The Latest Information and Legends of the Man-Eating Flower: A Complete Analysis
The man-eating flower grows in the primeval forests and swamps of the Amazon River in the Americas. Its appearance is extremely gorgeous, with a flower shape resembling a sun disc, a diameter of up to 1.5 m, petals about 1.4 cm thick, 5 petals per flower, and leaves 30 to 40 cm long. It relies on flies to pollinate and absorbs nutrients from other plants to live. Let us take a look below at the information and legends about the man-eating flower!
Information About the Man-Eating Flower
The man-eating flower is a mysterious plant with certain animal-like habits. It must swallow at least ten living lives before it can bloom one flower, and only one in ten, that is, only after ten flowers have been nourished by the continuous fresh lives of living creatures can one small green fruit be produced. However, according to local people, May to October each year is its main growing season. When it first emerges from the ground, it is only about the size of a table tennis ball. After several months of slow growth, the flower bud changes from the size of a table tennis ball to the size of a cabbage, and then the 5 fleshy petals slowly open. By the time the flower has fully bloomed, two days and two nights have already passed.
Reproduction of the Man-Eating Flower
It is hard to believe that the huge flower the man-eating flower has finally managed to produce can only last 4 to 5 days, and it is said that during these 4 to 5 days the flower continuously releases a strange stench, so that large animals naturally avoid it, while some insects attracted to foul odors come to pollinate it and act as matchmakers. When the petals wither, they turn into a pile of rotten black matter. Soon the fruit also ripens, hiding within it many tiny seeds, ready at any time to fall into the ground and search for a suitable place to germinate.
The Legend of the Man-Eating Flower
In recent years, many newspapers and magazines have continuously published reports about man-eating plants. Some say they are in the primeval forests of the Amazon River basin in South America, while others say they are on the island of Java in Indonesia. Although these reports describe in detail the morphology, habits and locations of various different man-eating plants, what is very regrettable is that in all the reports, no one has produced direct evidence about man-eating plants——photographs or specimens, nor has anyone clearly pointed out which family or genus the plant belongs to. For this reason, many botanists have begun to doubt whether man-eating plants exist.
The earliest news tracing man-eating plants came from some explorers in the latter half of the 19th century. Among them was a German named Karl Leach, who said after returning from an expedition: “On the island of Madagascar in Africa, I saw with my own eyes a kind of tree that can eat people. The local residents worship it as a sacred tree. Once an indigenous woman, because she violated the tribe's commandments, was driven to climb the sacred tree. As a result, the 8 leaves with hard thorns on the tree tightly wrapped her up. A few days later, when the leaves opened again, only a pile of white bones remained.” Thus, terrifying rumors that man-eating plants exist in the world spread everywhere.
These rumor-like reports left botanists extremely puzzled. For this reason, in 1971 a group of South American scientists organized an expedition and made a special trip to Madagascar to investigate. They conducted an extensive search in the areas where man-eating trees were rumored to exist, but the result was that they did not find this terrifying plant. Instead, they saw there many pitcher plants that can eat insects and some nettle-type plants whose stinging hairs can cause pain. The results of this investigation made scholars even more doubtful about the authenticity of the existence of man-eating plants.
In 1979, a British authority who devoted his whole life to studying carnivorous plants, Adrian Slack, said in his newly published monograph Carnivorous Plants: Up to now, no formal records or reports about man-eating plants have been found in academic circles. Even in the famous monumental botanical work Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien, edited by the German Engler, as well as the worldwide Dictionary of Flowering Plants and Ferns, there is no description at all about man-eating trees.
In addition, the famous British biologist Wallace, in his famous work The Malay Archipelago, written after traveling throughout the South Seas, recorded many rare tropical plants of the South Seas, but he never mentioned any man-eating plants. Therefore, the vast majority of botanists tend to believe that perhaps no such type of plant that can eat people exists in the world.
Since botanists have not confirmed it, why then did claims about man-eating plants appear? Adrian Slack and some other scholars believe that the greatest possibility is that they were produced through imagination and exaggeration based on the insect-catching characteristics of carnivorous plants, and of course they may also have been mistakenly transmitted from certain unverified legends. According to current information, it is already known that there truly exists on Earth a type of carnivorous plant (also called insectivorous plant) with unique behavior. They are distributed in countries around the world, with more than 500 species in total. Among the most famous are the pitcher plant, the tropical pitcher plant, and the bladderwort that catches underwater insects.