Along with dozens of questions about the lifecycles of carnivorous plants, their digestive processes, and where to acquire them, Rice poses one particularly provocative question: "Can Venus flytraps digest human flesh?"
Being a scientist, Rice conducted an experiment to find out. At the time, he was suffering from athlete's foot that resulted in chunks of his skin peeling off. It was then he thought of his Venus flytraps.
[He figured the outcome would be unlikely because surely the skin would be able to resist the puny enzymes from the plant. And he took the chance to prove it].
For a start, he carefully selected four "sizable" chunks of skin. Then he fed them to four different Venus flytraps (#1: typical plant; #2: 'Justina Davis'; #3: 'Dentate Traps'; #4: 'Red Piranha').
Just in case the plants would not like the skin or would not go through the normal digestion process, he included small earwigs with the skin-chunk sacrifices for plants #2 and #3.
A quick recap summary. He fed diseased human tissue to his plants. After a week, the traps opened. And he had predicted the skin chunks would be relatively inert and unaffected. After all, these were hard, crusty chunks of skin from the sole of his diseased feet.
But the skin chunks were almost completely digested. Worse, what was left no longer had much cohesion, but was gooey and slimy, like little boogers. Uck! Uck! And there was the weird hue shift to bacon color?? Uck! Uck!
Check out the images from his experiment:
The "A" pictures are for before digestion, the "B" pictures are for after digestion.
So he reckons that if you were to get caught by a sufficiently large Venus flytrap, your skin would easily be digested, and the plant would be able to proceed to your other internal tissues! This is gross alright!
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