The Venus flytrap is perhaps one of the best-known and most impressive plants. Its leaves are able to close in order to catch insects that come too close, which will serve as food. This characteristic is even more impressive if we take into account that it is capable of achieving this movement without obtaining solar energy.
The plant is a harmless rosette and the blades of its leaves end in distinctive traps formed by very jagged edges. The exterior of the traps usually has a green color, while the interiors have a red pigment that varies depending on the age. On the edge of each lobe there are 14 to 20 teeth pointing radially from the trap sheet. The stem of the flower of the Venus Flytrap is devoid of leaves and can reach up to 30 cm in height, while the capsule of the seeds is flat and contain only one seed. In the season, you can see how their small white flowers are born with faint green veins and bright black.
As if it were a whim of nature, one day some plants began a path that would end up turning them into carnivorous. Yes, yes, in plant beings that feed on insects and protozoa.
No other type of plants does that, so it is very interesting to know the origin of the Venus flytrap. And now, finally, we can know.
In 2010, the European Union financed the Carnivorom project with 2.5 million euros, which during 2016 successfully completed one of its objectives, which were to find the origins of carnivorism in the plant we know by name of Venus flytrap and that botanists call Dionaea muscipula. Thus, they have been able to find out that this strange and, at the same time, attractive plant began its evolution about 40 million years ago from an ancestor that was already carnivorous.
Its predecessor had flypaper-like leaves, and developed at least six times independently until the traps it has today were useful enough to attract and hunt its prey, according to German biophysicist Rainer Hedrich of the University of Wurzburg, who has led the study.
Another really curious thing they discovered was that these plants are capable of keeping up to 60 hairs. As you have surely seen, in every trap of the Dionaea there are three hairs. When an insect touches one, nothing happens, the plant remembers it in case it is lucky; but when it touches the other two in a time frame, it closes automatically. Well, for this to happen, the chitin that is part of the structure of insects is key.
According to the study, Dionaea muscipula was reprogrammed to use chitin as a food signal, since for conventional plants chitin is a sign of danger, since there are many insects that eat leaves and stems.
What do you think of this discovery?
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