Theodora Blackthorn

Carnivorous Garden Safety Officer

Keeping visitors safe in carnivorous plant gardens. The plants are not aggressive. But they are opportunistic.

Carnivorous plants are not dangerous to humans. I want to be very clear about that. A Venus flytrap cannot eat a person. A sundew cannot restrain an adult. A pitcher plant is not going to swallow anyone's child. However. When you scale carnivorous plants to garden size — when the Venus flytraps are 3 meters tall and the pitcher plants hold 200 liters of digestive fluid — the safety calculus changes. At Venus Industries, our display gardens feature genetically enhanced carnivorous plants at 10-50x normal scale. They're spectacular. They're educational. And they require a full-time safety officer, which is me. My safety protocols include: minimum 2-meter visitor distance from all trapping mechanisms, mandatory closed-toe shoes (the sundew pad is sticky enough to remove a sandal), no perfume (the pitcher plants respond to fragrance), and absolutely no running. Running triggers the snap reflex in the large flytraps. They can't actually catch a human. But the sound of a 3-meter flytrap closing at speed is enough to cause cardiac events in elderly visitors. We've had four. I've maintained a perfect safety record for 5 years. Zero injuries. Zero ingestions. One near-miss involving a photographer who leaned into a pitcher plant for 'the perfect shot.' The shot was not worth it. I told her. She didn't listen. She was fine. The camera was not.