Magnification / Fly caught from a blow to a carnivorous dewy plant.
Cathy Kiefer GT
Towards the end of the 19th century, horror stories about killer plants began to appear everywhere. Terrible tentacles pulsate the trees and devour reckless travelers to distant lands. Crazy craftsmen grew wild dew and pitcher plants on raw steak while their predators turned and ate them as well.
The young Arthur Conan Doyle clung to the flag in threads depicting everyone’s favorite predator, the flytrap Venus. Drawing on entirely new botanical discoveries, he accurately describes two-part traps, how they catch insects and how diligently they absorb their prey. But even his rockets were incredibly large, big enough to bury and engulf a man. Carnivorous and man-eating plants have a moment, and you can thank Charles Darwin for that.
Until the days of Darwin, most people refused to believe that plants ate animals. This was against the natural order of things. mobile animals eat; The plants were food and could not move – if they were killed, it should be only in self-defense or accidentally. Darwin spent 16 years conducting rigorous experiments that proved otherwise. He showed that the leaves of some plants have 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 insect-eating plants detailing everything he discovered. In 1880, he published another book that shattered the myth, The Power of Motion in Plants. The realization that plants can move as well as kill has inspired not only a very popular genre of horror stories, but also generations of biologists who want to understand plants with unexpected habits.
Today, predators are going through another big moment when researchers are beginning to get answers to one of the great unsolved mysteries of botany: How did flowering plants with moderate behavior become deadly predators?
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land and sea em>. ” src = ”width =” 300 ″ height = ”455 ″ srcset =” 2x ”/> Zoom / Tales of killer plants were popular in the late 19th century. In 1887, the American author James William Boyle described the fictional man-eating tree Ya-te-veo (I See You) in his book Land and Sea.
JW Boyle
Following Darwin’s discoveries, botanists, ecologists, entomologists, physiologists and molecular biologists have studied every aspect of these plants by drowning in liquid-filled jugs, immobilizing them with sticky flytrap leaves or trapping them in snap traps and suction traps. under water. They describe in detail what and how they capture plants – as well as some of the benefits and costs of their exotic lifestyle.
Recent advances in molecular science have helped researchers understand the basic mechanisms underlying the carnivorous lifestyle: How, for example, a fly trap settles so quickly and how it becomes a “stomach” for insect sap and then into the gut “To suck up the remnants of his booty. But the big question remains: how has evolution given these diets the means to eat meat?
The fossils give almost no evidence. There are too few and fossils cannot reveal molecular details that could lead to an explanation, says the biophysicist. Rainer Heydrich of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who studied the origins of meat in 2021. Annual Review of Plant Biology. Innovations in DNA sequencing technology now mean that researchers can tackle the issue in a different way by searching for genes associated with carnivores, determining when and where those genes are involved, and tracing their origins.
There is no evidence that carnivores have acquired any of their wild habits by stealing genes from their animal victims, Hedrich said, although genes are sometimes passed from one species to another. Instead, numerous recent discoveries point to the co-optation and reuse of existing genes with ancient functions ubiquitous among flowering plants.
“Evolution is vile and flexible. It leverages existing tools. ”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 sunflowers and other carnivorous plants in the greenhouse of his Down House, home in Kent. He experimented for 16 years before publishing his groundbreaking book, Insect-Eating Plants.
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