Fleischfressende Pflanzen

Up to the middle of the 19th century it was believed that plants exclusively served as a nutritional staple to be eaten by herbivorous primary consumers. It was Charles Darwin who published his observations on carnivorous plants in the book „Insectivorous Plants“ in 1875 – thus helping carnivory, which had so far been dismissed as „Botanists’ tales“, to gain recognition. Due to his experiments with sundew, Venus flytrap and bladderwort he discovered that in the course of evolution plants had developed that were not only able to consume animals but also capable of catching them with really clever strategies.