More carnivorous plants!

A few minutes ago, while washing my dishes, I caught the very end of a radio interview on As It Happens*, the daily news magazine from CBC. I didn't catch the species or genus they were talking about until after the interview, when one of the hosts commented that she was going to go have some fries and ketchup to reassert her dominant position on the food chain.

Nightshades! The discovery must be about nightshades!

Dishes be damned. I pulled off my rubber gloves and rushed over to my computer to do a Google news search on "nightshade carnivorous." The search brought up only one result, which was a bit of a disappointment -- hello, global media, this is world-changing news! Yes, yes, I know Copenhagen is interesting, but those bigwigs aren't actually planning to agree to any changes in their policies just yet, so can't you free up at least one reporter per venue to report on breakthroughs in botany?

Well, maybe there will be more news results tomorrow.

To be fair, a search of "potato carnivorous" brought up seven results, but don't get too excited yet. Three of these were just blog rehashes of a story in the Independent, which also showed up in the results. The remaining three were:

• The Daily Mail story I found by Googling "nightshade carnivorous"
• A press release
• A story from The Telegraph

Note that all the newspaper coverage is from the United Kingdom. If this story makes it to the States, how much do you want to bet that newspapers will simply rehash those three articles (with an exception, perhaps, for The New York Times, which - bastion of secular liberalism that it is** - actually devotes an entire weekly section to science)?

*Spoiler Warning: If you listen to this show and have always imagined the hosts to look like an older version of Nurse Hathaway, as I have, linking to this Web site will present a challenge to the theater in your mind. A photo of Carol Ott and Barbara Budd is fetured prominently on the intro page.

**Yes, insert snicker here.