Sundews look gorgeous up close. Each leaf is covered in dozens of red tentacles, and every tentacle is tipped with a sparkling bead of clear liquid that looks like dew. The catch - literally - is that those beads are super-sticky glue laced with digestive juices.
When an insect lands on a sundew, the glue holds it instantly. The more it struggles, the more tentacles it brushes against and the worse it gets stuck. Slowly, over minutes to hours, the surrounding tentacles bend inward and the whole leaf may even fold up around the prey to start digestion.
Sundews live just about everywhere on Earth - bogs in Britain, fynbos in South Africa, swamps in Australia, mountain ridges in Brazil. There are more than 250 species, all sharing the same shiny, deadly strategy. They’re some of the most widespread carnivorous plants on the planet.
