Understanding Carnivorous Plants

Series Summary

Carnivorous plants thrive on the nutrients that it receives from trapping and eating animals, insects or arthropods. These plants grow in parts of the world that do not provide valuable nutrients in the soil such as nitrogen. The most popular types are flypaper traps, pitcher plants, snap traps and bladder traps. The flypaper traps are the plants that secrete a sticky substance called mucilage on their leaves in order to trap its prey. Pitfall traps are an interesting plant that traps prey in a rolled leaf, while bladder traps suck prey in with an internal vacuum.

In this series of videos, you can learn more about these interesting plants. Our expert shares an introduction to carnivorous plants and shows how to propagate them through division, leaf cutting and seeds. Stratification and transplantation of carnivorous plants is made easy after seeing these videos. You can also get tips on watering, feeding and lighting these plants so that they will thrive in any environment. Learn about the dormancy stages that these plants go through. Keep your plants safe with a fungus treatment and get tips for hybridization of carnivorous plants in these expert videos.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Wes and I’m here for ExpertVillage.com and in this video series I’m going to be presenting how to care for carnivorous plants. If you want to know more about our plants you can visit us at Equilibriocarnivorousplants.com. First I would just like to start off by showing you a few different types of carnivorous plants. Here we have Sundews, these can be easily identified by their sticky, dew-like substance that they have on their leaves. Sundews come in several different varieties, here we have a smaller rosette shaped Sundew and over here we have obviously taller, thin-leafed Sundews. Here we have plants that are called Butterworts or Pinguiculas, these have another also small, low-line, flat leaves in a rosette shape. Butterworts come in a lot of different varieties, a lot of different colors as you can see here these light green and red plants. Also, this is a Butterwort as well, quite a large plant, different from these two. Over here we have the four different varieties of pitcher plants, these are the North American Pitcher Plants, we can identify them by the fact that they have long trumpet like structures for pitchers. This here is the Australian Pitcher Plant the Cephalotus, a very low lying, smaller plant with smaller pitcher structures here. This over here is the South American Pitcher Plant, the Heliamphora and here we have the Tropical Pitcher Plant, the Nepenthes and this can easily be identified by the fact that the pitchers grow off the stalks of the leaves here. Here we have the Utricularia or the Bladderwort with nice flowers and small leaves, actually each one of these leaves is an individual plant. Here we have the Genlisea or the corkscrew plant and over here we have the Venus Flytrap. "