Illuminating The Inner Workings Of A Venus Flytrap





12 thoughts on “Illuminating The Inner Workings Of A Venus Flytrap

  1. The depth and sophistication of plant interactions with their environment is largely underestimated.

    Take for example the way plants modulate the electric fields around their flowers to signal bees and other pollinator insects if a flower has been already visited and does not contain nectar anymore, to avoid deceiving them (and getting less chances of being pollinated).

    this happens almost in real-time, while flowers provide a long-distance visual signal advertising for nectar, the electric field modulation provide individual signalling about the level of nectar in each flower.

    And there are many many examples like that. Plant are just like animals that can´t move (al least most of them) and live at a very different pace :)

    1. Plants can also signal surrounding plants of the same species when they are damaged, and the warned plants will make physical changes to help protect themselves. Maybe plants are even intelligent but just talk really, really slowly. :)

        1. Oh yea I know, when someone says plants “talk” to one another your first thought it “What? How? Tell me more.” So this reference is from something half remembered I say in a documentary years ago so the best reference I can give you is the documentary I think I saw it in, here is the link.

          Good luck getting it though, it’s only available in Canada I think so you might need to use a VPN.

  2. Why didn’t they just use PET scanner and radioactive calcium? But the idea of a fast electrical network in the flytrap is neat, convergent evolution of a “nervous” system. And I, for one, welcome our new Triffid overlords.

  3. Seems years ago I read a Scientific American article about the 6 triggers and the logic gate of 3 or more to activate in a short time frame. Just not the chemistry in this case.

Leave a Reply

