DEVIL’S SNARE: WHAT ARE THE REAL-LIFE FLESH-EATING PLANTS?

Herbology is one of the many fascinating topics that students study at Hogwarts. Herbology is all about magical plants and fungi, and although it is sometimes overlooked, Professor Sprout’s lessons help Harry, Ron, and Hermione out of many sticky situations during their time at the Castle.

One of the deadliest plants that Harry encounters, both in and outside the herbology classroom, is Devil’s snare. In the golden trio’s Voldemort-busting adventure through the trapdoor, Devil’s snare is one of many trials that they have to overcome to reach the Sorcerer’s Stone. This particular magical plant has the startling ability to constrict around its prey, and as Ron and Harry discover, the more you struggle, the tighter it squeezes. Later in the series, Devil’s snare is featured as a deadly weapon more than once. Neville Longbottom and Professor Sprout position them strategically around the grounds during the Battle of Hogwarts to take down the giants and death eaters invading the Castle.

In another sinister scene, Devil’s snare is smuggled as a method of assassination into St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. A potted Devil’s snare was delivered to an unsuspecting comatose patient, Broderick Bode, and mistaken for an innocuous Christmas gift. The death eater responsible, Walden Macnair, was able to sneak the plant passed the Healers, where it strangled Bode to death before anyone could realize.

Luckily for Harry and Ron, there is an easy way to escape Devil’s snare. The harder you struggle against its grasp, the faster it starts to choke you, but if you keep still, you can trick the snare into relaxing its grip on you. Thanks to Professor Sprout’s herbology class, Hermione is able to escape its clutches and then manages to save a very panicked Ron by conjuring fire to make its tentacles recoil. However, while the fast-moving vines of the Devil’s snare are certainly impressive, there are just as many fascinating and deadly plants in real-world botany.

Nepenthes Rajah: King of the Pitcher Plants

First up is something that seems to have climbed right out of the wizarding world. nepenthes rajah sounds more like a spell or incantation rather than a plant. Originating in Malaysian Borneo, nepenthes rajah is a scrambling vine. This plant comes equipped with giant pitcher-shaped traps, the biggest of which have been known to capture and digest small mammals, frogs, and lizards. It’s a slow death, too. When the fated animal falls in, it is drowned and slowly digested by the liters of fluid sitting in the pitcher trap. The trap is essentially a cupped leaf with a waxy, slippery interior, making it difficult to climb out. Scholars have noted that the bodies of small rodents can take months to slowly digest, until finally all that remains within the plant’s fluid is the skeleton.

Ominously, the stem of nepenthes rajah has distinct climbing ambitions. It usually grows along the ground, but it will try to climb anything it comes into contact with and which can support it. And that stem is formidable. It can grow up to six meters in length, with insects, particularly ants, making up the staple prey of both aerial and terrestrial pitchers.

Dastardly plants have a good side, too. Although nepenthes rajah is renowned for trapping unsuspecting creatures, its pitchers are also host to a large number of other organisms. Nepenthes rajah plays mutual symbiotic mother to creatures that cannot survive anywhere else, such as the two mosquito taxa named after it: culex rajah and toxorhynchites rajah.

Bladderworts: Deceptively Innocent

Like devil’s snare at St. Mungo’s, this plant at first seems small and innocent. But with a name like bladderworts, a botanist might divine there’s also something weird afoot. Even though bladderworts is bedecked with pretty flowers, it’s actually just as effective at capturing its prey as the nepenthes rajah and devil’s snare plants. The name bladderworts refers to the bladder-like traps, with which the plant carnivorously captures small organisms. They occur in both fresh water and wet soil, as terrestrial or aquatic species, across every territory on Earth, save Antarctica.

Bladderworts acts swiftly. It can take just ten thousandths of a second for its trap to spring. In the aquatic species, the trapdoor is mechanically triggered, and the prey, along with the surrounding water, is sucked into the bladder. The bladder traps are considered one of the most sophisticated structures in the plant kingdom. But thankfully, its prey is relatively small fry. The aquatic species, common bladderwort, boasts bladders that feed on prey such as water fleas, mosquito larvae, and young tadpoles. By grabbing them by the tail, bladderworts consume tadpoles and larvae by ingesting them, bit by bit.

The Venus Flytrap: The Classic

It’s the classic flesh-eating plant of the muggle world. And, with vibrant leaves that close around its prey, the Venus flytrap sets a grasping trap, which is very like the sinister clutches of the magical Devil’s snare.

The Venus flytrap is a miracle of nature. People don’t normally think of moving plants, but the flytrap can catch insects by its toothed leaves snapping shut, when triggered by prey touching the tiny hairs on the inner surface of the leaf.

The flytrap’s mechanism is a sophisticated trap. Imagine a spider, stupid enough to be clambering across the inside of a Venus leaf. If the arachnid triggers one of the tiny hairs on the inner surface, the trap prepares to close. It snaps shut unless it feels a second contact within about twenty seconds of the first strike. This requirement of redundant triggering serves as a safeguard. It means the flytrap doesn’t waste energy by trapping objects of no nutritional value. Venus will only begin digestion after five such stimuli, to make sure it’s caught a live bug worthy of chomping. The flytrap adds further refinement, too. The speed of snap-shut varies on the amount of humidity, light, size of prey, and general growing conditions. The speed with which the trap closes is a useful indicator of the plant’s general well-being, even if the same can’t be said for its prey, which includes beetles, spiders and other crawling arthropods.

The Venus flytrap boasts some very famous fans. The founder of geographical botany, John Dalton Hooker, was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. He shared a keen interest in carnivorous plants with his closest friend, Charles Darwin, who called the flytrap, “one of the most wonderful plants in the world.”

The Giant Hogweed: The Late Entry

Giant hogweed is the plant of nightmares. Many plants prove toxic by ingestion, but the Giant Hogweed, which grows up to 8 feet tall, can poison you by touch alone. Looking like something from an alien planet, Hogweed poisons with cooperation from an extra-terrestrial body—the sun! As Hogweed is photosensitive, it oozes a thick sap that coats human skin upon contact. At once, the sap reacts with the sun and starts a chemical reaction that burns through flesh. The searing contact can lead to necrosis, and the formation of massive, purple lesions on the skin. Incredibly, the lesions may last for years. Even more worrying is the fact that a minute quantity of sap can cause permanent blindness upon eye contact. It’s hardly surprising that giant hogweed plants have become a priority emergency target for muggle toxic plant control departments.