Carnivorous plants are definitely the bad boys of botany (in a good way).

Volume 190 Issue 1 of Plant Physiology, published back in September 2022, devotes a significant amount of time to carnivorous plants and detailing their many systems.

Here’s a succinct tidbit from the article that describes the main difference between animal and carnivorous plant digestive systems:

Although trap leaves share many functions with animal digestive tracts, there are striking differences in their spatial arrangements (Figure 1). Most vertebrate digestive tracts are divided into functionally specialized organs such as the mouth, stomach, and intestines, where food is digested and absorbed in distinct compartments (Hedrich, 2015). In carnivorous plants, however, the prey does not travel through a digestive tract but instead remains in the same organ where it was captured for subsequent digestion and absorption