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The bladderwort has an equally sophisticated way of setting its underwater trap. It pumps water out of tiny bladders, lowering the pressure inside. When a water flea or some other small creature swims past, it bends trigger hairs on the bladder, causing a flap to open. The low pressure sucks water in, carrying the animal along with it. In one five-hundredth of a second, the door swings shut again. The cells in the bladder then begin to pump water out again, creating a new vacuum.
Many other species of carnivorous plants act like living flypaper, snagging animals on sticky tentacles. Pitcher plants use yet another strategy, growing long tube-shaped leaves into which insects fall. Some of the largest have pitchers up to a foot deep and can consume a whole frog or even a rat unlucky enough to fall into them. Sophisticated chemistry helps make the pitcher a death trap. Nepenthes rafflesiana, a pitcher plant that grows in jungles on Borneo, produces nectar that both lures insects and forms a slick surface on which they can't get a grip. Insects that land on the rim of the pitcher hydroplane on the liquid and tumble in. The digestive fluid in which they fall has very different properties. Rather than being slippery, it's gooey. If a fly tries to lift its leg up into the air to escape, the fluid holds on tenaciously, like a rubber band.
Many carnivorous plants have special glands that secrete enzymes powerful enough to penetrate the hard exoskeleton of insects so they can absorb nutrients from inside their prey. But the purple pitcher plant, which lives in bogs and infertile sandy soils in much of North America, enlists other organisms to digest its food. It is home to an intricate food web of mosquito larvae, midges, protozoans, and bacteria, many of which can survive only in this unique habitat. The animals shred the prey that fall into the pitcher, and the smaller organisms feed on the debris. Finally, the pitcher plant absorbs the nutrients released by the feeding frenzy. "Having the animals creates a processing chain that speeds up all the reactions," says Nicholas Gotelli of the University of Vermont. "And then the plant dumps oxygen back into the pitcher for the insects. It's a tight feedback loop."