Category: Uncategorized

OLD AND DIVERSE. "Today we recognize at least 583 species of carnivorous plants in 20 genera, 12 families, and 5 orders of flowering plants. Based on DNA sequence phylogenies, these species represent at least nine independent origins of the carnivorous habit per se, and at least six independent origins of pitfall traps, five of sticky traps, two of snap traps, and one of lobster-pot traps...these origins of carnivory appear to have occurred between roughly 8 and 72 million years ago (Mya)." https://lnkd.in/eAvpP47 View in LinkedIn

ADAPTIVE STRATEGY. "Carnivorous plants live in nutrient-poor soils and have circumvented this shortage of resources by deriving most of their nutrients from the digestion of arthropods captured through a variety of trapping mechanisms." https://lnkd.in/eufMNnU View in LinkedIn

"CARNIVORY has evolved independently at least six times in five angiosperm orders. In spite of these independent origins, there is a remarkable morphological convergence of carnivorous plant traps and physiological convergence of mechanisms for digesting and assimilating prey." https://lnkd.in/e2_et_n View in LinkedIn

PREDATORY PLANTS. "Quite a few reasons for calling carnivores ‘the most wonderful plants in the world’. We are accustomed to thinking of plants as being immobile and harmless, and this may be a reason for our fascination with carnivorous plants and especially about those that move while trapping." https://lnkd.in/eyitYYX View in LinkedIn

TIPPITY TWITCHET, an old name for the seductive Venus Flytrap, which can live for 20-30 years, and lives in a diet of insects. https://lnkd.in/efpR2N7 View in LinkedIn

DARWIN'S BOOK. "Charles Darwin laid the foundation for modern research on carnivorous plants. In Insectivorous plants, Darwin (1875) applied his then relatively new conception of homology to illustrate evolutionary and functional convergence across seemingly unrelated taxa." https://lnkd.in/e2_et_n View in LinkedIn

SUNDEW OBSESSION. "At the present moment, I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world." (Darwin 1860, in a letter to Charles Lyell, Page 492 of the 1911 edition of The life and letters of Charles Darwin, edited by F. Darwin). https://lnkd.in/eGYndS2 View in LinkedIn

COUNTERING STICKY FEET. "Experimental data showed that none of the flies was able to walk across any of the waxy surfaces and only a few were able to take off from those surfaces. Both the absence of sites for claw anchorage, especially in N. ventrata, and the wax itself were shown to contribute to the trapping ability of the plants. We hypothesize that wax interacts with adhesive fluids secreted by the fly pad and thereby prevents the tenent setae from functioning effectively." https://lnkd.in/eBJsvKZ View in LinkedIn

MOST WONDERFUL. "This plant, commonly called Venus’ fly-trap, from the rapidity and force of its movements, is one of the most wonderful in the world." (C. Darwin, Insectivorous plants, 1898, p. 231). https://lnkd.in/eGEAMQ5 View in LinkedIn

MODULATED MECHANISMS. "Species without wax crystals had wider peristomes with a longer inward slope. Ancestral state reconstructions identified wax crystal layers and narrow, symmetrical peristomes as ancestral, indicating that wax crystals have been reduced or lost multiple times independently." https://lnkd.in/eRvVEeB View in LinkedIn