As a refined Victorian gentleman, Charles Darwin naturally gravitated toward the macabre, and few things fascinated him like those floral flouters of the conventional food chain: carnivorous plants. He experimented with them and wrote a major treatise about them. He called the Venus flytrap, with its elaborate hair-trigger snap trap and its lethal brew of digestive juices, “one of the most wonderful plants in the world.”

He compared the glistening and gothically tentacled sundew plant, or Drosera, to a “most sagacious animal” and said, “I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death.” To which a sagacious sundew might well have replied, Thanks, but I’ll take a damselfly instead.

As a bounty of new research reveals, biologists are still sticking up for carnivorous plants, and still unearthing surprising details about the anatomy, evolution, biochemistry and hunting tactics of what Rainer Hedrich of the University of Würzburg calls “the green flesh-eaters.”

One group lately has determined that a pitcher plant in Borneo supplements its insectivorous diet with regular helpings of bat guano, attracting the bats to roost — and void — in its slender goblet of a modified leaf by tuning its shape to precisely match the bats’ echolocating calls.