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How the flytrap snaps its prey

PlantAKiss

Moderator Schmoderator Fluorescent fluorite, Engl
Hi all
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Anyone see this? My father emailed it to me.
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Yahoo! News Thu, Jan 27, 2005
Environment & Nature
Related News Stories - Science - AFP

Wed Jan 26, 2:31 PM ET Science - AFP

How the Venus flytrap snaps up its prey

PARIS (AFP) - American and French scientists believed they have explained how one of nature's marvels, the Venus flytrap, snaps shut to snare its victims.

The plant -- described by Charles Darwin as "one of the most wonderful in the world" -- is able to enclose a fly within its clamshell-shaped leaves in just 100 milliseconds, faster than the eye can blink.

Scientists have long wondered how the flytrap (Latin name Dionaea muscipula) is able to do this spectacular feat, given that it does not have the nerves and muscles of fast-moving animals.

The answer, according to a study published on Thursday, is tensile strength.

The plant first bends back its rubbery leaves so that they are convex-shaped, rather like half a tennis ball that has been flipped inside-out.

To close the trap, the plant releases the tensed-up energy.

The leaves instantly flip from convex to concave -- as if the half tennis ball has suddenly popped back to its normal shape. Their edges snap together and the insect is trapped within.

"Closure is characterized by the slow storage of elastic energy followed by its release," say the authors, led by Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, an Indian-born professor of applied mathematics and evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

The researchers were able to model the change in geometry by putting microscopic dots of ultraviolet fluorescent paint on the external surface of the leaves.

They then filmed the closure under ultraviolet light, using a high-speed video at 400 frames per second, which showed the leaves' sudden shift from convex to concave when the trap closed.

Previous work has already established that the flytrap lures the insect with a smell exuded from the inner surface of the leaf. When the fly walks on the surface, this activates a hair trigger and causes closure.

Still to be explained is the phase in between -- exactly how the signal is transmitted from the hair trigger to the closure mechanism in such an astonishingly fast time.

The study appears in Nature, the weekly British science journal.

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Cool.
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very interesting.
 
been there done that. I do not think that this is new to science
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Especially that rendition.
 
This has been a topic on several forums for the last two days. I find it interesting but now I want to know why, once the trap has snapped shut, it continues to close and seal, then secret digestive enzymes?
 
I believe the authors simply explained the meaning behind the convex/concave shape of the leaves. The authors focus on how the trap closes so quickly after it's been stimulated. The most frequent explanations are an irreversible acid induced wall loosening and a rapid loss of turgor pressure in certian 'motor cells'--the authors state that these do not explain rapid closure. They claim (through their study) that the shape of the leaf itself lends a 'passive elastic component' to the mechanism, i.e. it's the shape of the leaf that allows the rapid closure, not biochemical 'muscle' power.

Personally, I find the paper a hard read--not much biology but a lot of mechanics!
 
Well the impression I got was that there have been some studies and many theories, but this is the first time the trap closure was studied in this particular method where they could get a good look at the trap closure step by step. If this was already accepted information I doubt the Americans and French would have wasted their time doing this study nor would any magazine have wasted space publishing their article.

Now all they need to do is figure out how the signal gets from the hairs to the trap mechanism to tell it to close.
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Geez, THAT would be awesome to study--the molecular biology of the venus flytrap!
 
  • #10
Finally puts an end to that discussion. Among the collection of theories and what people though, rapid cell division was the dumbest most laughable theory i ever heard regarding the trap mechanism of a VFT...

I hope they'll rest their case now.
 
  • #11
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Amateur_Expert @ Feb. 03 2005,8:13)]Finally puts an end to that discussion. Among the collection of theories and what people though, rapid cell division was the dumbest most laughable theory i ever heard regarding the trap mechanism of a VFT...

I hope they'll rest their case now.
Don't get your hopes up that it will happen soon. Nothing harder for a person to give up than a long held believe. Especially if they have had to defend that believe against the riddicule of others.
 
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