Page 39

Plants, in a broad sense, are food. Not only for humans, but for animals, birds, insects. This is their main function on the planet, aside from creating oxygen. They feed life.

But there are some with a much subtler evolutionary design. Plants that wait patiently, taking no nutrients from the poor soil they exist within, their brightly colored and patterned leaves particularly delicious looking. Plants that draw the insects and the little rodents and the frogs to them—hungry creatures searching for food, tricked into thinking they have found a feast, before they themselves are consumed by the pitcher plants. The carnivores. These are plants that refuse to be prey. What possible need could we have to keep such defiance? The seeds of the deadly pitcher plants sit, gathering dust, in a far corner of the vault.