Man eating plants- Fact, Folklore or Fantasy?
A German traveller
in the 1880s called Karl Lache (Spelling may not be accurate as
different versions spell his name Carle etc) wrote to the Polish Doctor,
Omelius Fredlowski, describing a human sacrifice he had seen in
Madagascar , in which a woman had been devoured by a tree. His letter
said that the Mkodos of Madagascar lived in caves ,were small in stature
and sacrificed their fellow tribes people to the tree. The full text of his letter is reproduced in Searching for Hidden Animals by Roy P Mackal (1983 Cadogan Books London).Lache called
the tree “Crinoida”. He described it as a truncated cone with right
hooked or horned leaves That hung to the ground like hinged doors.The
tree had a receptacle which contained a clear sweet treacly liquid and
from this hung tendrils. Lache said he had witnessed the Mkodos take a
woman to the tree,where she drank the liquid and the tree surrounded her
with its tendrils and ate her.Ten days later all that remained was her
skull.
The account was published in
newspapers and magazines along with lurid illustrations and was
purportedly published in a scientific journal. I could find records of
the other articles but not a scientific journal.
Chase Salmon Osborn of the USA travelled all over Madagascar
after reading these accounts to look for the tree. He published a book
about his travels in 1924.He did not find the tree but heard lots of
folktales he said about it from both indigenous peoples and
missionaries.
I think that the man eating
tree is more fantasy than fact .The strangest thing I find about it is
that the tree contains(when you read the account) so many elements of other
carnivorous smaller plants which seems unlikely. You can understand it
having two but not so many. Surely that would be evolution gone wild?
Why would it need the receptacle element and tendrils and leaves? If the
receptacle is on top of the tree where creatures would
fall in, why would it also need the leaves? We do have lots of smaller
plants such as pitcher plants. Venus fly trap, sticky sundew that
attract and digest insects and more recently a larger plant was
discovered that could digest a rat, but a plant that could digest a
human would have to be very large and surely would be seen by many
people? Sadly I think this is one we confine to old Tarzan films ,more
myth than reality.
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