HERB-101 Lesson 4

But that would only take up one plant, and training a dog to follow you takes years? Isn't that almost as inefficient as it is inhumane? Why not simply place a bird in a cage near the mandrake and then pull it up by magic from a safe distance? 

What makes Devil's Snare a magical plant? It just grows really quickly as far as I can tell. There are non-magical plants that do that. There are also non-magical carnivorous plants. Why hide its existence from muggles? They've seen weirder. And no sane muggle would approach it if they knew what it was.

Homework

A rather complicated query on the mandrake: If the scream of the mandrake can only cause one death, would it not most often kill flies, worms, or bacteria? Now, a possible answer is that the range of hearing of a fly is different, but then, so is a dog's range. Perhaps it is the complexity of the creature, or its intelligence. Also, the screams of a juvenile mandrake are known to only stun- is there a limit to the number of creatures it can do that to, and if not, then why would it have evolved the greater-powered one? Also, a mandrake only starts screaming if its mouth is out of the soil. Would that not leave it vulnerable to animals that burrow? Perhaps it simply kicks them. 

Also, having some knowledge of a normal plant's anatomy, I know that the mandrake is clearly not made the same way most plants are. Plants don't have muscles - in fact, they have rigid cell walls. On the assumption that the mandrake is in fact a plant and not an animal, you could consider it a very advanced form of the same things that allow carnivorous plants to move, but unlike, for example, devil's snare, a mandrake is not growing to cover things. Granted, perhaps it is a magical process, but surely we should study the process that animates them.

In class, you showed us infant mandrakes- how large to they become when fully grown? They seemed approximately human size as babies, are they six feet long underground as adults?

Now the most obvious protective necessity for a mandrake is earmuffs. They do also bite, so good protective gloves are probably needed as well.