What biological explanation that allow plants like the Venus flytrap to digest insects?
In: Biology
If you are looking for a ‘how did this behavior evolve’, you are going to run into a few issues.
One is that historical ‘records’ of plants can be harder than animal fossil records for tracing evolution.
Another is that you are going to get a lot of ‘speculative’ answers that wave their hands and say “this might be a mechanism for it?”
The evolutionary advantage is somewhat clear, for example insects have nutrients so plants that can trap and digest insects will be able to survive with worse soil conditions, outcompeting plants without that trait. In some sense that is a good ‘why’ answer.
As for ‘how’, it is a cool area we are still looking at. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-venus-flytraps-evolved-their-taste-meat
You can think of a few evolutionary steps that might be involved, but it will be conjecture. AKA
– a plant species has many crawling insects die either on it or in the soil under it. Ones which have a mutation that makes their leaves act more like roots and try to ‘digest’ nutrients on their surface such as nitrogen does much better.
– A plant which has a mutation to produce a substance that harms insects prevents pests to some degree.
– If you have both, a faster and faster way to break down insects might be advantageous so you don’t lose the nutrients to rain or other insects.
– A plant which can move its leaves quickly is able to repel insects based on movement or rotate to face the sun more efficiently.
– trap designs might be efficient in attracting insects for pollen or reproductive reasons (such as insects collecting and spreading pollen when funnelled to it). But a design which then traps the insects might accidently be even better for survival when there are multiple ways of reproducing and it already has a weird way of ‘digesting’ insects.
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