Weird Animal Question of the Week: What's the Biggest Killer Plant?
Some meat-eating plants are big enough to digest a small mammal.
With Halloween around the corner, it's as good a time as any to take a closer look at carnivorous plants.
We used author's prerogative to ask our Weird Animal Question of the Week about the coolest facts on meat-eating flora, which Darwin called "the most wonderful in the world."
"Everyone loves carnivorous plants," said Aaron Ellison, a senior research fellow at Harvard Forest (the university's ecological research area) and an expert in killer flora.
The biggest, he said, may be the endangered Nepenthes rajah of Borneo. "It could eat a good-sized rat or small mammal." (See more pictures of killer plants.)
Insects and other prey are lured by the plant's scent, but slip off the waxy surface into the
