How Plants Became Meat Eaters

in borneo high up on mount kinabalu is the habitat of a large carnivore but it is no big cat or large reptile although it does have a mouth just as big nepenthes rajar is the largest species of carnivorous plant and it is so big that a drowned rat was once found inside its trap although this is the largest carnivorous plant there are many more species found all over the world and they have evolved into many different forms developing their own unique ways of catching prey but considering that plants are defined by their ability to make their own food how and why did these plants take such a different evolutionary pathway there are many different types of carnivorous plant that have very different methods of trapping their prey and many of them are not even related as carnivory in plants has evolved separately on different occasions even just pitcher plants are actually made up of multiple families of plants that have evolved their liquid-filled traps multiple times cephalotus follicularis is a pitcher plant found in australia and is more closely related to the star fruit than it is to any of the pitcher plants found in southeast asia among all of the plants that have different methods of catching their prey the evolutionary process of developing their traps may have been different but the reasons behind why they evolved the traps are the same although they are called carnivorous plants this isn't exactly correct because they aren't getting any energy from the insects they eat or doing this instead of photosynthesizing and they can still photosynthesize just like any other plant they actually digest animals for nutrients carnivorous plants are found growing in water clogged mossy or very acidic soil that is low in nutrients and have become carnivorous to supplement their poor diets growing in these nutrient desert environments comes with benefits as it is hard for other plants to grow in these areas and so the carnivorous plants have low competition and won't get overgrown and over time this has forced them to get their nutrients from other sources so they can survive and then reap the benefits unfortunately these wet bogey environments that forced carnivorous plants to evolve in the way that they did is also incredibly poor for preserving fossils and so the fossil record is not very good having said this there is a lot that can be deduced from dna studies and the structure of modern carnivorous plants all known carnivorous plants are angiosperms which are plants that have flowers that are known to have evolved about 135 million years ago so it is known that none of the currently living species can be any older than this plus it is known that nearly all of the traps on carnivorous plants were originally regular leafs that have been heavily modified to catch animals all plants are able to absorb nutrients through their leaves known as foliar feeding and carnivorous plants just build on this basic function it is thought that picture traps formed from a hairy leaf as just a standard hairy leaf is able to hold a small amount of water that small insects can sometimes drown inside of as the insect rots away and breaks apart the plant would be able to absorb the nutrients using foliar feeding provided this plant was in soil that had a low level of nutrients selective pressures would favor plants that had more concave leaves that were better are holding water in them until eventually the plant had some leaves that had completely rolled up into a cup once the plant has developed the insect killing and catching trap and once nutrient-starved plants began to benefit from having the trap certain adaptations that make the prey trapping more successful would be selected for like a lure to increase the chances of the insects stumbling into the trap and digestive enzymes to speed up the process of gathering the nutrients from the plant's victims but it is known that plants can survive in this intermediate stage where they have to rely on chance to get their food because there are plants that still live like this proto-carnivorous plants rely on getting their nutrients from other sources than soil like carnivorous plants but lack any of these advanced features one of the best examples of proto-carnivorous plants are the bromeliads which is the family that contains pineapples many species in this family catch a water in their crown of leaves that sometimes have whole ecosystems of animals living inside them like frogs and insects the animals that live in bromeliads bring nutrients to the plants in their droppings and when they die but there are at least two species of this group that are carnivorous and will break down any prey that falls inside of them and it is known that they descended from the other members of the family showing they would have gone through a proto-carnivorous stage before becoming completely carnivorous and it is likely that most carnivorous plants would have gone through a stage like this before becoming truly carnivorous when carnivorous plants became more specialized for capturing and killing the features that helped meat eating plants catch and digest their food were often co-opted from common features among plants some carnivorous plants use nectar and bright colors to trick pollinating insects into their traps but also the cocktail of chemicals that carnivorous plants use to break down and digest their victims are related to those that other flowering plants use to fend off pathogens for instance many species of plants use an enzyme that breaks down chitin this substance is found within the cell walls of fungus and so they use this in defense against fungal infections but australian pitchers and other carnivorous plants have repurposed this enzyme to digest insect exoskeletons which are also made of chitin another type of carnivorous plant that uses simple traps are the fly paper traps that use sticky leaves to catch their prey these plants also would have had a very similar evolutionary process as pitcher plants just instead of their leaves becoming more curved they got stickier and stickier the more each generation of plant benefited from the nutrients they were getting from the dead insects on their leaves there are some members of this group that just have a pretty regular looking leaf that has a sticky surface for catching insects while others are quite different from other plants like sun juice that are covered in sticky hairs surprisingly dna studies show that one of the most complicated and most famous carnivorous plant traps the snap traps actually descended from these simpler sticky leaf trapped plants venus fly traps are the most famous snap trap but there is another aquatic plant that catches its prey like this found in europe known as the water wheel venus flytraps are so highly modified it is a lot more difficult to see how they came from a regular non-carnivorous plant but actually the trap of a venus fly trap is analogous to the leaf of any other plant where the hinge of the trap is the vein of the leaf and the sides have folded up to create the shutters they have just been so heavily modified it is difficult to see anymore flypaper carnivorous plants will also fold up when they have trapped their prey to stop them from escaping they are just really slow and it is known that this was the beginning process behind the evolution of the highly specialized snap traps the advantage of a snap trap over a sticky surface is that the shutters protect the prey from being stolen by larger animals and due to the increased leverage of a snap trap they can catch larger animals which will give more nutrients for instance most fly paper traps catch small flying insects and despite the name venus flytraps actually more commonly trap large animals like spiders and millipedes so the first snapping trap would have started out with sticky leafs but in order to catch larger prey would have adapted larger and more concave leafs that can close quicker to reduce the chances of the stronger and larger prey escaping as the snapping mechanism becomes faster and stronger the stickiness of the leaf would be less relevant in the capture of its prey and so would reduce more with each generation of plant until the leaf is only trapping by snapping and the glue is not used anymore this shows how a more advanced trap can come from a simpler one but the most complicated trapping mechanisms out of all the carnivorous plants are deployed by the utricularia better known as the bladderwarts these plants are found all around the world and in many different habitats but are often aquatic their small flowers are often quite eye-catching but their bottom half hidden under the water or the soil possesses one of the most deadly and complicated traps of any carnivorous plant they have bladder-like traps that suck up their prey in order to be digested and some species can catch animals as large as tadpoles the mechanism behind this trap is so complicated it was puzzling to think how a structure like this could have evolved but there is one member of this group of plants that may hold the answer utricularia multifeeder found in australia is a utricularia that has traps similar to any other member of the group only their traps don't suck and instead it works more like a lobster trap where the prey will be funneled further and further into the trap but can't get out once it's in and it is thought that these types of traps were ancestral to the highly complex bladder traps that would have come later so carnivorous plants may seem complicated and different but their elaborate traps are simply the product of repurposing modifying and warping simple functions possessed by nearly all plants and by doing this they were able to survive and sometimes thrive where other plants were not able to previously grow thank you for watching a massive thank you goes to all my patrons for supporting the channel if you enjoy content 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Channel: Moth Light Media

Views: 300,454

Rating: 4.9657569 out of 5

Keywords: Evolution of Carnivorous Plants, pitcher traps, biology, cretaceous, flowering plants, evolution of plants, venus fly traps, utricularia, sundews, flypaper traps, bladderworts, aquatic plants, evolution, evolution of venus fly traps, biology of carnivorous plants, carnivorous plants, meat eating plants

Id: ut3EviqJei8

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/foxtailavenger]

Woah that sounds really intense.... how is it like from the residents’ pov tho haha

[u/[deleted]]

So what you're saying is...

[u/goo321]

Post the link to the video.

[u/WaldenFont]

What are nutrients for, if not energy?

[u/mind_the_umlaut]

Pineapples also contain digestive enzymes such as bromelain, a protease, that break down proteins into amino acids. The good pineapple publicity says that this helps you digest proteins when you eat pineapple. If we look more closely at all the evidence, the pineapple is indeed attempting to digest you.

[u/J_Class_Ford]

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