Zoom / Fly trapped on a carnivorous plant.
Cathy Keifer Getty
Towards the end of the 19th century, sinister tales of killer plants began to appear everywhere. Terrible tentative trees snatched and devoured reckless travelers to distant lands. Crazy professors grew monstrous dewdrops and pitchers on raw steak, while their predatory creatures turned and ate them as well.
Young Arthur Conan Doyle is closer to science in a yarn that includes everyone’s favorite carnivore, the Venus flytrap. Drawing on brand new botanical revelations, he accurately describes the two-bladed traps, how they caught insects and how diligently they assimilated their prey. But even his flycatchers were incredibly large, big enough to bury and devour a man. The meat-eating plants, the cannibals, had a moment, and you can thank Charles Darwin for that.
Until Darwin’s Day, most people refused to believe that plants ate animals. This was against the natural order of things. Mobile animals ate; the plants were food and could not move – if they killed, it must be only for self-defense or by accident. Darwin spent 16 years conducting thorough experiments that proved otherwise. He showed that the leaves of some plants have been transformed into ingenious structures that not only capture insects and other small creatures, but also absorb and absorb the nutrients released from their carcasses.
In 1875, Darwin published Insectivorous Plants detailing everything he discovered. In 1880, he published another myth-breaking book, The Power of Plant Movement. The realization that plants can move as well as kill has inspired not only an extremely popular horror story genre, but also generations of biologists who want to understand plants with such unlikely habits.
Today, carnivorous plants have another big moment when researchers are beginning to get answers to one of the great unsolved mysteries of botany: How did soft-flowering plants typically evolve into deadly carnivores?
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Zoom / Tales of killer plants were popular in the late 19th century. In 1887, the American author James William Buell described the fantastic man-eating tree Ya-te-veo (I See You) in his book Land and Sea.
JW Buel
Following Darwin’s discoveries, botanists, ecologists, entomologists, physiologists and molecular biologists have studied every aspect of these plants that drown prey in liquid-filled pitchers, immobilize them with sticky sheets of “leaf paper” or trap them underwater and underwater. suction traps. . They described in detail what plants catch and how – plus some of the benefits and costs of their bizarre lifestyle.
More recent advances in molecular science have helped researchers understand the key mechanisms underlying the carnivorous lifestyle: how the flycatcher snaps so fast, for example, and how it becomes a “stomach” releasing insect sap, and then ” intestine ”to absorb the remnants of its prey. But the big question remains: how has evolution provided these dietary independent people with the means to eat meat?
The fossils give almost no evidence. There are very few and fossils cannot reveal molecular details that could suggest an explanation, says biophysicist Rainer Hedrich of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who is studying the origins of carnivores in the 2021 Annual Review of Plant Biology. DNA sequencing now means that researchers can tackle the issue in other ways by searching for genes associated with carnivores, determining when and where those genes are involved, and tracing their origins.
There is no evidence that carnivorous plants have acquired any beastly habits by stealing genes from their animal victims, Hedrich said, although sometimes genes are passed from one species to another. Instead, numerous recent discoveries point to the sharing and redirection of existing genes that have age-old functions ubiquitous among flowering plants.
“Evolution is vile and flexible. It’s taking advantage of existing tools, “said Victor Albert, a plant genome biologist at the University of Buffalo. “In evolution, it’s easier to readjust something than to do something new.”
Zoom in / Charles Darwin grows dewdrops and other carnivorous plants in his greenhouse at Down House, his home in Kent. He experimented for 16 years before publishing his pioneering book, Insectivorous Plants.
Heritage images Getty
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