Plants which hunts

Venus flytraps are unable to seek out their insect prey in this manner. Once a love vine penetrates an inhabited gall, they suck all of the nutritious fluids out of the wasp larvae shortly before they emerge from their homes and into adult life.

This is why many researchers who have looked into galls have found mummified wasp corpses that had been drained of their vital fluids. Although the carnivorous nature of the love vine has been known to scientists for over a century, the first study exploring the relationship between these vines and their insect prey has only occurred recently. Since the carnivorous nature of love vines has been known to researchers for just a little more than a century, do you believe that other undiscovered insect-eating plants exist in nature?

They're mostly defenseless and when danger heads their way, there's no running from it. But some plants have broken away from the norm and gave skeptics something to chew on. Carnivorous plants turn the food chain on its head, preying on insects and small mammals. Growing in poor soil, they have developed various discreet traps for nourishment.

Some snap shut, others suck their victim's juices and a few secrete substances that stick to their target, conferring the kiss of death on them. The sundew Drosera makinoi a synonym of Drosera indica uses help from neighbouring sundews to pull in prey that would otherwise be too big to catch.

Tagawa and Watanabe found that almost half the time that a sundew caught something large, it had help from another sundew. Drosera makinoi grows by the town of Kawaminami, on the eastern shore of Kyushu Island, Japan. The leaves are covered in sticky glue droplets. When a plant catches an insect or other animal on the glue, they struggle, and this motion activates the leaves.

The leaves curl around the victim, trapping it further, and the plant releases digestive juices to pull in nutrients from its prey.

But if the prey is big enough, then it is possible to escape from one of these leaves. Kazuki Tagawa noticed that rather than finding their own patch to hunt, the sundews grew closely together. So closely that often a large animal would be trapped in multiple leaves from different plants. The genomes of the carnivorous plants Venus flytrap, spoon-leaved sundew and waterwheel from left are decoded.

All three belong to the sundew family. Nevertheless, they have each conquered different habitats and developed their own trapping mechanisms. In Dionaea and Aldrovanda, the ends of the leaves are transformed into folding traps. The sundew, on the other hand, attaches its prey to the leaf surface with sticky tentacles. The duplication of the entire genome has provided evolution with an ideal playing ground for developing new functions.

To their surprise, the researchers discovered that the plants do not need a particularly large number of genes for carnivory. Instead, the three species studied are actually among the most gene-poor plants known.