Drosera

Drosera, commonly known as the sundews, is one of the largest genera of carnivorous plants, comprising at least 194 species in the family Droseraceae, native to every continent except Antarctica and varying enormously in size and growth form. Sundews capture prey using stalked, mucilage-tipped glands covering their leaf surfaces, which trap and slowly digest insects to supplement the poor mineral nutrition of the acidic, boggy soils in which most species grow. Charles Darwin conducted much of the earliest scientific research on carnivorous plants using Drosera, running an extensive series of experiments on the common sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, that provided the first rigorous confirmation of true carnivory in plants; in an 1860 letter he wrote that he cared more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world.