High in China's mountains, a flower traps and digests insects for nitrogen yet spares the flies that pollinate it. Darwin guessed it in 1875. It fits none of our tidy categories.
Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and stretches her wings toward the south?
Job 39:26
Scientists in China have confirmed that a small yellow flower in the Hengduan Mountains eats insects. Saxifraga candelabrum grows in rock too poor to feed it, so it feeds itself. Its stems carry sticky hairs that first evolved to fend off animals that would graze it. Those same hairs now trap small gnats, which the plant digests with an enzyme and draws in as nitrogen, most of all into its flowers.
The strange part is what it lets go. The larger flies that carry its pollen are left free. A plant that hunts still protects the insects it needs. Darwin guessed in 1875 that some saxifrage might be carnivorous, but he could not prove it digested its catch. Enzymes, isotopes, and genes have now closed the case.
A flower is meant to be the gentle thing in the picture. This one hunts, and it spares, and it does both without apology. It sits in no box we keep.
Job wanted his suffering to add up. He asked God for an accounting and got a tour of the wild instead: the lion crouched over its kill, the wild ox that will never pull a plow, the hawk that hunts by an instinct no one taught it. None of these creatures fits a ledger. None was made to.
We do what Job did. We sort the world into gentle and fierce, safe and dangerous, and we trust the parts that stay where we put them. The whirlwind is God refusing to hand over that tidy world. The flower will not be smaller than it is. The harder question is why we still need creation to be tame.
Sources
Identification of carnivory in the flowering plant Saxifraga via multidisciplinary evidence
Nature Communications
Newly Discovered Carnivorous Plant Is as Deceptive as It Is Deadly
Scientific American
Darwin proved right about gnat-trapping carnivorous plant
New Scientist
Darwin proposed that a type of plant was carnivorous. Scientists finally proved him right
CNN