--- title: Carnivorous and strange plants — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Carnivorous and strange plants», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Most plants live quietly on light, air, water and a little from the soil, but some grow in wet, boggy ground so poor that they have turned --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Carnivorous and strange plants # Carnivorous and strange plants Lesson 61 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/0/) — Most plants live quietly on light, air, water and a little from the soil, but some grow in wet, boggy ground so poor that they have turned into hunters of insects. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/1/) — Watch a Venus flytrap at the garden centre: a fly walks across the pink inside of the trap, brushes one tiny trigger hair, then another, and in about a tenth of a second the two halves slam shut like a mouth with green teeth. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/3/) — Other plants are strange in different ways: a flower a metre wide with no leaves at all, a flower spike taller than a grown-up that stinks of rotting meat, a desert plant with just two leaves for hundreds of years, and a nettle that injects you with its sting. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/4/) — Plants do move, but slowly or with clever tricks, and no plant anywhere can eat a person, whatever cartoons say. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/5/) — A Venus flytrap shuts in about a tenth of a second when its trigger hairs are touched twice within about 20 seconds; one touch, like a raindrop, is not enough. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/6/) — After it closes, the flytrap seals tight and makes digestive juices; digesting one fly takes about a week to ten days, and then the trap opens again; if it closes on something it cannot digest, like a finger, it opens again in a day or so. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/7/) — Each flytrap can only close a few times before it dies off, so closing on nothing wastes its energy, and food that is too big, like a lump of meat, makes the trap rot. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/9/) — Pitcher plants have jug-shaped leaves with slippery rims and a pool of digestive liquid; insects come for nectar, slip in and drown. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/10/) — Some big pitcher plants in Borneo feed partly on the droppings of tree shrews, which lick sweet nectar from the lid and use the pitcher as a toilet. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/11/) — A sundew's leaves have red hairs tipped with sticky drops that glitter like dew; a stuck insect is slowly wrapped as the hairs bend over it. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/12/) — Bladderworts have no roots and float in ponds; their tiny underwater bags pop open and suck in water fleas in less than a thousandth of a second. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/13/) — The sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, folds its leaflets within seconds when touched because water quickly moves out of cells at the base of the leaf; it opens again after several minutes. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/14/) — Rafflesia arnoldii from Sumatra and Borneo has the biggest single flower, about 1 metre across, and it has no leaves, stem or roots of its own: it lives as a parasite inside a vine. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/15/) — The titan arum, or corpse flower, from Sumatra sends up a flower spike up to about 3 metres tall that opens for only a day or two and may not bloom again for years; it warms itself and smells of rotting meat to call carrion beetles and flies. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/16/) — Welwitschia from the Namib Desert grows only two leaves in its whole life; they keep growing from the base and are torn into ribbons by the wind, and some plants are thought to be over 1,000 years old. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/17/) — A stinging nettle's hairs have glass-like tips that snap off and inject an itchy mix of chemicals into the skin; rubbing a dock leaf on the sting mostly just cools and distracts. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/61-carnivorous-and-strange-plants/19/) — No plant can eat a person; the largest meat-eating plants catch insects and, very rarely, a small frog, lizard or mouse, and the old story of a man-eating tree in Madagascar was a made-up newspaper tale. - ← previous: [Trees](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/60-trees/) - next →: [Fungi: mushrooms, mould and yeast](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/62-fungi-mushrooms-mould-and-yeast/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)