Trivia

Pitcher plants are passive hunters that capture insects by means of nectar and color. Once lured inside, the insect slips on the plant's slippery inner surface and drowns in the rain water that has collected in its base. The pitcher plant secretes enzymes that digest the bodies, except for outer skeletons and wings, of its prey.

Armed with sticky and slippery traps but rooted to the spot, most carnivorous plants have no choice but to consume any small creature unlucky enough to stumble into them. But a pitcher plant in Brunei's rainforest seems to have refined the art of fussy eating, luring only termites to their doom.

The picky pitcher plant, Nepenthes albomarginata, can catch thousands of termites in its slippery-walled, jug-shaped leaves filled with digestive fluid.

N. albomarginata's preference for a single type of prey is a first for carnivorous plants, according to Marlis Merbach at the University of Frankfurt in Germany and colleagues, who made the discovery. Moreover, the plant is the only one known to offer up its own tissue as bait.