As a refined Victorian gentleman, Charles Darwin naturally gravitated toward the macabre, and few things fascinated him like those floral flouters of the conventional food chain: carnivorous plants. He experimented with them and wrote a major treatise about them. He called the Venus flytrap, with its elaborate hair-trigger snap trap and its lethal brew of digestive juices, “one of the most wonderful plants in the world.” He compared the glistening and gothically tentacled insectivorous sundew plant, or Drosera, to a “most sagacious animal” and said, “I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death.” To which a sagacious sundew might well have replied, Thanks, but you’re too big. I’ll take a damselfly instead.