For a while now, ever since I moved my tropical fish into a larger aquarium, I’ve wanted to build a terrarium in their old 10 gallon fish tank. I wanted to create a little mini ecosystem in which a couple of interesting plants and a couple of small animals – perhaps a little lizard of some sort and/or some tiny frogs or a turtle – could all live in symbiotic harmony.

In particular, I wanted a carnivorous plant, so that I could name it ‘Audrey 2’ and sing songs about it stubbornly refusing to grow.

After a period of unsuccessful Googling for information, I even wrote to Dr. Barry Rice, who runs a website about carnivorous plants (among other things) to find out what sorts of other plants and animals would work well in a terrarium with meat-eating plants.

Turns out my whole premise was flawed. Apparently the reason I couldn’t find any information on how to do it was that it couldn’t be easily done. Carnivorous plants are carnivorous because they evolved in nutrient poor soil. But animals excrete nitrogen in their waste. The excess of nitrogen the animals would deposit would poison the plants.

What’s good for the daisies ain’t good for the fly traps.

And that’s on top of the fact that the animals would tend to fight or eat each other in such a small space, which is why zoos have so many exhibits instead of tossing them all into the same big cage.

Alas, another great idea laid waste by reality.

But the idea of getting a carnivorous plant or two has stuck with me. And I’ve learned a lot by researching them.

For example, there’s an International Carnivorous Plant Society. They put out a newsletter and everything. Their website has oodles of information.

Another great source for information is the Botanical Society of America. They detail all the different types of carnivorous plants, which they say runs to 600 species in 9 plant families. That was a lot more that I expected.

I was also surprised to learn that the ordinary Venus Fly Trap was native to the sandy Coastal Plains of North Carolina, and that it was North Carolina’s Official State Carnivorous Plant. I thought that such a strange and interesting plant would be native to the jungles of South America or Australia, but it turned out we had one right here in the U. S.

And most recently, I’ve been reading about these newly discovered carnivorous plants that trap tiny worms underground using subterranean leaves. (Click here for the scientific article.)

And btw, there are also carnivorous fungi.  Which, for some reason, I find significantly more disturbing.