PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: There are 66 carnivorous plants in the United States, but one strange species stands out amongst them all.
Mike Kunz: The Venus Fly trap is very unique because it's the only species that's in its genus. It's kind of evolutionarily. All by itself
Anisa Khalifa: that Supreme Weirdness has also made the fly trap a cultural icon, but there are increasingly worries about the health of its wild population because the Venus Fly Trap only grows natively in a very narrow and specific habitat. One that only exists. In a single place on the planet
Matt Criscoe: if you'd think it would be growing in the Amazon or the Congo or something like that. But you know, it's growing right here, right up the road.
Anisa Khalifa: I am Anisa Khalifa. This is the broadside where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South this week. The tale of a blood thirsty plant that has mesmerized us for generations and its remarkable quest to survive.
For better or worse, the 1986 Cult classic movie, little Shop of Horrors, introduced much of the world to the Venus Fly Trap, the
Unidentified Speaker: Miss Mall.
Anisa Khalifa: It is a story about a talking plant with an insatiable taste for human blood. It's also a musical
Unidentified Speaker: feed. Miss me all night long.
Anisa Khalifa: It may be hard to believe, but that eight foot tall monster with a soulful singing voice. Was based on a real plant, one that's fascinated people around the world since it first became widely known in the late 17 hundreds. In fact, my home state of North Carolina recently created a special license plate featuring the fly trap, and it honestly inspired me. So I visited the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill to see a Venus Fly trap. For the very first time.
Mike Kunz: These are our carnivorous plant displays. They are Venus Fly traps. Oh, they're so tiny. And many of these beds. Yeah. Uh, think sometimes people expect Little Shop of Horror. These, these big giant plants. Um, and they're not big giant plants. They're, they're fairly small. My name is Michael Coons. I'm the Director of Conservation Programs here at the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
Anisa Khalifa: As we walked next to our row of fly traps, Mike explained just how unique these plants actually are.
Mike Kunz: Each of the traps that we classically think of as like the actual fly trap is a leaf. It's a modified leaf that's just been modified through generations and generations of evolution and adaptation.
Anisa Khalifa: So it's a leaf, it's not a flower.
Mike Kunz: Yes. Those are the leaves that we're seeing. Uh, but then once that leaf fully matures and it opens, uh, the inside of that pad of the trap has these tiny little hairs, and they're trigger hairs. And when an insect gets inside of those, the first time it moves one of those trigger hairs, it'll start to close. And then if that insect continues to move and brushes a second hair, it'll close completely and trap that insect inside. Uh, and then it'll seal itself off. So the insect can't get out and it's digested then, uh, and the reason it does that is because they grow in very nutrient pore soils usually very wet and very high in peat.
Um, and so there's just very low organic matter. And so to get the nutrients they need, the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and some of the other things they've adapted to be able to, to digest the insects. And so they're getting those extra nutrients from being able to use that insect material as food.
Anisa Khalifa: My whole 15 minute tour was like this. Mike would just spit out a weird fact about the plant and I would be blown away. But the most surprising part of it all,
Mike Kunz: it is only currently found within about 90 miles of Wilmington, so predominantly North Carolina and a few counties of South Carolina. So it's got this really narrow geographic range, but probably one of the most recognized plants throughout the world. You can travel all over the place and find them in stores in nurseries, and so it's pretty fascinating that it's so widely loved because it's so unique, but yet if you want to see them in the wild naturally occurring, you really have to come to the Carolinas to be able to see them.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, it's pretty iconic to be honest.
Sara Heise Graybeal: It is a really, really, really cool ecosystem.
Anisa Khalifa: Sarah Heise Graybeal is a freelance journalist and folklorist. Last year I. She wrote a story for the assembly about the plant's cultural impact for her research. She went to see a stand of Wild Venus Flytraps in the Green Swamp. It's a 17,000 acre preserve managed by the Nature Conservancy in the southeastern corner of North Carolina.
Sara Heise Graybeal: And then there's just this like sandy trail that kind of goes off into the distance. It's really beautiful for parts of the walk. You're in these big open meadows and then it gets really swampy and you're like walking on a boardwalk through these swamps, and then you come out on the other side and you're back to meadow and they grow in the kind of space that exists between the longleaf pine Savannah and the POCs in which is the more swampy areas and they don't really grow anywhere else.
And you can experience it all in 10 minutes out there.
Anisa Khalifa: And while their ecosystem may be harsh and hard to find, Sarah says they thrive in it.
Sara Heise Graybeal: Yeah. Venus slide traps actually can live up to like 20 years old, which is pretty amazing. Um, however, each little trap only gets like three. Closures and then subsequent openings before it falls off.
So, um, a plant can regrow more traps in order to keep trapping insects, but the traps have a very limited lifespan. What kind of threats does the fly trap face? So the place where I focused, a lot of my research and my reporting was in Brunswick County, um, which is right on the coast in southeastern North Carolina.
Brunswick County is, um, the fastest growing, or was as of a couple years ago at least, was the fastest growing county in the state and the sixth fastest growing in the country, um, in terms of population. So that kind of helps describe, uh, what I would consider the number one threat to the venous fly trap, which is development.
There are just. Tons of stories of Venus fly traps all over construction sites. And then the bulldozer comes in and there are no more Venus Fly Trapps. They are a plant that have made a way of living not only on like protected lands, but also in ditches along the side of the road next to power lines. So lots of places where like if highways are being expanded, if you know there's just more businesses going in, more houses going in, those are all threats to the flag shop.
Fire suppression is another big threat to the fly trap and fire is necessary to the Venus fly trap in order to survive because it is very low to the ground and it needs direct sunlight. So as soon as there's enough undergrowth that it can't get that direct sunlight, it starts to die out.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow. So after a fire, they kind of thrive.
Sara Heise Graybeal: Yeah, yeah. Ironically, and that is interconnected with development because as more of the landscape along the North Carolina coast is built up, um, more of it is privately owned. And so it is hard to go in and get, you know, 20,000 homeowners to agree to burn their backyards in order to make a more hospitable habitat for the fly chap.
So those are kind of like the two things that I would say are the, the really big threats to the fly chap.
Anisa Khalifa: But there is one more threat to these tiny meat eating plants, and it's grabbed the vast majority of the headlines. In recent years.
Matt Criscoe: In the past, officers have seized over 2000 at one time.
Anisa Khalifa: Coming up after the break, we'll dig into the murky underground scene of Venus Flytrap poaching.
Matt Criscoe: My name is Matt Crisco. I'm an area sergeant for Brunswick and Columbus County, and I'm employed by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, division of Enforcement.
Anisa Khalifa: Matt is a wildlife cop. He travels the rural back roads of Eastern North Carolina, protecting endangered and vulnerable species, and enforcing hunting, fishing, and boating laws.
His beat is a little different from a traditional policeman's, but last year he was involved in a classic law enforcement maneuver straight out of a cheesy cop show, a stakeout.
Matt Criscoe: So that day we got a call from the property owner saying, Hey, I, I've got a couple of folks on my property right now.
Anisa Khalifa: Matt's unit suspected that these folks were doing more than just trespassing.
Matt Criscoe: We all kind of come up with a quick game plan and headed toward Bowling Springs. We dropped few officers off here and there that the place that they entered from. And then we kind of staggered up the road a possible places that they would come out of the property.
Anisa Khalifa: Then they waited and waited, and after about two hours, the suspects finally appeared.
Matt Criscoe: We seized the baggage, the backpack, and sure enough, you know, we took it back to our office, opened it up, and there's right under 600 plants, you know, that we had laid out. So at that point, we went back to master's office, took out warrants on him for felony possession.
Anisa Khalifa: Felony possession of a Venus fly trap because in North Carolina, the taking of a plant is punishable by up to 25 months in prison.
Matt Criscoe: In my opinion. I think that that's helped out probably more than anything. Um, but it still, I mean, it still goes on quite a bit. I mean, we still get reports, especially this time of year, so it's, it's something that people will still take a chance.
On getting caught to dig those traps and get 'em sold
Anisa Khalifa: in places like Brunswick County. This game of cat and mouse is constantly happening, but journalist Sarah Hegra says that it's a relatively recent development. Has it always been such a severe offense to harvest Venus? Fly traps from the wild.
Sara Heise Graybeal: No, not at all.
So in the 1950s is when harvesting Venus Fly. Trapps became a misdemeanor in North Carolina, however that constituted maybe like a $10 fine if that. And a lot of people continued to dig Venus Flytraps with government issued permits that, you know, were collectors licenses essentially, that let them legally dig fly traps and sell them.
And then in 1991, the Venus Fly Trapp became a plant of special concern, which meant that the fines. That a judge could kind of dole out for digging. Venus fly traps became higher, however, the collector's licenses were still in circulation. Um, that was still a viable option up until 2014 when it became a felony to dig Venus fly traps, and that's when it really became impossible to dig them legally anywhere except like your own backyard or on someone's private property who's given you permission to dig them.
Anisa Khalifa: Sarah says that while the decade old law has. Plenty of supporters. It's also upset some locals who for generations had harvested and sold plants for supplemental income.
Sara Heise Graybeal: So the idea that it would be a felony to dig one really caught people by surprise, I think. And I think for some people has felt a bit like scapegoating.
You know, like we're bringing in 20,000 more houses to this development. Clearly there's lots of fly traps that are being. Obliterated here, and yet, you know, we're focusing on the individual people digging 50 at a time. Then there are the demographics. You know, conservation communities tend to be largely white.
Former fly trappers tend to be largely black, so there are race and class dynamics there as well.
Anisa Khalifa: According to Sarah, there's also growing frustration among some conservationists and even law enforcement officials who believe more should be done to go after the middlemen and the buyers instead of low level fly trappers. Which leads to the big question, where exactly are these black market plants going?
Sara Heise Graybeal: Such a good question. It's not gonna be a long answer because I almost have no answer for that. It's, it's one of the most difficult questions to answer. There is a thought that there are plant collectors who come into town from other places because they want natively grown fly traps. Even though you can buy a fly trap at Walmart in Seattle, you know, but, but people who come to town, 'cause they want a fly trap from the North Carolina soil, and this is where things get very weird.
There is another thought that there are, um, companies out of the country largely who are using Flytraps in order to create, um, cancer treatment products that are not sanctioned in the United States.
Anisa Khalifa: Really, it's.
Sara Heise Graybeal: It's a whole thing.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Sara Heise Graybeal: Yeah. I've talked to fly trappers who have shared with me that, um, this is something that happens and that this is where a lot of fly Trapps from North Carolina have gone.
However, I have not been able to get a single like data point that I can really track to, um, to do further reporting on that. Huh. So, I don't know. I have no idea. It's a great question. I wish I knew.
Anisa Khalifa: Do we know how many venous fly traps exist? It sounds like they're really hard to find from, from your descriptions. Yeah. What, what is kind of, is there a general consensus about how how much at risk these plants actually are?
Sara Heise Graybeal: I don't think there is a general consensus. It really does depend who you ask.
Even within more scientific environmentalist communities, there is not really a consensus. In 2018, a conservation biologist. Named Lori Haman did a kind of a conservative estimate using a bunch of different sources, and she came up with an estimate of somewhere between 73,000 to 158,000 plants living natively in the wild between 2019 and 2022.
There was this. Other study headed by the Natural Heritage Program, and it came up with somewhere around 900,000 fly traps in the Carolinas. Oh, wow. I mean, I don't think many people disagree that fly trap populations are declining due to all the reasons that we've talked about, but how quickly they're declining to what degree they are, like in dire need of urgent protection versus kind of on a slower decline.
There's not total agreement on that, and
Anisa Khalifa: the plant status reflects that. In 2023, the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the species does not meet the definition of threatened or endangered. Instead, it's currently listed internationally as vulnerable, but despite that uncertainty, Sarah says the Venus Flytrap has a legion of supporters.
Sara Heise Graybeal: There are national groups that are focused on protecting the Venus Fly Trap. You know, the Nature Conservancy owns and operates part of the Green Swamp, which is a huge, you know, area of land in Brunswick County that houses many fly traps. There are also North Carolina programs that are focused on conserving the fly trap.
The. North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill has a lot of fly traps there and is very involved in efforts to protect Venus Fly Trapps. And then there are citizen groups that are, you know, based in specific towns on the coast that are focused on. Keeping an eye out for Venus fly Trapps, like literally spotting them in ditches and then putting in a phone call and relocating them to somewhere safer.
There are even like in boiling Spring Lakes, there was a much beloved town mower who mowed, you know, the ditches and the highways and he was fully on board with protecting the Venus fly trap and, and actually took over mowing from the state because he was the one who was trusted to look out for the fly traps and not.
Mow over them. So really like a pretty cool community effort from a lot of quarters. And then I would just, I mean, I wanna throw in there, you know, it might not be a popular opinion in all circles, but, um, these communities that have dug Venus Flytraps for generations are some of the people I spoke to on the coast who are most, um, fond of the Venus Fly trap and have really the most.
Experience with it, and at least historically have been some of the people who have been concerned with keeping the plant going for the plant's sake, and also to continue to have that income source.
Anisa Khalifa: The Venus Fly Trap has an extraordinary ability to bring us all together, and even though it's just a tiny plant from one little corner of Eastern North Carolina, its impact on folks is almost universal. From the longleaf, pine savannahs to garden centers around the world.
Sara Heise Graybeal: People are just like inspired by the way that the Venus flytrap fights to survive.
You know that they will just go to any means necessary, even though they physically cannot move from the one spot where they're situated, but they will do everything in their power to hang on to life and live one day longer. Just seems to be something that really speaks to people. Every group of people or or person that I've spoken about here today is inspired by the fly trap kind of in a similar way, and I think that that's notable.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, I mean, I had kind of a similar experience when I went to see them in person at for the first time in my life at the Botanical Garden. They're so small and cute. And yet they're so blood thirsty. I mean, it's just like, you know, like the one little leaf is the size of maybe your fingernail.
Sara Heise Graybeal: Totally.
And they've generated so much debate and discussion and there's a license plate named after them, and they've got people from all different places and backgrounds fighting for them in different ways. It's, it's really remarkable.
Anisa Khalifa: If you'd like to read Sara Heise Graybeal's article about the Venus Flytrap, we've dropped a link in this week's show notes and a quick heads up as of 2024, if you live in North Carolina, you can get a Venus Flytrap themed license plate, the very same one that inspired this episode.
And how do you personally feel about the license plate?
Mike Kunz: I think it's great. I have one on my car. Um, yeah. And you know, it's self-serving 'cause it helps support the, the conservation work that we're able to do with, um, with Venus Fly Trapps and with a lot of rare plants across North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and our editor Jared Walker.
The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton Ormond, and Executive producer Wilson Ser. The Broadside is a production of WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio, and is part of the NPR network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside at w unc. Dot org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend.
Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.