Drawing on >125 years of subsequent research, this
review surveys recent progress in three areas of inquiry
that Darwin initiated in Insectivorous plants: (i) the tempo
and mode of carnivorous plant evolution; (ii) patterns and
processes of prey capture; and (iii) the energetic costs and
benefits of botanical carnivory. These three research fronts
are unified by stable phylogenetic placement of carnivorous
taxa, new data on gene evolution in carnivorous plants
(Jobson and Albert, 2002; Mu¨ ller et al., 2004), and the
refinement by Laakkonen et al. (2006) of the cost–benefit
model for the evolution of botanical carnivory originally
formulated by Givnish et al. (1984).