| Author: Peter Del Bosque
Founder of Socialeaf, Peter's bio can be found by clicking on this Google+ link.
The beautiful but deadly pitcher plant is an evolutionary marvel to the plant world. Living in harsh conditions with inadequate nutrients, the pitcher plant and other types of carnivorous plant species have been undeniably successful at harnessing valuable nutrients through, let’s just say, unorthodox means.
There are several types of pitcher plants which are considered to be either ‘Old World’ or ‘New World’ Both of these types of pitcher plants can be found in South America , North America and southwestern Australia.
The ‘Old World’ Pitcher plants are generally found high in the rain forest canopies. These plants are vine like and at the end of their long tendrils have a pitcher trap.
The ‘New World’ pitcher plants can be found in South America and North America and are restricted to living on the ground on marshy terrain.
In either case, the pitcher plants are beautiful assassins that use a variety of techniques to lure unsuspecting insect victims to an early grave. Their techniques include sweet nectar, floral fragrance, and enticingly visual leaf patterns and colors.
Once the pitcher plant has lured its victim, how does it retain them? How can an immobile plant secure an insect with the drive to live? Well, it uses a variety of methods to both secure and confuse its prey to utter exhaustion until it dies.
More specifically, in a recent report from Science Magazine, the South American Pitcher plant know to the scientific community as Heliamphora nutans, contains a vast amount of microscopic hair-like structures pointing downward from the throat toward the belly of the pitcher plant. These tiny hair-like structures are said to become very slippery when wet. Now, with that said, the likelihood of this carpet of hair-like structures becoming wet in a swamp or rainforest has got to be astronomical. As you might guess, whenever insects such as flies or ants try to ascend down the throat of the pitcher plant, they quickly begin to slide down as soon as they enter this zone.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy but plant biologist Ulrike Bauer from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom along with his colleagues decided to find out how and why some ants are able to escape the pitcher plant trap and some aren’t.
Unfortunately the pitcher plant Heliamphora nutans is only found in a very remote, highly inaccessible, native location, in the highest plateaus of southeastern Venezuela. With this obstacle, Bauer and his team resorted to studying specimens of this specific pitcher plant from a collection at the London’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
During preliminary observations, they found that if the pitcher plant had a dry surface, only 29% of the ants fell in whereas if the pitcher plants surface was wet, 88% of ants fell to their doom. This observation allowed Bauer and his team to identify two factors at work. The first factor was the ant’s ability to hold on to the top portion of the pitcher and the second factor was the plants ability to become highly slippery when its surface becomes wet.
Bauer and his team decided to find out how effective the ants natural adhesive foot pads were in maintaining a foot hold on the pitcher plants leafy wall. In one trial, Bauer and his team carefully removed foot pads off of ants and observed their ability to adhere to the wall of a dry pitcher plant. The results found that the ants could not maintain their foothold on either a dry or wet pitcher plant despite what area of the plant they were on whether they were in the area with or without hairs. On the other hand, it was found that ants with their natural footpads intact had a greater chance of holding on to the hairless part of the wall of a dry pitcher plant but had little ability to adhere to the wall with or without hair of a wet pitcher plant.
Undoubtedly the pitcher plant has successfully evolved the ability to undermine the ant’s ability to adhere to surfaces using its foot pads, but likewise, the ant has evolved the ability to counteract the pitcher plants sneaky trap under dry conditions.
Now, during this study, Bauer and his team wondered why the ants secondary gripping tool, it’s claws, were ineffective at rescuing the ants from their perilous fate. Well, it seems the pitcher plant’s hair-like structures help create an ungraspable surface where the claws are utterly useless at helping the ant climb back out.
In short, ants have two sets of gripping tools, (foot pads and claws) and, pitcher plants have two ways to counter these tools, (a slippery leaf surface and tiny ungraspable hairs pointing downward into ‘the belly of the beast.’
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