."

However, the world's largest Venus fly trap, according to the World Record Academy, is still only 2.4 inches long, quite a long way from being able to ensnare even a mouse, let alone a human.

"The big challenge that plants have in trying to be scaled up to eat large animals is that their cells have walls and not membranes," Rice said. "So they usually cannot move easily as animals do [so could not chase after larger prey]. If you wanted a big plant predator, I think it would have to be a plant based on a pitcher plant. Imagine a well with slippery walls. If a plant could produce a deep well (just a bit taller than a person) with slick, sturdy walls, all you need is for a person to fall into it. They'd drown, and then the plant could digest them. Yum."

However, so far, plants have not seen any evolutionary reason to go after us larger prey—at least, no plants that we know of.

"It would be hard to imagine a plant evolving to capture large prey since there are so many small prey available," Rice said. "But if there were a scenario with diminishing small prey, evolution would favor a carnivorous plant that could consume large prey!"

For now, though, humans pose a much greater threat to these plants than they pose to us.

"Since they require pure, clean environments, they are rapidly dying out in the wild because of climate change and habitat destruction," Rice said. "Enjoy them while you can!"