SCHOLARS MARVEL AT CARNIVOROUS PLANT COLLECTION.

Byline: Carol Masciola The Orange County Register

The big bug is half-digested, yellowish. It is gross.

Leo Song Jr. has pried open the jaws of his Venus' flytrap to see it.

``Whoa. A cricket,'' he says in awe.

After 25 years as curator of the carnivorous-plant collection at California State University, Fullerton, Song still gets a thrill watching his 500 plants catch, subdue and eat bugs.

``Some of them I get pretty attached to,'' said Song, 55, who grew his first carnivore in his boyhood garden.

During his years at the university, Song has expanded and diversified the collection, which is held in high esteem by carnivorous-plant scholars. He has added plants from Borneo and Australia, and plants from islands off the Horn of Africa. The collection includes about 100 new meat-eating hybrids that Song himself created.

There's hardly any space left for more plants.

What is needed now is organization.

So Song has devised a plan hat blends botany with library science in a new way: He wants to turn his carnivorous-plant collection into a carnivorous-plant library.

Each plant would be assigned a call number, and the plant's history, photo and location would be loaded into a database where anyone could retrieve it.

``It makes a lot of sense, and I think it's very innovative,'' said Debra Hansen, associate director of the library and information science program at the university. ``Someone looking for a certain type of plant could come in and search the database by these different characteristics, call up the plant and go get it like you would get a book off the shelf.''

Song is applying for a $5,000 university grant to begin the library of plants. A library intern would work on the project. Song hopes to put the library on the World Wide Web, where everybody could see his renowned collection.

``As far as the nepenthes (pitcher plants), he has one of the best mature collections. He has most of the choice rare ones,'' said Tim Metcalf, carnivorous plant grower and lecturer at the University of California, Davis. ``There's been no way to get them out of Borneo or Indonesia or any of those countries for the past 10 years.''

Song's passion for carnivorous plants began when he was a youngster in Los Angeles. He saw a Venus' flytrap in a catalog and ordered it. It didn't come with any instructions, so he just planted it in the garden. His avocation and vocation took root.

Since then, he has augmented his collection by trading seeds, plants and clippings with other plant lovers and universities.

Some of the most prized and cruel plants in Song's collection are the tropical pitcher plants, also known as monkey's drinking cups.

The plants grow big, hollow structures that look like hairy clog-style shoes and collect rainwater. Insects fall in, drown, and the plants digest them.

Some of the drinking cups have two fangs poised above them. Song thinks that in the wild, small mammals stick their furry heads into the cups to drink, but when they try to withdraw, the fangs sink into the back of their necks and trap them. The plant slowly digests the animal's head, leaving the rest to fall onto the ground in a dead heap.

At least, that's his theory.

``It's very sinister,'' Song said. ``I have yet to see photographic proof.''

Song also has about 200 sarracenia plants, a lovely but lethal piece of flora commonly known as the North American pitcher plant. It is native to the Carolinas.

``If you look in, you can see all the bloated ant bodies,'' Song said.

The pitcher plant shoots out of the ground like a slender, hollow tube open at the top.

The plant secretes a nectar that lures the hapless ant. It crawls upward, upward, toward the opening. The nectar is a mild narcotic, and the ant becomes drunk and careless and falls into the opening. It tries to crawl back out, but the inside of the tube is covered with little hairs that point downward, hindering the ant's progress.

A strong ant might get all the way up to the rim, within sight of freedom, only to find that the surface is coated with wax that renders the ant's adhesive foot pads useless. The doomed ant falls to the bottom, and the plant's digestive juices go to work.

``If we found everything we could about plants, we could probably develop one that would eat a person. But that's far in the future,'' Song said.

The collection also contains:

Butterworts - tiny bugs get glued to the pretty but sticky leaves.

Bladderworts - tiny bugs get sucked into a trapdoor on the plant, which shuts behind them.

Waterwheels - they have tiny traps like those of a Venus' flytrap.

Sundews - the flytrap's family, they have small, bristly tentacles. Each bristle has a teensy drop of clear, sticky mucous at the tip. The bugs land, get stuck, get slowly digested.

Song moved some plants into the Fullerton Arboretum bog, where they can be viewed by the public. It is the only man-made outdoor bog of carnivorous plants in Southern California.

His most precious treasures are inside the university greenhouses, and he gives them meticulous care.