Carnivorous plants

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Anyone know anything about keeping carnivorous plants? Specifially the genus Nepenthes? I have somewhat too frequent incursions of flies of varous sizes and levels of annoying, and I'm feeling spiteful. The places that sell them online say they are "best kept in a terrarium" for the sake of air humidity. But does that mean they'll die or barely get by outside of one, or that they just won't thrive as much?

All I know about them is that they're not for casual botanists. You'll need to do a ton of research on what do to because they're a bastard to grow and cultivate and keep alive.

As above, carnivorous plants occupy quite specific niches, if you can't replicate their natural conditions it's unlikely they will survive. I kept venus fly traps for a while, generally high maintenance and they couldn't feed themselves either.

Thanks for your input, guys. It's roughly as I suspected.

Dammit, how is a guy going to realize the dream of being a small-scale supervillain, if I can't even have a ravenous miniature plant-monster?

Get a spider and put a plant costume on it?

I occasionally see Venus fly traps for sale and have felt tempted to buy one, but I really stink at caring for plants. They seem to hate me for some reason and wilt by my presence. Some people think plants can read our minds, I don't know about that but *any*one who claims to have ESP would need therapy after reading mine.

Also I have two carnivorous pets, my cats, who might like to add a nice salad to their diet, and I don't get many flies or bugs in my home anyway. Although I did have a real problem with fruit flies in the winter from keeping a small green bin indoors.

Actually there was one plant I've successfully grown, and that was cat grass. It required hardly any care at all, just water and put next to a window. And naturally when it was grown, my cats wouldn't touch it.

I've never kept them but always thought they were cool.

I knew some people once years ago who had venus flytraps. It depends on your climate: they would need a hothouse in most conditions and they lived in the Western Cape pf South Africa, a temperate Mediterranean climate, and kept them in a hothouse as far as I recall. Quite small plants really, and I liked them.

I bought two small but healthy-looking Nepenthes Alata today. Supposedly, highland varieties like these should be fine without terrariums, if given plenty of water and sunlight. This should prove interesting

Cats, with frikkin' lasers on their heads.

I like your thinking. However:



I don't think this will make anyone tremble before me.

See, now that's just mean and will only frustrate the cat. Why? Because a red diode laser doesn't even have enough power to warm a raisin. I'm talking something more along these lines:

Now, there's a "Want!"-inducing contraption.