Carnivorous Plants as a Fascinating Glitch in the Food Chain

Carnivorous plants are a trick that revert the natural order, as a mythological beast might do that turns its head and devours its predator.

In the intimacy of the food chain, to which we pay little attention because we are dominant beings, there is an incredible glitch. Let us consider carnivorous plants for a moment. If each link in the food chain takes its energy from the level immediately before its own, and the energy flows in a linear and ascendant way, carnivorous plants are a trap: they revert the natural order as a mythological beast would do if it were to turn its head and devour its predator.

We have always been sold the idea of the food chain as an essentially predictable system that begins with producing species (autotrophs: plants that photosynthesize) and ends with predatory creatures (planet-eaters: whales, humans, bacteria…) and each link represents a trophic level. But the trophic pyramid has perfect aberrations, evolutional depravations that destroy the concept of order and harmony that we take as a given. Carnivorous plants obtain their necessary nutrients from meat and their energy from the sun; they have achieved the strangest adaptation in all spheres of low nutrients.

There are some 630 species of carnivorous plants, but we should focus on one of them, the most overwhelming of all:

Sarracenia purpurea, commonly known as the purple pitcher plant. Within its ‘body’ it carries out an impeccable orgy of digestion that is hard to believe. Compared with its companions of the same species, the purpurea is the most complex and subtle insect eater of all. Its mouth is a cavity that stores a few drops of rain like a tiny well. But those fatal waters, independently of the plant but with its orchestration, enact a sophisticated process of digestion.

In there are mosquitoes in movement, carnivorous flies, worm larvae, mites, rotifers, minute crustaceans (copepods), nematodes and multicellular algae. All of that is its digestive system. An imposed network of food processing. When an insect drowns in the water of the elegant purpurea and the plant closes its mouth so that it cannot escape, the worm larvae quickly swim to the surface and cut it into small pieces, the bacteria eat those pieces, the rotifers eat them and the plant absorbs the rotifers’ detritus. But that is not all. The fly larvae also eat the rotifers, the worm larvae and their own species. And they all eat bacteria. In a complex food chain that changes within seconds. It is as if the purpurea were the host of a biological community, of an entire trophic chain in rotation. And all in order to eat a fly.

The popular notion that there is a predictable order of the flows of energy in nature, in the behavior of species and in biological identity is a handle of certainty to cling onto in order to avoid feeling the cruel and mythical bestiary of which we are all part and which surrounds us. The idea of order is also a solace that we have created to feel that there is a reading in all of this. But when a plant – a species that peacefully feeds off light and lets itself be stirred by the wind – devours a piece of meat there is a glitch of taxonomic mirages. A technical deviation that is, in fact, the determining factor in the natural world.

To think then, and albeit spontaneously, in perversions as enlightening as a carnivorous plant is important. Within the gears of all chains there is a link that reverses the order and allows us to see the skeleton of its workings; it throws light on the mirage of all that we understand as order.

In the intimacy of the food chain, to which we pay little attention because we are dominant beings, there is an incredible glitch. Let us consider carnivorous plants for a moment. If each link in the food chain takes its energy from the level immediately before its own, and the energy flows in a linear and ascendant way, carnivorous plants are a trap: they revert the natural order as a mythological beast would do if it were to turn its head and devour its predator.

We have always been sold the idea of the food chain as an essentially predictable system that begins with producing species (autotrophs: plants that photosynthesize) and ends with predatory creatures (planet-eaters: whales, humans, bacteria…) and each link represents a trophic level. But the trophic pyramid has perfect aberrations, evolutional depravations that destroy the concept of order and harmony that we take as a given. Carnivorous plants obtain their necessary nutrients from meat and their energy from the sun; they have achieved the strangest adaptation in all spheres of low nutrients.

There are some 630 species of carnivorous plants, but we should focus on one of them, the most overwhelming of all:

Sarracenia purpurea, commonly known as the purple pitcher plant. Within its ‘body’ it carries out an impeccable orgy of digestion that is hard to believe. Compared with its companions of the same species, the purpurea is the most complex and subtle insect eater of all. Its mouth is a cavity that stores a few drops of rain like a tiny well. But those fatal waters, independently of the plant but with its orchestration, enact a sophisticated process of digestion.

In there are mosquitoes in movement, carnivorous flies, worm larvae, mites, rotifers, minute crustaceans (copepods), nematodes and multicellular algae. All of that is its digestive system. An imposed network of food processing. When an insect drowns in the water of the elegant purpurea and the plant closes its mouth so that it cannot escape, the worm larvae quickly swim to the surface and cut it into small pieces, the bacteria eat those pieces, the rotifers eat them and the plant absorbs the rotifers’ detritus. But that is not all. The fly larvae also eat the rotifers, the worm larvae and their own species. And they all eat bacteria. In a complex food chain that changes within seconds. It is as if the purpurea were the host of a biological community, of an entire trophic chain in rotation. And all in order to eat a fly.

The popular notion that there is a predictable order of the flows of energy in nature, in the behavior of species and in biological identity is a handle of certainty to cling onto in order to avoid feeling the cruel and mythical bestiary of which we are all part and which surrounds us. The idea of order is also a solace that we have created to feel that there is a reading in all of this. But when a plant – a species that peacefully feeds off light and lets itself be stirred by the wind – devours a piece of meat there is a glitch of taxonomic mirages. A technical deviation that is, in fact, the determining factor in the natural world.

To think then, and albeit spontaneously, in perversions as enlightening as a carnivorous plant is important. Within the gears of all chains there is a link that reverses the order and allows us to see the skeleton of its workings; it throws light on the mirage of all that we understand as order.