In the food chain,
plants are termed producers,
as they convert energy
from the sun into food.
Food for the primary consumers, the herbivores,
that only feed on plants as their source of energy.
And then, on the top of the food chain,
there are the carnivores, the secondary consumers,
that eat other animals to obtain their energy.
This feeding relationship seems
to be
the basic principle of life on earth.
Then the more surprising is it,
that one group of plants managed to evolve tools
that allowed them to break away, from the bottom of the food chain
and become carnivores themselves.
they are no longer the food of animals, instead animals became their food.
The most iconic of these carnivorous plants is probably the venus flytrap.
But why did they evolve like this? And how exactly
does their release mechanism work?
That's what we're going to find out in this episode of facts in motion.
The inner workings of the Venus Flytrap.
Hope you enjoy.
Most carnivorous plants live in swamps
and marshes, with soil so
waterlogged they are very poor in esential nutrients
like nitrogen and phosphorus.
So in order to survive in these harsh enviroments,
they evolved mechanisms that allowed them to
trap and digest insects and other small animals
that then provide these plants with the nutrients they
can't find in the ground.
There are many different kinds of carnivorous plants,
each with its own method of killing.
Pitfall traps use the simplest method.
A vertical tube that fills with water, and
drowns anything that falls into it,
which are sometimes even relatively large animals,
like rats and frogs.
Flypaper traps utilize sticky mucus,
to catch insects that come into contact with it.
And then there are snap traps, the most advanced
of all carnivorous plants. Today,
there are only two species of snap traps,
the venus flytrap and the waterwheel plant.
Basically a venus flytrap that grows underwater
where it captures small aquatic vertabrates
and tiny fish.
In the wild, the venus flytrap only lives
in a few small patches of wet pine forest in
South Carolina, in the United States.
The plant itself is relatively small, with
with only four-seven leaves growing outwards
from a single stem.
Each leaf blade consists of two ridges;
the stem, which is sharp and pointy,
and the leaf, which is shaped like a pair of lobes.
that form the crown (?)
Each with a set of spines along it
Within the trap, six fine hairs
three on each side, called echo strips. (?)
A closer study of these plants shows they evolved
from an ancestral lineage that utilized microbes. (?)
The evolution of a mechanism that can completely
trap in the prey